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How food became a right-wing movement, with Michael Pollan · REAP/SOW

• This transcript was exported on 05/28/2026 - view latest version here Theodore Ross: Welcome to Forked. I'm Theodore Ross, editor-in-chief of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, and I'm joined by my co-host, Helena Bottemiller Evich from Food Fix. On this episode, we're joined by best-selling author, educator, and thinker Michael Pollan. It's been 20 years since the publication of The Omnivore's Dilemma, a book that defined and drove a huge shift in how Americans thought about food and agriculture. We sat down to talk to him about the ideas he wrote about then, from commodities to chemicals, and how they've traveled across the spectrum of food politics in ways few of us could have foreseen. Helena, welcome back to Forked. How are you? Helena Bottemiller Evich: I'm doing well. How are you? Theodore: I'm doing good, too, and I'm very happy to welcome our newest guest to Forked. Michael Pollan, thank you for being here. Michael Pollan: Thank you. Theodore: I think that most people who listen to Forked, generally, they know who you are, but I'm going to do an introduction anyway. Helena: Yes. Theodore: Everyone who listens to Forked knows who you are. You are, however, also the author of eight books, including six New York Times bestsellers. For those of you who are keeping score at home, I think that's a 75% bestseller rate. I am an English major. Do not fact-check me. My kids both read and purchased, and read, or I purchased, they read the student version of Omnivore's Dilemma in their middle school. I'm going to do a little shout-out there for the Brooklyn Urban Garden School. Yes, that is BUGS. You've also written such well-known titles as Cooked, In Defense of Food, and Food Rules. In fact, food does rule, no matter how you decide what you were using the word "rules" as. More recently, you've turned your attention to the potential, I believe, of psychedelics, which is beyond the kind of expertise I'm willing to admit to for something that my children might listen to, so I will take your word for it. Again, Welcome, Michael. Michael: Thank you. Not that I'm keeping score, but actually, I've written 10 books, not 8. Theodore: Oh, gosh. I'm sorry. Michael: That's okay. Helena: You know what? Theodore: What did I say? I thought, I said-- Michael: You said eight. Theodore: Ugh. See? Math. Michael: Yes, but anyway. Helena: He can fix that. He can fix that in editing. [laughter] Michael: Oh, it's fine. It's fine. Theodore: Why don't we get to it, now that I've stuck my foot in my mouth? Go ahead, Helena. Helena: Let's lighten the mood. Marion Nestle has written 17 books. I believe her 17th or 18th. See, I'm losing count, but that's coming out in the fall. There's still time for you to catch up. Michael: Yes, I guess so. Helena: It's also her 90th birthday this year, I learned. Michael: We have some time. Helena: Got some time. Got some time. Anyway, sorry, I interrupted you, Ted. Theodore: That's okay. Omnivore's Dilemma was published in 2006, and I believe that it introduced a lot of Americans to the idea of non-industrial farming, farming minus the chemicals, without relying on a single commodity crop. What we're seeing now today, and this is something that Helena and I talk about on the show a lot, and I want to hear what your thoughts about, is that those ideas that you described in Omnivore's Dilemma have been embraced by people in the MAHA movement specifically, and more generally by some people on the political right. What do you make of that? How do you feel about that? Michael: Well, it's interesting. When I was writing Omnivore's Dilemma, I spent a lot of time on Joel Salatin's farm in Virginia. He became my model of regenerative farm, although I don't think we used that word at the time. It's interesting. Ultra-processed food was not used at that time, too. Helena: No. Michael: These are two changes since 2006. One of the things I was really curious about is this farm is in the middle of nowhere. Who would come here? How do you sell your food? He said, "Well, they'll drive 100 miles to get pastured meat and eggs." I was very curious who they were. I hung around on sale day. There were these moms who would make the schlep from often great distances. I interviewed some of them, and many of them had kids who had some kind of illness that they were trying to essentially heal with food. They spoke passionately about grass-based agriculture, raw milk, and food as medicine. I thought they were just interesting characters who I hadn't met before. Many of them were also homeschoolers. If I scratched, I'm sure I would have found anti-vaxxers, too, although that wasn't what I was interested in. As Joel said, there were people who had already checked out once on the mainstream. These were the MAHA moms before they were called the MAHA moms. That was my first encounter. Many of them were members of the Weston Price organization. