Award-winning author Michael Pollan says everything he’s learned about food and health can be summed up in seven words: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” He’s also convinced that our grandmothers wouldn’t even recognize the food we are consuming today. “When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes or eat something with 15 ingredients you can’t pronounce,” he says, “ask yourself: ‘What are those things doing there?’” UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the William Nierenberg family are proud to announce that Pollan has been selected the 2014 recipient of the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest. The award will be presented at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 9 at the Samuel Scripps Auditorium after a short awards ceremony. A journalism professor at The University of California, Berkeley, and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine since 1987, Pollan is the author of such books as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” and the recently published “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.” He has received numerous awards for increasing eating consciousness with an often humorous approach while breaking down the ethical and ecological dimensions of our eating choices. Pollan’s “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” suggests that the more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become. A contributor to the documentary “Food, Inc.” Pollan raises questions on the origination and processing of food and the giant agribusinesses’ stake in food production. Pollan writes that the food we eat today would be completely unidentifiable to that our grandmothers ate, since the majority of their meals were made from scratch. He has launched a national conversation about the American way of eating, one meal at a time.
Pollan is the brother of actor Tracy Pollan, wife of actor Michael J. Fox.
The Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest is bestowed to those who have made a difference to the public at large. Recipients include director James Cameron, journalist Ira Flatow, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, primatologist Dame Jane Goodall and broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite. The prize was created to honor the memory of William Nierenberg, director of UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1965 to 1986. The prize consists of a bronze medal and $25,000.
