American journalist best known for his writing on food and diet. His pithy distillation of decades of nutritional research—"eat food, not too much, mostly plants"—became one of the most cited pieces of dietary advice. More recently he has turned to writing about mind-altering drugs, from psychedelics such as magic mushrooms to opium and caffeine. His book "A World Appears" (2026) explores the "hard problem" of consciousness, surveying competing scientific theories of subjective experience.
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say. And then say it with the utmost levity.