Interview: Pollan Explores Links Between Biodiversity and Health

In his new book, Cooked, author Michael Pollan once again delves into issues relating to the connections between the environment and what we eat, and, more broadly, to humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Taking control of cooking, he argues, may be the single most important step an individual can take to help make the food system healthier and more sustainable. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Pollan talks about how his research led him on a journey that ranged from the monoculture fields of U.S. commodity agriculture to the bacterial world inside the human body. And he notes the fundamental importance of biodiversity — in the landscape and the farm field, as well as in people’s diets. “This may prove to be the key legacy of ecology — what it teaches us about health,” Pollan says. “Who would have thought?”

Read the interview