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but that's an important node of the MAHA movement. It's based on a nutritional philosophy that privileges grass-based food. It was started by a dentist named Weston Price in the '30s or '40s. Very interesting guy who went around the world and was able to correlate dental health with diet. Anyway, many of them had read his work, and Sally Fallon is his progenitor. I think the significance of MAHA is political. That is the food movement that really gels in the early 2000s. You have the Slow Food Nation happening in 2008. You have Food, Inc. happening in 2008. You have Fast Food Nation in 2002. Marion Nestle's Food Politics in 2002 or '01. Helena: 2002. Michael: Omnivore's Dilemma. There's a lot happening, and there's a lot of energy in the food movement. It tended to be coded liberal or left and was vulnerable to being charged as elitist. In some respects, it was. I don't think that's as damning as many people think it is, but there it was. The MAHA movement, because of Robert Kennedy and the pact he made with Trump, has surfaced a right-wing critique of the food system. I think that's important. Remember how they went after Michelle Obama? Helena: Oh, yes. Michael: Limousine organic. Helena: Spent a good chunk of my career covering that. It was chaos. Michael: Wow. Theodore: Do you think that those folks that you met way back when, who were potentially homeschooling, potentially anti-vaxx, do you think that they were politically on the right then, and this is just something latent that has been around for a long time, has only come to the front, or what do you think about that? Michael: Yes, no, I would say they leaned right. I don't think they were that political. Helena: Yes, it was almost more libertarian. Michael: Yes, I think that's right, libertarian. They were homeschoolers, so they're very suspicious of mainstream institutions. They were also often evangelical. I think that they tended to be more right than left. Although, frankly, had the food movement been more conscious of what it was doing, this was a constituency they could have reached out to. There was the potential to bring them into the movement. I don't think enough people saw the potential. It was Kennedy who recognized that the numbers were big here. Also, people very disaffected from the healthcare system. They've all had really bad experiences with the healthcare system. Helena: I've always seen those seeds. It just was never clear to me how big it was, right? I remember going to a raw milk rally outside of one of the Senate office buildings in 2011, and they had brought a cow to milk. Michael: I remember that. Probably read your coverage of it. Helena: I was at Food Safety News back then. It was Rand Paul, maybe Ron Paul. It was a right, but there were also lefty foodie people there. You could see that they were the right and the left, but it was more fringy. What it feels like what has happened is those fringes or the political U has taken up more space in the mainstream on both sides. That's what it feels like. Michael: I think that's true. Helena: It's interesting. Michael: The DNA of the MAHA is different than the DNA of the food movement. The food movement often argues for regulations, for example. The MAHA moms, they want to regulate pesticides and a couple of things. Basically, they're very libertarian as you said. If an alliance is formed, it's going to be a very uneasy alliance. Helena: Yes, I do think they're saying that. Michael: There's a huge cultural differences, too. We saw on the pesticide issue when that provision was inserted in a spending bill to protect Bayer/Monsanto against lawsuits. It was Chellie Pingree getting together with some of the MAHA activists to get it yanked. I think that was a very hopeful sign. Hopefully, we can build on that. Helena: It wasn't just that they got it out of the spending bill, which is a huge win. Then, more recently, they got a vote to get it out of the farm bill. They got it out of the House farm bill, which I feel like didn't get a lot of attention because it's like inside baseball, but the vote on the House floor to pull that pesticide preemption language from the farm bill was 280 to 142. It wasn't close. Michael: Wow. Helena: A third of Republicans voted for that, so they voted against Bayer to strip it out, and against a lot of the ag groups that wanted to keep it in. It was almost all the Democrats and then a third of Republicans voted for that. I remember when I saw that vote, I was like, "Oh, this is different. This is a different political landscape that we're in." Michael: Yes, that's very interesting. I wasn't aware of that. Helena: We'll see. I don't know. Did you follow it all the Supreme Court rally? Did you see any of the footage from that? Michael: No, I didn't. I read about the hearings. It sounds like it's very up in the air on what's going to happen there. Tell me about the rally. Helena: Well, the rally was interesting. It was outside of the Supreme Court, and it was very left and right. You had Vani Hari, and you had a lot of the MAHA advocates like Kelly Ryerson and Zen Honeycutt and those folks. You also had Thomas Massie. He's still congressman from Kentucky who was recently taken out in a very dramatic fashion by Trump and his political allies. You had Chellie Pingree, Democrat from Maine. Cory Booker showed up, a Democrat from New Jersey. It was this very interesting left and right showing. It felt like the first MAHA event or MAHA adjacent event, MAHA allied event that I had been to that felt really bipartisan. I'm not sure where it goes from here, but I think that was the big takeaway that a lot of people had from it. Theodore: It was sparsely attended, too, right? Bipartisan, but it was mostly media. Helena: Reporters. Theodore: Yes, that was it. Helena: I don't know if it was mostly reporters, but there were a lot of reporters. Theodore: I think it's hard to interpret what the meaning of that kind of an event really is. Yes, it's bipartisan. That's interesting. Helena: It's like the speaker is for it. Theodore: What that actually means for the voting public, or