Michael Pollan is a nature writer of sorts. Throughout his career, his subjects have been places where people live and work, where humans take part in nature instead of just watching passively. This stands in distinction to a strain of nature writing that concentrates on wilderness. To put the contrast in simple terms: while someone like Bill McKibben camps, Pollan gardens.

Before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, as the Knight Professor of Journalism a few years ago, Pollan was an editor at Harper’s magazine for about a decade. At Berkeley, he organizes the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism, where the likes of Eric Schlosser, Wendell Berry, and Raymond Kurzweil come to discuss the science-environmental nexus, and where such topics as President Bush’s science policy, the future of food, human biotechnology, alternative agriculture, and nanotechnology have recently been the focus of intense panel discussions. Perhaps more to the point, Pollan is most notably the author of four books—the first three of which are The Botany of Desire, Second Nature, and A Place of My Own—and currently serves as a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

A lot of people seem to have personal experience with food, so when you write a book about it, a lot of those people want to ask you things. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan’s fourth book, is about four different ways to make a meal—through the industrial food chain, the organic food chain (think Whole Foods), local farms (not always the same as organic), and by hand (hunting, gathering, that kind of stuff). We spoke about the book and his broader journalistic ambitions via telephone, on several occasions, even when in the background his son needed help with a Huckleberry Finn reading assignment, and even when he was fielding calls about E. coli outbreaks near and far. We talked about ecological thinking, farm policy, and why people don’t think agriculture means food. We were unable, though, to avoid surmising that any such conversation is ultimately about culture, politics, and economy.

—Benjamin R. Cohen

I. THE CAUSE AND EFFECT OF JOURNALISM

THE BELIEVER: You really made the rounds with The Omnivore’s Dilemma last year. I even saw you on The Colbert Report. How’d that go?

MICHAEL POLLAN: It was an interesting experience. Being interviewed by comedians is uniquely challenging. They can say anything they want, while you still, as a journalist, have to stick to the truth, or what you perceive the truth to be, which sometimes isn’t as funny or entertaining as they might want. I also did an interview...