Michael Pollan

57, New York City

POSITION: Author

NOTABLE FOR: Being the nation’s leading food philosopher and aphorist. Pollan’s opening line to his bestselling 2008 book, In Defense of Food, is justly famous: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” With those seven words, Pollan neatly summed up the current state of science-based dietary advice—and proceeded to blame more than a century of nutrition science for reductively focusing too much attention on “good and bad” nutrients while enabling the industrialization of the food supply, to the detriment of whole foods. Better-tasting food costs more, but you might need less of it to find real pleasure: “Buy better stuff, buy less of it, and you’ll be happier.”

TWITTER: @michaelpollan