how people think about these issues. Michael: The vote on the House floor on the ag bill, that's really a sign. The mystery is why Trump should have pushed so hard in the other direction. What has he got? Why is he defending glyphosate and Bayer? Monsanto was always a Democrat company. It wasn't a Republican company. They often had a Democrat leadership and supported Democrats. Democrats were very pro-GMO, surprisingly so. To invoke the Defense Production Act to produce more of a herbicide, that's bizarre. I don't know how that happened or who pushed that in the White House. Helena: I don't have this ability until the upper echelons of the White House, but it feels to me covering it. I have traditionally not really covered pesticides that much. I've always been much more focused on nutrition and all the federal nutrition programs. When I was at Politico, we always had a pesticide reporter, because this stuff is so weedy and political. It's like a whole other universe. From what I have gathered watching this, it really seems like Bayer is trying to master the inside game less so than the outside game. I'm not seeing a ton of trying to convince the public or trying to sway public opinion that their position that glyphosate is fine and that there's nothing to see here. This is all about nothing. I'm seeing much more of like, they got the solicitor general to be with them at the Supreme Court. They got the executive order. They're getting this language put in the House farm bill, although it looks like it might stay out of the Senate farm bill because it's been so controversial. It seems like it's this inside game to make sure that they have maximum protection from all this litigation they're facing, but it's absolutely infuriated. To say that the MAHA folks are mad about this is really an understatement there. Michael: Trump, it's one of the many mistakes he's made in terms of the midterms to- Helena: So many. Michael: -convince his voters to stay home. It's like he's inviting them to stay home with all these issues. It's weird. Helena: Yes, and they're really mad about the Massie thing. The MAHA folks love Massie. Michael: That's interesting. I didn't know that. Helena: There's some really deep anger there. Michael: Massie's running for something else. We just don't know what it is. Helena: Yes, no. Theodore: That's right. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk to you about some of the outcomes that emerged from the food movement that came from your writing and from other people as well, the idea of buying directly from producers whenever possible, encouraging those producers to make better, healthier foods, farming in different ways, all these kinds of ideas. To me, when I look back on that and what I took away from reading your book, it was about building an alternative food system by voting with your fork, right? Do you still think that's the best way to reform the food system, or do we need to be engaging with Big Food or Big Ag? Michael: I think you have to do both. It's not an either/or. I know it often gets depicted that way. I think that the power of the voting with your fork is it gives the individual something they can do now. In our politics, there isn't a lot. You can't do as much about climate change, for example. There are so many issues you can't do much about. You empower people when you show them a path that they can make changes that make a difference. It obviously doesn't solve the problem. It's necessary, but not sufficient, I would say. You also need to engage politically, but getting lots of people to care about the farm bill is a heavy lift. Helena: You've got to stop calling it the farm bill, first of all. Michael: Yes, right. Helena: You really do. Michael: That was an early proposal of mine. Call it the food bill. Helena: I just want to be on the record that I fully endorse that. Food and farm bill. Both would be fine. It just sounds like it's irrelevant to people, and it's really not. Michael: Urbanites, because urbanites really don't understand that food comes from farms. Helena: I think it's even worse than that. I think that a lot of people in rural America also aren't directly connected to the farm bill. It's just most eaters hear farm bill, they're like, "That's not relevant to me." Michael: There's less than two million farmers in this country, 350 million people. We don't have a connection to the farm. That was part of what I was trying to do in Omnivore's Dilemma. It was a natural history of four meals. I was tracing food back to the farm. As I said, I think at some point in the book, 100 years ago, you wouldn't need an investigative journalist to tell you where your food came from. Everybody knew. Now, we're so disconnected that you actually have to pay an investigative journalist to tell you where your food comes from. I think the whole conversation should be more about food and less about farming. Helena: It's also mostly nutrition spending at this point in the farm bill. Theodore: Right, yes. Michael: It is. Helena: [sighs] It's misbranded at this point. Michael: Yes, but the incentives are still in favor of mono-culture, which I think is the biggest problem of agriculture, whether you're talking about plants or animals. Too many of the same thing in too small a space. In terms of what came out of that, I think more consciousness about how food is produced and caring more about it. Also, Alice Waters' work glamorized farmers to an extent they hadn't been, and that was a healthy thing. You had farmers like Joel Salatin, but there were others, too, who had