Episode #251
Michael Pollan: “Eat Food” Came From Joan Gussow

In this third conversation between Dave Chapman and acclaimed author Michael Pollan, the two explore the deep legacy of food systems pioneer Joan Gussow – the teacher who helped inspire In Defense of Food and whose ideas about nutrition, ecology, and soil continue to shape the Real Organic movement today. Pollan describes how Gussow’s clarity of thought and skepticism toward reductionist science changed the way he and an entire generation understand food. Together, they revisit the origins of the phrase “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” and discuss what it truly means in an era of “organic” Twinkies, hydroponic shortcuts, and Food-as-Medicine marketing.

Our Michael Pollan interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Michael Pollan virtually in August 2025.

Dave Chapman 0:00
I want to talk to you about the significance of Joan Gussow’s work. When did you first encounter Joan?

Michael Pollan 0:23
It must have been in the late 80s. I think I met her at a Kellogg Foundation conference at the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America in New York. I knew of her by reputation, and I’d heard about her. I thought she was a pretty formidable figure, and a feisty one too.

Michael Pollan 0:52
But what I remember is I was writing about genetically modified crops for the New York Times, and I was writing mostly about Monsanto. She had stiffened my spine in various ways. We had a conversation about it, and she warned me that I’d get a lot of criticism from Monsanto and other people for writing about GMOs, but it was really important what I was doing.

Michael Pollan 1:22
I was young. I was very new. It was one of my first pieces on the food system. I think it was even before I wrote about organics. I found that it was one of those pep talks that are very helpful when you’re delving into a controversial topic. So, I think that was the first time having a meal with her at this conference, and my spine stiffened by Joan.

Dave Chapman 1:54
I’ve interviewed Joan twice, and I’ve written a number of letters about her, and I’m still just learning who she was and what her impact was. It was so much greater than I realized at the time. It’s sort of like Eliot. There are all these people who are influenced by her, and I didn’t know about them, but I’m learning.

Michael Pollan 2:16
She was not in the press as often as, say, Marion Nestle is, or a whole bunch of people in the food movement. I don’t know why that was exactly, but she wasn’t one of those people that the mainstream press wanted to quote. But everyone in the food movement knew her very well, and I agree, was strongly influenced by her.

Michael Pollan 2:40
To me, her big contribution, and it’s in that book she wrote, “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology,” was really embedding agriculture in ecology, in the natural world, and helping people see food as a system, and connecting food to agriculture in a meaningful way, and agriculture, in turn, to soil, to water, and to all the systems that make the world go.

Michael Pollan 3:18
She was one of these great dot connectors, in a way like Marion. Marion focuses more on political economy, although Joan Gussow was incredibly political and economically sophisticated. But her first love was nature, and she was a gardener, and I think gardening informed how she looked at the food system.

Michael Pollan 3:42
Gardening is a kind of a microcosm of the food system. She really had her hands and her feet in the garden all the time, literally, metaphorically, and philosophically.

Dave Chapman 3:58
One of the things in which she was fairly unique was in the world of people who would have described themselves as nutritionists, and I know that Joan eventually stopped describing herself as a nutritionist. She felt that that world was failing. But in that world, she’s the one, more than anybody I know, who connected nutrition to how the food was grown.

Michael Pollan 4:24
Oh yeah, and the importance of soil and the quality of food. She saw all these things as connected, that you couldn’t separate or really draw firm lines. What she rejected about nutrition was the scientific overconfidence, I think. She understood the limitations. I remember the first time I went to Piermont, to her house, I had been commissioned by the New York Times to write a piece.

Michael Pollan 4:59
After “Omnivore’s Dilemma” came out, they came to me and said, the question readers all have is, “What should we eat if we care about our health?” I was writing a piece that would become the “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” book. I went to her for advice, “Joan, what should we eat?” Her advice, she was able to reduce it to two words, “Eat food.” I was like, “Huh! Eat food. What do you mean?”

Michael Pollan 5:26
But in the end, that’s what I said. I elaborated a little bit, “Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants.” But that basic blew the top of my head off, “Eat food,” because I’d been talking to people for whom it was so much more complicated, who were talking about nutrition, nutrients, polyphenols, antioxidants, fiber, and all these kinds of things. She just kind of said, “No, no. You just have to eat real food and you’ll be fine.” She could cut through a lot of bullshit with a very sharp knife.

