He's a much-loved New York Times bestselling writer with a brain, a point of view and fascinating, urgent things to say about science, culture and where we're headed.  His latest, QPB Main Selection The Omnivore's Dilemma, asks what should you have for dinner? Michael Pollan traces in detail four very different types of meals, from nature all the way to the dinner table, with an eye for what’s best for you as well as for the environment.

Here's way more on one of our favorite thinkers of today:

Date of Birth: February 6, 1955
Birthplace: Long Island, New York
Current Residence: Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut
Education: Bennington College, Massachusetts, B.A.; Oxford University, England; M.A. in English, Columbia University.
Profession: Former executive editor, Harper's
Influences, Interests and Interesting Tidbits: "Someone has got to tell Michael Pollan that he simply has not lived if he doesn't know about the magnolias, the honeysuckle, the figs, the pears, the surprise lilies and the chinaberries in Eudora Welty's fiction."
- Joan Flippin, letter to the New York Times Book Review in regard to Pollan's essay "A Gardener's Guide to Sex, Politics and Class War""Thoreau famously claimed to have spent only $28.12 building his cabin, but no construction cost-accounting can ever be believed."
- Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own

I'm very proud of the fact that I still have all ten fingers. . . It could have turned out very differently.
-Michael Pollan on his experience building his "dream" hut, At Random magazine, Winter 1997

I read to garden, and I garden to read. Mrs. Perenyi, my Virgil, not only taught me about compost and doubleness in flowers and how to make an asparagus bed; she clued me in, too, on the class consciousness operating just below the garden world's surface: gladioluses are strictly for funerals, she let me know, and magenta flowers must be eschewed, for they are ill bred and all too common, the plant world's proletariat.
-Michael Pollan, New York Times Book Review

While an admirer of Thoreau, Mr. Pollan disagrees about having to head off into the wilderness to discover nature. People can discover it in their own back yards [according to Pollan,] as they cultivate it and protect their small corner of the earth.
-Jackie Fitzpatrick, New York Times, August 9, 1992