some celebrity, and still do. Alice Waters, her whole thing was to take some of the glamour that had attached to high-end cooking and say, "Great cooking begins with great farming." The whole practice of naming farms on menus, which, really, I think, she began, and giving them credit for the work they do and taking that work very seriously. Farmers had been denigrated in America. They were the butt of jokes. You could make stupid farmer jokes, and nobody would bat an eye. It was a stock and trade of American comedy for a very long time. The farmers came cool, and young people wanted to work on farms. WWOOFing became cool. I think that represented a cultural shift. I make no claims that that much was accomplished in terms of changing the food system. It has really been very resistant, and it successfully countered the food movement, I think. There was a time when the cause of reforming agriculture went unquestioned. I really think it was until 2008 when the industry realized they had to fight back. They did very successfully, and they came after me and lots of other people. They went to the editorial boards and convinced them that they should be running pro-GMO copy and op-eds and other defenses of industrial food and industrial agriculture. I think it was a movement. It was very well-intentioned, but it was very naive. It was people like me who don't know how to operate in a political realm. There were a handful of people in Congress, but not that many who got it. Theodore: Well, it's also because of the difficulties of the alternatives, right? It's the same thing that the MAHA folks and Cory Booker, who we had on a couple of weeks ago, are facing, where you pose the question, and I put this to Senator Booker, "Describe the post-glyphosate for ag system and what it looks like." I think I don't question his intentions, and I believe he means well, but he doesn't really have an answer for that. We've gone through the years of the food movement, but we don't have a solution. We don't have a way to move away from it at scale without dramatically changing the way we eat, and that's the real tough part. Americans have shown over that period of time that they don't really want to change how they eat. Michael: Yes, no, I think that's a big impediment. People like processed food. They like fast food. It fits into their lifestyle. It gets marketed heavily to them. Looking at other things have changed. I mentioned earlier the whole term "ultra-processed food," and what's been attached to that is fascinating, how quickly that happened. Helena: Yes, it's like last two years. Michael: Yes, and this was the creation of a Brazilian epidemiologist, who just reconceived what processed food meant, or junk food, and it's really had legs. That's another place, obviously, where MAHA and the food movement can find common cause. I think that's a really interesting development. I don't know where that goes exactly. There's this proposal by David Kessler. This is a proposal to regulate ingredients in ultra-processed food. From what I've read of it, and I've talked to him about it, it's a pretty sophisticated way to force these companies to essentially lose their grass status or force to justify it with research that'll be very hard to do. I gather he's got Kennedy's ear on that. I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but Kennedy right now, his wings have been clipped. We'll see if he has more freedom after the midterms. Helena: Yes, I think that is the big question. That petition from Kessler is right there. It would essentially knock out or strictly limit a lot of the ultra-processed foods on the market right now. Michael: By going after the various refined carbohydrates. Helena: By going after refined carbohydrates. The question is, does this administration actually have the audacity, the political will, the willingness, all of the things to do that because it's like a nuclear weapon? Theodore: No, they do not. Michael: They don't. Helena: It doesn't appear so yet. Michael: Trump's presumably not going to run again. Theodore: Theoretically not going to run. Michael: Theoretically. He wants to keep RFK Jr. in the tent as long as he can. I don't know what his breaking point is, whether he wants to run for president. I don't know. At some point, he might, depending on what happens. Essentially, the ultra-processed food issue is asking the government to regulate. Helena: Yes, there's no way around it. Michael: The DNA of this administration is you don't regulate. There's a clash coming there. Helena: It's the central tension. The central, I think, problem that MAHA has is that the political campaign, the political promises, the political, "Let's get toxins out of food," "Let's crack down," that is what was sold on the campaign trail. Michael: It's forever chemicals, too, and that takes a real regulatory push to do anything about that. Helena: They are deregulating. They just deregulated on PFAS and water last week. The list is very long of actions the administration has taken that go in the exact opposite direction of what the MAHA moms were at least told, or it was insinuated that this administration would do. I think that is just the central tension. I think you raised a really good question. It's like the question is, after the midterms, does this dynamic change? We'll see. I don't know. I really don't know what's going to happen. Michael: There'll be some shift in the weather, but some of it depends on what happens as the midterms, too. Helena: Yes, I think that's true. One of the things I want to ask you about is I don't