Dave Chapman 6:14
I just reread, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” Michael, and congratulations. It has aged remarkably well.

Michael Pollan 6:22
I haven’t looked at it in a long time.

Dave Chapman 6:25
No, it’s so relevant. People are always asking us, “Why don’t you test real organic food and compare it to the hydro and stuff?” I say, “Well, it’s actually much more complicated than that.” If you’re trying to prove it in a scientific study, there’s too much to study, and I think Joan really got that.

Michael Pollan 6:46
Yeah, complexity, and that all the nutrients we’ve categorized and the tests we have for them are maps, but they’re not the territory. They’re tools, but they don’t capture the full picture of what’s going on in food. We still don’t know – we’re constantly discovering new and important aspects of food.

Michael Pollan 7:10
She had a healthy respect for the mystery, that our understanding is partial and we shouldn’t… She wasn’t overly mystified or impressed by science, even though she knew science really well. To my mind, she had one foot in the humanities.

Dave Chapman 7:34
Yeah. I had dinner with Marcelo Gleiser the other night. I think you know him from other worlds. We had been talking about reductionism in science and emergence. As my understanding, emergence is part of the complexity of… I think you wrote about it in “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” that the synergy of these different things in food can’t be replicated by isolating them and then adding them back into your food.

Michael Pollan 8:06
Yeah. They’re more than the sum of their parts very often, which is what I take emergence to mean.

Dave Chapman 8:11
You once said that so much of what you came up with, you went, “Oh, that’s brilliant,” and then you discovered Joan had come up with it some years before.

Michael Pollan 8:23
Yeah. She had a big influence on my work. The whole reducing nutrition and diet to the phrase “eat food.” It was very much how I was approaching things. I would say the biggest influences on my work would be Joan, Marion Nestle, and a couple of farmers. Eliot is one, and Joel Salatin is another. But in terms of my intellectual influences, she ranks right up there.

Michael Pollan 9:02
I came to food also from the garden. My first book was about gardening. I got interested in agriculture because I was confronting the problems of the farmer: pests, fertility, all that kind of thing. My journalism grew out of a series of essays about what was happening to me in my garden and what it was teaching me.

Michael Pollan 9:25
That first piece I wrote on GMOs began as a garden column. I was going to get some seeds from Monsanto and plant them in my garden and see what happened. Suddenly I walked right into the heart of “the belly of the beast,” to mix metaphors. Monsanto took me out to these farms in Idaho, and I saw what industrial agriculture was and how it worked.

Michael Pollan 9:56
I think we connected around gardening and we often talked about gardening and the challenges of it. She wasn’t romantic about it. She dealt with many disasters. Her garden would regularly get destroyed by floods because it was right on the Hudson River. So, she had this tactile feeling for nature in both its best and worst manifestations. I felt a real kinship with her since I was coming at agriculture and food from the same direction.

Dave Chapman 10:35
Yeah. Dan Barber said something to me about Joan. He said he thought in 20 years that Joan’s position in these conversations would be considerably bigger, that her influence would be much greater. Do you think that that might be true, that her influence will grow over time?

Michael Pollan 11:00
Yeah, in ways that we shouldn’t be too thrilled about, because she was making predictions about how things were going to collapse if we didn’t fix it. If and when things do collapse, she will be perceived as prophetic. She really did talk about the strain that industrial agriculture was putting on the natural world.

Michael Pollan 11:26
I don’t know if that’s what Dan had in mind, but when I think about her influence going forward, a lot of it was in the form of urgent warnings – that we were on a really dangerous path, and so we still are. What did Dan mean?

Dave Chapman 11:46
I don’t know.

Michael Pollan 11:47
I think you got to ask follow-up questions.

Dave Chapman 11:52
There’s so many aspects to Joan’s work. I think that it was about this basic connection between how food is grown, then how it is eaten, and its impact on our health, our minds, our bodies, our world, and of all the people from the nutritional sciences, I think she has been fairly unique in that understanding, or at least was until very recently.

