This week's guest on REPORT FROM SANTA FE is Michael Pollan, award-winning author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. For more than 30 years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where nature and culture intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds.

Pollan’s new book is How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

His five New York Times bestsellers include: Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013), Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (2010); In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008); The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006) and The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001).

The Omnivore’s Dilemma was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

In 2010, Pollan was named to the 2010 TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Also in 2010, he was also awarded the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace by Yoko Ono. In 2009 he was named by Newsweek as one of the Top 10 “New Thought Leaders.”

Pollan is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and was a former executive editor for Harper's Magazine. In 2016, Netflix released a four-part documentary series, which was based on Pollan's book, Cooked. In 2015, a documentary version of Pollan's book In Defense of Food premiered on PBS.

In 2015, Pollan received the Washburn Award from the Boston Museum of Science, awarded annually to "an individual who has made an outstanding contribution toward public understanding and appreciation of science and the vital role it plays in our lives" and was named as a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

He has also won the James Beard Leadership award, the Reuters World Conservation Union Global Awards in environmental journalism, the James Beard Foundation Awards for best magazine series in 2003, and the Genesis Award from the Humane Society of the United States.