know if you read Consumed, it's a great Substack by Jane Black and Liz Dunn. You should read it. If you don't, everyone should read it. It's good. Theodore: It's good. Helena: This was a couple of months ago now. I wish I could remember what it was called, but it was something about the key difference between MAHA and the food movement is really this focus on the personal lens. You are personally being poisoned by PFAS and microplastics, and you are personally being poisoned by ultra-processed food. This is the thesis that is being used to talk to people, right? It's, in a way, very different from the food movement because the food movement was very much about the greater good. There's the environmental degradation that came with certain types of farming. There was the public health impact. It was much more big. Looking at the whole picture, I'm wondering what you think about it. It struck me as, really, a key difference in how the MAHA folks think about it. There's the Silicon Valley biohackers. They're very, very focused on themselves and how the food system individually affects them. On one hand, it's an unlock. It's allowed more people to get interested, but it is different how it is bringing people in. I'm curious what you think about that. Michael: I think, yes, the food movement cast its message as collective and public, but a big part of the food movement is organic agriculture. Helena: Yes, it's true. Michael: Organic agriculture was all about the personal, as much as the farmers said this is about the environment, as much as the movement said it's about the environment, if you poll people and everyone in the organic industry understood this, that the appeal was no pesticides or no synthetic pesticides and that this food is better for me, safer for me. I think it's been part of the appeal across the board, and it's very motivating. Getting people to buy organic for environmental reasons has been a hurdle and has been tough. They just don't care as much as they do about personal. I think that in the public voice of the food movement, yes, they're right. In the reality, given that organic agriculture represents a giant chunk of the movement to reform the food system, it was driven by the same self-interest. Theodore: I definitely agree with that. When I think of the food movement, I think of patterns of consumption. I know that it's based on how we grow food, but really, we interact with it as individuals at the farmer's market rather than at the farm, right? It's what we're cooking. I want to switch gears a little bit and go back to ultra-processed foods and ask you questions. At FERN, the organization where I'm the editor-in-chief, we did a series of stories about ultra-processed foods last year. We were talking a lot about the interest of young people in avoiding ultra-processed foods, despite the fact that it is young people who get most of their calories from ultra-processed foods. One of the things that we ran into, and I'm curious what you think about it, is that young people are definitely interested in objecting to ultra-processed foods, but they don't cook. The older you are, the more likely you are to cook. Therefore, the more likely you are to get fewer of your calories from ultra-processed foods. What do you think we can do about that other than just saying to people, "Hey, you ought to cook"? Michael: I wrote a whole book trying to encourage people to cook, and boy did I get a lot of grief for doing that as a male. Men aren't allowed to voice that message because what a lot of people hear is women should be back in the kitchen. It's a very hard message. I think there is a segment of young people, and I'm thinking of people my son's age, who's 33, who are pretty passionate about cooking and have dinner parties in Brooklyn and are really into it and cook more nice than they don't. I think the way they're squaring that circle is fast casual restaurants like Sweetgreen. There are restaurants that are cheap, mass-market restaurants that are serving real food. Chipotle is one, too. I don't think their ingredients are ultra-processed. I could be wrong, but simple foods, whole foods, but cheap and convenient. My guess is that's how they're dealing with that contradiction, but I don't know. That's pure speculation. Helena: I do think that's the missing link. It's like, we need more convenient, minimally processed foods. Michael: It's doable. Helena: You named some examples. It is absolutely doable, but it just hasn't been a major focus, I think because consumers weren't thinking about things in terms of what is UPF and not. That is a very new concept. I think that framework has just changed how we talk about it. I know a lot of young parents are struggling with this. They're like, "Okay, I'm supposed to hear all the things that are UPF, which is, a lot of the food marketed to kids." Then you're like, a lot of people are two-parent family. They're working. Even if you're lucky to have resources, you might not have time. It is a thing that a lot of people are struggling with. I think the market hasn't fully caught up. Theodore: The concept is so expansive, right? I think we all have a pretty good sense of what junk food is. If you tell me, "Oh, that's junk food," I know what that is. When you start to look at what we actually are calling ultra-processed foods, and I'm not making a value judgment about defining them in these ways, but it's basically everything. Helena: Yes, it's the vast majority. Michael: It's not just snack food. I think junk food was associated with snack food, but there are meals