Michael Pollan 12:23
Yeah, I think so, too. But she’s influenced a lot of people who now are sensitive to that. The whole concept of thinking about the food system is a relatively new idea, and she, along with Marion, deserves a lot of credit for explaining that to people or making those connections. You can’t take food in isolation, as most nutritionists seek to do.

Michael Pollan 12:51
They have that carrot. It’s sitting there, and they’re going to figure out how much beta carotene is in it and whatever else is in it, and fiber, without regard to how it was grown, what the soil was like, how long ago it was grown, how it was cooked, and all these kinds of things.

Michael Pollan 13:09
The term “web” is central to her work. She saw the web: the web of nature, the web of the soil. Now that seems kind of like common knowledge, at least among people who think seriously about food, but it wasn’t. I think she deserves a lot of credit for getting us to think this way. Certainly in my case, she connected a lot of dots for me, and it’s hard to imagine “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” without her.

Dave Chapman 13:49
Even having written the book, you still wander back to that nutritionist way of thinking sometimes because it’s so ubiquitous in our culture.

Michael Pollan 14:04
The scientific vocabulary has such power. It is the most authoritative term or lens through which to see anything in our culture. It’s very important to have a healthy skepticism about it. Science is limited. Culture sometimes gets there first. The example I remember, I think it’s in “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” was at the time, this is in the late 2000 aughts.

Michael Pollan 14:34
There was a discovery by scientists that lycopene, the antioxidant in tomatoes, requires oil to absorb it. The grandmothers figured out that putting olive oil on tomatoes was a really good idea. As it turns out, it made that nutrient accessible. Scientists sometimes come very late to things that culture has discovered. Joan was not overly dazzled by science. She saw its usefulness, but she also saw its limitation.

Dave Chapman 15:12
One last thing about “Eat food…” I wrote you, and I never got to talk to Joan about this, but I had added to your beautiful seven words, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Michael Pollan 15:31
It’s fust about rhythm.

Dave Chapman 15:33
I know. That’s why I hate to add anything, because it’s beautiful as it is. But I added “Mostly real organic” because I think it matters how the food is grown, don’t you?

Michael Pollan 15:47
It does matter. When I was writing that, it was hard to make an airtight case. There were examples where organic food had higher levels of nutrients and lower levels of pesticides, but the extent to which this mattered to health was up for debate.

Michael Pollan 16:15
I also was trying to dispel the idea – remember, the focus of this book was bodily health – that it was more important to eat fresh produce, fruit, vegetables, and grains of any kind compared to eating ultra-processed food. That became the focus. I think soil has a tremendous bearing on food quality.

Michael Pollan 16:43
Does it make the difference between being a healthy person and not being a healthy person? To me, that still remains to be proven. It is likely tastier also – that is certainly my experience. But you can always find exceptions. Fresher industrial food can taste better than older organic food, depending on how it has been treated.

Michael Pollan 17:14
In the early days of organic, as you know, the distribution system was much less efficient than the industrial distribution system, with the result that there was some very sad-looking produce. It did not always taste so good, even though, had you picked it fresh, it might have.

Michael Pollan 17:31
Anyway, I did not want to showcase that idea, because the first step here was making people realize that if you want to be healthy, you should eat real food. The next step is to eat organic food, or regenerative food.

Dave Chapman 17:51
I completely agree, and I understand why you left that out. But it is actually a challenge, I think, for the whole Food is Medicine movement, because they do not talk about how food is grown. They talk about “Do not eat ultra-processed food.” That is right, of course, but my goodness, do not eat food that has been doused in glyphosate either.

Michael Pollan 18:16
Yeah. I think that that argument has gotten stronger. Now that we douse all our conventional wheat in glyphosate, we are exposed to a lot more of it than we were then.

Dave Chapman 18:29
Yeah. I wanted to talk just for a little bit about the “organic” Twinkie debate. Joan famously wrote a paper when she was on the National Organic Standards Board saying there could not be an “organic” Twinkie. I don’t actually know the exact details of the conversation with Gene Khan.

Dave Chapman 18:53
I know that you interviewed Gene for a long piece you did, and he famously said in response to Joan’s comments that organic is not your mother. I quoted that to Joan, and she said, “No. Nature is your mother.”

