Michael Pollan Audiobooks

Michael Pollan, born in 1955, is an American journalist who has done more than almost anyone to change how ordinary readers think about food. He is a professor and the first Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer at Harvard University, and also the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where in 2020 he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and leads its public-education programme.

His reputation rests on books that trace the socio-cultural life of what we eat – The Botany of Desire in 2001 and The Omnivore’s Dilemma in 2006 chief among them – which fed directly into the local food movement and a wider public reckoning with industrial food. More recently he has turned to drugs and consciousness: How to Change Your Mind, published in 2018, is widely seen as a cultural turning point in reviving serious, open-minded discussion of psychedelics, and This Is Your Mind On Plants followed in 2021.

Pollan is a journalist first and a theorist second, which is why his work translates so well to audio: he explains by narrating, not lecturing. In our catalogue, Caffeine sits squarely in his mind-altering-substances territory, taking the drug most of Britain consumes before nine in the morning and making it strange again. A World Appears continues his project of examining how what we ingest shapes how we think.

For UK listeners, he is one of the most reliable nonfiction voices going: curious, rigorous and never preachy, even when the subject invites it.