that are ultra-processed and ready-to-eat things. I think that that's true. Also, foods that people assumed were healthy and wholesome, like sweetened yogurt. Yogurts made with guar gum and tons of sugar and all this kind of stuff. Suddenly, people are looking at those differently. That's a healthy thing, but I think that's true. It's a category that will develop. You see it already in marketing. I just saw an ad for a dog food, and they said, "It's not ultra-processed." Helena: Oh my gosh. Really? Theodore: That's right. That's right. Helena: Wow. I haven't seen that. Michael: It's really penetrated. It's really remarkable how quickly it's penetrated. Helena: There's a whole burgeoning space of non-UPF certifications, much like we had non-GMO. In fact, the non-GMO project, which people probably see the little butterfly symbol, it's, I think, the most widely used third-party certification on a label. That group now has non-UPF. There's a couple of others where they're certifying products as non-UPF. They have to meet certain criteria. They're all a little bit different. Theodore: What do they mean by it? Helena: Oh, you can't use certain ingredients that there's health concerns about. Then, I actually think some of them, not all of them, I think some of them actually look at the level of processing, the actual process of how it is made. That is what's really tricky, because you can't tell as a consumer reading a package. There is some movement in that space. Michael: It's still up for grabs. It has a great folk definition, right? This is food. You need a factory to produce, but is all food produced in a factory ultra-processed? Not necessarily. Helena: Ultra-processed foods, the definition, the big criticism of it from the food industry, but also from folks within the scientific community is that it doesn't take into account the nutritional profile at all. Maybe there's some definition down the line where it's a little bit more hybrid or precise. I don't know. The government says they're coming up with a definition, but I will believe it when I see it. I haven't seen it. Michael: That'll be negotiated over the next decade. Helena: Yes. Oh, gosh, it's hard to think about, what does the next decade look like? I don't know. I'm noticing a theme with you, Michael Pollan. You write a book. I don't want to say it unleashes a movement, but it maybe comes right before a movement is happening, right? We saw with the food movement. I think psychedelics similarly are now very mainstream. I think you've helped mainstream some of these ideas that then become almost American narratives. Now, you have a new book out about consciousness. Are we about to have-- Michael: Consciousness. Helena: A movement about consciousness? What are you doing here? What is happening? Are we about to have awakening about consciousness? Help me out here. I know there's a big question of AI. Can AI be conscious one day? What's coming? You now, I think, are predicting these issues going mainstream. Can you just tell me what to expect here? Michael: I haven't predicted anything with regard to consciousness. It never occurred to me that there was anything to do about it. Actually, when I finished-- Helena: The AI stuff now is raising some-- Michael: I was-- Helena: Tell us about the book for folks who maybe haven't heard of it. Michael: I started on this book five years ago after the psychedelic book. It was inspired by psychedelic experience. There is a way in which a psychedelic experience defamiliarizes consciousness. The pain is smudged, through which you experience reality. Suddenly, you realize there's a pain there. What's that about? What had been perfectly transparent now has been complicated. That set me on a path. I want to understand consciousness. What do we know about it? What can the scientists tell us? Looking at it as a scientific issue, and it's an incredibly difficult one, and science has made very few strides in understanding consciousness. That may have to do with the fact that science is poorly designed to address first-person subjective experience. Our science is organized around third-person objective perspectives. It has trouble accessing interiority, which is what you want to explain. How is it that you have this voice in your head? How is it that you have this sense of an interior space through which you perceive reality? When I started, ChatGPT had not been introduced yet. That came three years after. I realized as soon as it did, there was this incident with an engineer at Google named Blake Lemoine, which you may remember, who claimed that LaMDA, which was their frontier model at the time, was conscious, was a person. I interviewed him, and I realized, "Oh, this is really going to be an issue for consciousness," because it's very easy for people to fall into what I think is the trap of-- Theodore: You interviewed Lemoine, or you interviewed LaMDA? Michael: No, Lemoine. Did I say LaMDA? Helena: Just to clarify. Theodore: I want to make sure. Michael: LaMDA was never released, as far as I know. I interviewed Lemoine. At one point, I alluded to the problem of people falling in love with chatbots, and he was like, "What's wrong with that?" Helena: Oh, what? Michael: A lot. Helena: Yes, a lot. I want to be on the record that it's a lot. Michael: The idea that we would regard these machines as conscious was clear. It's not surprising, by the way. They talk to us in our language, in the first-person. Whoever decided that's the way to go was a big decision somebody made. Maybe it started with Siri. I don't know. Theodore: They're