Michael Pollan speaks about food

So by now you (the 4 people who occasionally read this) may be thinking all I ever do is go to talks and movies, but writing about topics from class doesn’t seem that interesting. How interested are you in “analysis of collinear data” or “the log logit model”? I didn’t think so.

Tonight I went to see Michael Pollan the author of most recently “In Defense of Food”. I recently read “Omnivore’s Dilemma” which had a great story of food. The talk will be available from Stanford on iTunes soon and is worth a listen. He’s definitely an engaging speaker who kept the overflowing audience engaged throughout the hourlong talk and following 30 minutes of questions. There were so many people that the aisles were completely full of people, including me, and there was still a lobby full of people trying to get in 10 minutes before the start. He talks about the importance of eating healthly and not getting sucked into the “Nutritionalism” machine which tries to turn food into its parts. He convincingly argues that nutritionists and food scientists still don’t know what makes food work, and that extracting bits doesn’t always extract the benefit. His solution follows from the quote above, eat (whole) food not nutrients or edibile foodlike products. Like my stepmom says, the freshest food lives on the perimeter of the grocery store. I really like his idea of “Don’t eat anything that won’t rot.” If the stuff that eats the food we don’t isn’t interested in it, we probably shouldn’t be either.

Read more here:
Michael Pollan

Great Talks

This week has had its share of excellent talks. After 2 nights with Philip Glass (one “conversation”, one performance) I went to see three other eminent speakers.

The first was Martin Eberhard of Tesla Motors who make the Tesla Roadster, the world’s first electric sports car (it’s lighter than a 911 and does 0-60 in less than 4 seconds). He gave a great talk on how to start and run a successful start-up business as a part of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar Series. You can listen to his talk here. If you want to hear more just about every week, you can subscribe to the podcast (part of the reason I wanted to come to Stanford).

After that, I went to a full house lecture at the Law school given by Jimmy Wales, the guy who started Wikipedia. If you haven’t heard of or played with Wikipedia, it’s worth checking out. There’s a ton of information on just about every subject you can image, and if you disagree, you can always change it. That’s the beauty of the Wikipedia model. All of the content is created and edited by the users.

The third in an amazing series of talks was Jeffrey Katzenberg. A big time Hollywood guy who’s most recently been running Dreamworks animation, the makers of Shrek.

[Note: for the Internet neophytes the words that are a different color are links, clicking them will take you away from my site and give you more information from someone else. Many of the ones here link to Wikipedia, so seeing the founder talk was pretty cool.]

Jan Chipchase Design Lecture

Last week I went to a great lecture by Jan Chipchase, a design researcher for Nokia. His blog has a picture of the audience, look on the left side.

He brought up some very intersting points on cultural relations and design. For example, how do you design a phone for someone who can’t read? Even though his talk was at a very high level, I think he made some strong points and gave a talk in a style I enjoyed. The great photos certainly made the time go even faster.