Michael Pollan 19:14
Good for her. She was really fast also, I have to say, and feisty. The “organic” Twinkie article was like a watershed piece. She had this wonderful way of crystallizing a debate in a very vivid way, and that was that. The fact is, we had done all this work to create “organic” Twinkies.

Michael Pollan 19:39
The larger context there was that there were people in that debate, when the organic label was being federalized, that wanted to make sure that you could have all these additives and that they would be organic because you needed those additives to make processed foods of various kinds. It wouldn’t last, wouldn’t have shelf life, and it would lose its color.

Michael Pollan 20:05
They wanted to make an organic world safe for Twinkies, Cheerios, and all sorts of others. They wanted to make an organic version of everything in the supermarket: Heinz ketchup and Campbell Soup. Indeed, they ended up doing that. But she just said, “Do we really want an “organic” Twinkie?”

Michael Pollan 20:29
The point was, I think, that organic is more than a set of agronomic rules, that it was a way of thinking about food, or it should have been, and that it privileged real food, food that was grown in soil carefully, and that that idea was under threat. The ethics and the aesthetics of organic food were being challenged by an industry that simply wanted that valuable label so they could make an organic version of everything.

Michael Pollan 21:09
Twinkie was a great example because it’s an absurd food. When I was writing about food, I used to take a Twinkie with me on the road when I did talks. I’m sure I got the idea from her – Joan’s “organic” Twinkie idea – as the ultimate in processed food because after a year, nothing had grown on it. There was no mold, and it was still soft and spongy. It was a miracle of food science. You shouldn’t be able to make an “organic” Twinkie.

Michael Pollan 21:47
What Gene was saying was like, “Well, you’re being a moralist about food.” You could use that word, or you could say you’re being an aesthetician about food, or you’re being… there’s a vision and a tradition. You could look at those things as moralistic or as beautiful.

Dave Chapman 22:12
Yeah. Or visionary.

Michael Pollan 22:15
Yeah. That article had a big influence. In the end, they did make a world safe for “organic” Twinkies or things quite close to it, but it really threw the debate into very high relief. She had a gift for that – she understood rhetoric in the largest sense of the word: how to make an argument, how to use words, and how to use metaphor to get your ideas across in a really vivid and crisp way.

Dave Chapman 22:48
Yeah. I’m fascinated to see the Food is Medicine movement wonderfully stating, “We must stop eating ultra-processed food,” and there’s now a bipartisan national movement about this.

Michael Pollan 23:05
Yeah. Except it’s getting linked to quack medicine. In the long run, I don’t know if it’s going to… There’s the potential here to expand the food movement beyond the coastal elites that it always gets criticized for catering to and adding another constituency. But food is medicine even goes too far. You have people in this world so destructive of medicine that they’re trying to use diet to cure their cancer and nothing else. I think that’s really dangerous.

Michael Pollan 23:45
Food is very important to your health, but I wouldn’t say food is medicine. If you have a nutritional deficiency, if you have scurvy, then an orange is medicine, yes. But if you have pancreatic cancer, I don’t know what that food is that is going to be your medicine. I think you’re better off with chemo.

Dave Chapman 24:08
Yeah. I think that the hope of most of the Food is Medicine movement is that you wouldn’t get cancer if you were eating that food.

Michael Pollan 24:20
Right. I think there’s a lot of cancer that could be prevented by a healthy diet without question. There’s also cancers that are environmental, and there are cancers that are genetic.

Dave Chapman 24:32
That’s right. All right. Look, I know I’m kind of cheating on you, Michael. I said this would be very short, but any last things that you would like to say about Joan Gussow?

Michael Pollan 24:44
Oh, I just miss her. I miss her voice. I still hear her voice, and she could be as cold too. As I said, she was very feisty and very opinionated and did not soften her message. She was very direct. She didn’t like everything I wrote, and she would tell me when she didn’t. But I just found her a voice that I found really encouraging to me. I felt like when you had Joan’s support for something, it meant something – it meant you were on the right track.

Michael Pollan 25:30
I would often call her and consult about “I was writing an article on this or that…” Sometimes they were close to her expertise, and sometimes they weren’t, but she always had a valuable perspective. She was one of my most important teachers.

Dave Chapman 25:46
Great. Michael Pollan, thank you very much.

Michael Pollan 25:51
My pleasure, Dave.