generally complimentary, right? Helena: I'm always really nice. I always ask please and thank you whenever I engage with Gemini. I'm always like, "Please and thank you." I'm like, "What am I doing? Why am I being polite to this?" Michael: Well, we anthropomorphize every day. Helena: Yes, we do. Michael: It's a default. It's an evolved bias, and it's a good bias. Helena: Yes, sure. Michael: That rock over there looks like a bear, so I'm going to think first bear, and then only second rock. Anyway, I was surprised when the book came out that consciousness was topical in any way. I thought I was writing-- Helena: You finally found the one that was not going to go mainstream. That's what you thought? Michael: There was something else going on when I went out talking to people, which was, I think, a concern that people's consciousness, which is to say the space of their attention and emotions and all this thing, was under siege, and that social media was hacking our attention, and that AI was starting to hack our emotional connections to other people. Trump also had hacked our attention to a remarkable degree, and that people had this sense that they had a lot of crap in their head that they didn't want there, and that if there's a movement, I think it's a desire to reclaim this precious space of interiority, this private realm where we can think whatever we want. We have ultimate mental freedom, and we're giving it away, or it's being taken from us. These algorithms want that headspace. I think that was motivating some people to explore consciousness as well as AI. Theodore: Reclaiming interiority is a very attractive thing. When you say that to me and I think about the way my day goes on a regular basis, I like the sound of that. I wonder, though. I don't know. I can't speak for other countries, but how much capacity as Americans do we really have to reclaim that space? What are the levers that would allow us to reclaim interiority? Michael: Well, taking phones out of the schools. I think that's very interesting. It turns out a lot of teenage girls are really happy to have that happen. They can't do it individually. Theodore: I just want to go on the record that my two teenage girls, I have a son, he's a little older, but two teenage girls, they're not that happy about it. Michael: They're not that happy about it? [laughter] Theodore: They're not unhappy about it. They're not complaining every day. I have polled the audience around our dinner table, which I cook, and they're not big fans. Michael: Not that happy about it. I don't know. I've talked to young people who are like, "I can't break this addiction. I need help." There's this kind of revulsion about phones that's percolating in the culture. All these apps to disconnect you for a certain number of hours per day. These bricks, which I don't understand, but they have something to do with turning off your phone for a period of time. Taking sabbaths from technology, these kind of things. Helena: There's a lot of that happening also. I know parents getting into VHS movies, so their kids can't flip around. Michael: Right. Helena: It sounds very appealing to me, because then your kid just has to sit there and watch through the previews from 1997. [laughs] Michael: They're old tech. Helena: It was a different time, and you have to be patient. You have to sit there. It's the same reason why I like iPods. I have an old iPod. I got it out for my six-year-old. Michael: It still works? Helena: Yes, super fun. Michael: You alluded to boredom. I think boredom died around 2015. I don't think anyone's been bored since 2015, really. Helena: Geez. Michael: Kids tell you they're bored when they want things. Theodore: Certainly, since the pandemic. Michael: What would happen when we got bored is we would spontaneously start daydreaming and mind-wandering. Boredom was really generative, but now, we fill that time with scrolling. Helena: Podcasts for me. Michael: Podcast, yes. Helena: Even if I'm going for a walk, I'm listening to something. Michael: I know that. I do, too. I go out for walks, and that's when I catch up on podcasts, but what are you giving up? The good song and being in nature. I don't know. I think there's going to be a rebalancing at some point. That's my prediction for the next-- Helena: Well, it's interesting. I just feel like you've been one step ahead on a lot of these things. Theodore: You have a good track record. I'm betting on the overstimulation. Not that I approve of it, not that I hope that that's the case, but I think it's tough. It's a tough sell. Helena: Hopefully, there's a correction, though, because this is too much. I will say that just as a parent. It's too much. Michael: Well, it could be another failed movement. [laughter] Helena: Wait. Okay. Actually, last question, last question, unless, Ted, you have something else. Theodore: No. Go ahead. Helena: Are you planning to ever come back to write about food and ag again? I know you just updated Omnivore's Dilemma. Is it the 20th anniversary? Michael: I'm doing a new audiobook of Omnivore's Dilemma, because I really didn't like having someone else read it. When I published that, it was believed that authors couldn't read their own books. [chuckles] Helena: Doesn't it take like a million hours to do that? How many hours? Michael: It's a week. It's a week. Helena: A week, okay. Theodore: I remember when I published the book, I was only allowed to do the introduction. Michael: I know. It was crazy. They assumed you needed an actor. I get it for novels, if you have a lot of voices you have to do, but