In an American food culture transfixed on convenience, we as individuals are better equipped than the food industry to break the cycle that puts our health in jeopardy, says journalist, food reform advocate, and award-winning author Michael Pollan.

Our willingness to cook more often and to take responsibility for our food choices will bring about substantial changes in a food industry monopolized for decades by mass production of cheap food, said Mr. Pollan, who speaks Tuesday in Toledo as part of the Authors! Authors! series.

“Whenever there’s a problem with the food product — let’s say concern of lack of fiber in the diet or concern about too much sugar in the diet — the processed food system can change their formula and come up with an apparent solution to the problem,” Mr. Pollan said in a phone interview with The Blade from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area. “But it’s usually just another iteration of processed foods, and processed foods are by and large the real problem with the American diet that nobody wants to talk about.

“The consumer is not bound to that world and doesn't have the same imperatives. So the consumer — and we see this increasingly — is very interested in foods that are simpler, that have short ingredient lists or that are completely unprocessed.”

His investigative plunge more than 25 years ago into food, diet, and the evolution of agricultural systems has produced such best-sellers as The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.

Mr. Pollan hopes to engage a Toledo audience on those topics during Tuesday night’s talk at the Stranahan Theater & Great Hall, 4645 Heatherdowns Blvd. He is the fourth of six authors to speak as part of the 2017-18 series sponsored by The Toledo Lucas County Main Library and The Blade.

When The Blade contacted Mr. Pollan for this article, he was doing what he loves best: Writing. Storytelling.

His love of learning the ways humans engage with the natural world started at the “earth end of the food chain” and led him to famously summarize what he has learned about food in seven words: “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”

Mr. Pollan, 63, grew up on Long Island and received a bachelor of arts in English from Bennington College and a master’s in English from Columbia University. He previously served as executive editor of Harper’s Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley, although currently on leave. He has received numerous awards for his writing and reporting, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. He was named to Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people list in the Thinker category in 2010.

His first book, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, was published in 1991. Years later on assignment, his visits to a 35,000-acre potato farm in Idaho and a massive cattle feedlot in California inspired Omnivore’s Dilemma, named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The book traces the origins of human consumption, following the food chain from earth to table to reveal what humans are eating and how gathering, growing, and producing that food has evolved.

“I had a couple of experiences when I was out reporting of large-scale industrial agricultural operations that were so shocking actually that they convinced me, ‘Oh my God, we don’t know how our food is produced and wouldn’t it be interesting to tell that story?’ ” he said.

That publication, along with questions from the American public, led Mr. Pollan down the investigative how-and-what-should-we-eat rabbit hole. In Defense of Food and Food Rules (2010) followed. In Mr. Pollan’s 2013 book Cooked, he ventures into the kitchen — and the backyard, a convent, and the hunting and foraging terrain of other countries — where he takes on the role of apprentice to culinary masters who teach him cooking traditions using the basic elements of fire, liquid, air, and earth.

Today people have swapped time in the kitchen for computers and other leisure activities, Mr. Pollan said, arguing that such activities — coupled with food industry marketing that suggests Americans are too busy to cook and that it can do so for us — is a detriment to the country’s health. His research has led him to believe that there is a home cooking renaissance just starting in the United States.

“I think many of us think if you’re going to cook you have to get cookbooks and get really good at it. And the industry is constantly presenting images in advertising that cooking is drudgery and that we should let the pros do it for us, which is to say, buy fast food or processed food,” he said. “Everyday home cooking is very simple and doesn’t have to take that long or require incredible knife skills or fountains of flame and amazing ingredients.”

So what are those uncomplicated ingredients and straightforward techniques that Mr. Pollan believes can get cooking novices back into the kitchen and back to living a healthy lifestyle?

■ Choose one-ingredient foods that haven’t been processed: proteins, fruits, vegetables, fresh herbs.

■ Invest the time cooking in the kitchen over other activities.

■ Look to your local food economy, which Mr. Pollan said is growing alongside the national food economy, for meal ingredients or meals out.

■ Eat smaller quantities of meat that flavor your dishes rather than making meat the centerpiece (think stir fry).

Although it aligns with Mr. Pollan’s primary interest in how humans engage with the natural world, How to Change Your Mind is a stark deviation from his previous forays into the evolution of food.

He said his interest in the phenomenon of humans using plants and fungi to alter their consciousness led him to research why some psychedelics, such as the psilocybin mushroom, produce mind-altering chemicals. He said he was shocked to learn during his research that more than six decades ago there was intensive research into using the drugs to treat such things as depression, addiction, and anxiety.

“All of that gets buried in the mid-’60s when the culture turns against psychedelics,” Mr. Pollan said. “Well, lo and behold beginning in the ’90s and really picking up steam in the last decade, we are studying these compounds again and learning some really interesting things about the mind and about mental illness. When I started learning about that, I became fascinated to explore it more deeply.”

Mr. Pollan said he will continue writing spin-off articles related to his new book for various publications and promoting it on a spring book tour before he pins down his next project idea.

“I do get a lot of ideas talking to audiences, as I will be doing in Toledo,” he said.

Contact Roberta Gedert at rgedert@theblade.com, 419-724-6075, or on Twitter @RoGedert.

First Published March 25, 2018, 10:30 a.m.