Authors Like Michael Pollan

Wendell Berry

American · The Unsettling of America (1977), What Are People For? (1990)

The Unsettling of America argued in 1977 that industrial agriculture was not merely inefficient or polluting but a cultural catastrophe — that removing people from the land removes the knowledge that keeps land alive — and it has never gone out of print. Berry has farmed the same Kentucky hillside for decades and writes essays, poems and novels out of it. He was arrested protesting a nuclear plant in the 1970s and has kept up the arguments since.

Every book by Wendell Berry →

Marion Nestle

American · Food Politics (2002), What to Eat (2006), Unsavory Truth (2018)

Food Politics documents how the American food industry shapes nutrition advice, dietary guidelines and school meals through lobbying and funding. Unsavory Truth follows industry-funded nutrition research and shows how reliably the sponsor's product comes out well. Nestle spent decades as a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University and edited a Surgeon General's report on nutrition and health.

Bee Wilson

British · Consider the Fork (2012), First Bite (2015), The Way We Eat Now (2019)

Consider the Fork is a history of cooking told through its tools: the pot, the knife, the fork, refrigeration, the microwave, and what each one did to how people eat. First Bite is about how food preferences are learned in childhood and can be relearned. The Way We Eat Now argues that the global diet has changed more in fifty years than in the previous several thousand. She has written a food column in Britain for years and holds a doctorate in the history of ideas.

Mark Bittman

American · How to Cook Everything (1998), Animal, Vegetable, Junk (2021)

Bittman wrote The Minimalist column at The New York Times for thirteen years and produced a cookbook that has taught a generation to cook without ceremony. Animal, Vegetable, Junk is a history of food from early agriculture to industrial processing, arguing that the modern diet is the product of specific political choices about subsidy, labour and land rather than of consumer demand.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

American, Potawatomi · Gathering Moss (2003), Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Braiding Sweetgrass sets the botany Kimmerer teaches as a professor at the State University of New York alongside Potawatomi teaching, and argues for a relationship of reciprocity with plants rather than ownership of them. It sold slowly for years and then became a word-of-mouth bestseller that has stayed on the lists ever since. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022, and The Serviceberry (2024) is a short book on gift economies.

Merlin Sheldrake

British · Entangled Life (2020)

Entangled Life is about fungi: mycorrhizal networks trading nutrients with tree roots, the yeasts behind bread and beer, the fungus that makes an ant climb a stem and clamp on before it dies, and the question of whether something without a brain can be said to decide anything. Sheldrake has a doctorate in tropical ecology from Cambridge, and the book became an international bestseller and a documentary.

Aldous Huxley

British · Brave New World (1932), The Doors of Perception (1954)

The Doors of Perception is Huxley's account of a single afternoon in 1953 under mescaline in Los Angeles, describing a chair, a vase of flowers and the folds of his own trousers, and arguing that the brain functions as a reducing valve on a much larger field of awareness. It is about a hundred pages, it named a rock band, and it set the terms for everything written on the subject since. His last novel, Island (1962), is the utopian counterpart to Brave New World.

Every book by Aldous Huxley →

Oliver Sacks

British-American · The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), Hallucinations (2012)

Hallucinations collects the many ways a healthy brain produces things that are not there: migraine auras, Charles Bonnet syndrome in people losing their sight, the visions of bereavement, phantom limbs, and a chapter on his own experiments with drugs as a young doctor in California. Sacks was a London-born neurologist in New York who wrote case histories as literature for forty years, and died in 2015.

Every book by Oliver Sacks →

Authors like Oliver Sacks →

Anil Seth

British · Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (2021)

Being You argues that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain generates predictions about the world and uses incoming signals to correct them, so what you experience is a best guess rather than a readout. Seth extends the account to the sense of having a body and of being a self, and is sceptical of the idea that consciousness is a mystery beyond scientific explanation. He is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at Sussex.

Tracie McMillan

American · The American Way of Eating (2012), The White Bonus (2024)

McMillan spent a year working undercover in the food economy: picking garlic and grapes in California fields, stocking produce at a Walmart in Michigan, and cooking on the line at an Applebee's in Brooklyn, living on what each job paid. The book reports what it actually costs in time, money and energy to eat well at the bottom of the wage scale. The White Bonus puts a number on the financial advantages her own family received.