in a first-person book of non-fiction, it seems to me you want to hear the author. Helena: Wow. Michael: I'm gradually doing all my books going back and doing them. Helena: Interesting. Theodore: That's great. Michael: Anyway, I'm doing an audiobook for Omnivore's Dilemma. I have not read the book since 2005, probably. I hope it's okay. Helena: I think you should put your own updated quips in there. Michael: Quips? Helena: They're going to let you do that? Like, side note. [chuckles] Yes, side note. Michael: I couldn't even believe this. Theodore: I'll also say, since I have reread it a couple of times with my kids. I read the adult version. They read the junior version. It holds up. It's still good. Michael: Oh, that's nice. Thank you. Theodore: I will say this. Helena: I haven't read it in a while. Theodore: Now that I've complimented you, if you want to write about food again, you must do it via FERN. Michael: Oh, FERN. Helena: Oh, there you go. Michael: Okay, thank you for your invitation. Helena: Okay, so no formal plans to return to food and ag, but you're not taking it off the table is what I'm hearing. Michael: Yes, I'm definitely not taking it off the table. Helena: You never really can leave because still everyone asks you about this, too. Michael: I still am interested. I still get involved in advocacy. I'm asked about it all the time, and I talk about it. I don't feel like I've left it. I just haven't published a book on it in a while. Theodore: We'll be glad to have you back. Michael: Thank you. I appreciate that. Theodore: Michael, typically, when we end an episode of Forked, we try to come up with something that we call the "good vibe," right? It's just one note of anything related to, typically, food policy, food politics that we take a little bit of hope for. Sometimes it's serious. Sometimes it's not so serious. I'll go first because I have one. It gives you an indication that it is often times not so easy to come up with something. One, I'm just going to do it again because this is May 26th. The Knicks just swept the Cleveland Cavaliers right now. That's a good vibe for me. Michael: Congratulations. Theodore: Thank you very much. I was also very, very happy to go out for dim sum this past weekend in Brooklyn. I walked away with a limp, and it was still good. I am very, very happy. I take a note of hope every time I go out for dim sum, so that's for me. Michael: Did you trip over a bun? [chuckles] Theodore: No, I ate so much that I could barely walk. [laughs] Michael: Oh, I see. Theodore: I put a hurting on myself. Helena, I don't know if you have anything or we want to-- Helena: Well, no, I'm just going to plug our guest's book. Not that he needs it from all his New York Times bestselling success, but A World Appears is out now. I wasn't sure if I was going to read this book, but I am going to because I listened to your NPR interview where you described that the Silicon Valley folks think that we basically have meat-based computers in our brains. Michael: Yes, they do. Helena: [chuckles] Save that term. I was like, "That's a fun term. I'm going to read this book now." [chuckles] The question is, oh, they think that the computers are going to have consciousness. Michael: Well, they do. Helena: I'm going to read this book now because I have questions. Michael: You can run it on meat. You can run it on silicon. It doesn't make a difference as far as circumstances go. Helena: Meat-based computer as another way to think about your brain, that is really something. Michael: My only thing I would add is I just got back from Turkey two days ago. The food there is spectacularly good, and it's simple. It's a lot of meze, these little dishes of many different things. Most of them vegetarian. It's just a very attractive way to eat. People don't eat meze at home. They bring it home from a store, or they eat it in restaurants. It points to a way of making wholesome food convenient. Helena: Wow. Well, that's a hopeful note. I love that idea. Theodore: I take hope out of that. Michael, thank you very much for being here. Helena, thank you. As always, it's great talking to you about these subjects. I just want to remind everyone out there that Forked is available wherever you get your podcasts. You should find us wherever you choose to do so and subscribe. It comes out every two weeks. I hope you'll listen to it all the time. It's also available on YouTube at FERN's channel, @FERNnews. Helena, as I always do, I'd like you to tell folks out there about your fantastic newsletter. Helena: Get on the list. Go to foodfix.co. You can get Food Fix in your inbox every Friday for free. Try to make all these really wonky issues approachable and fun, but also substantive. That is always my goal. Michael: Let me just add what an important newsletter it is. It's how I stay abreast of what's going on in the food world. Theodore: It's good stuff. Helena: That's high praise. Thank you so much. Theodore: Thanks again, Michael. Helena: Thank you both. This was fun. We should do it again sometime. Michael: Sounds good. Good luck, you guys. Helena: Bye. Theodore: Forked is a production of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are me, Theodore Ross, and Tom Laskawy. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Our producer and video producer is Amanda Vicari. Our hosts are Helena Bottemiller Evich and me, Theodore Ross. To find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent non-profit reporting, go to www.thefern.org. Forked Ep 24 Rough Audio Cut.mp3 (Completed: 05/28/2026) Transcript by GoTranscript.com