‘I’m the psychedelic confessor’: the man who turned a generation on to hallucinogens returns with a head-spinning book about consciousness

Several years ago, Michael Pollan had a disturbing encounter. The relentlessly curious journalist and author was at a conference on plant behaviour in Vancouver. There, he’d learned that when plants are damaged, they produce an anaesthetising chemical, ethylene. Was this a form of self-soothing, like the release of endorphins after an injury in humans? He asked František Baluška, a cell biologist, if it meant that plants might feel pain. Baluška paused, before answering: “Yes, they should feel pain. If you don’t feel pain, you ignore danger and you don’t survive.”

I imagine that Pollan gulped at that point. I certainly did when I read his account of the meeting in his latest book, A World Appears. Where does it leave our efforts at ethical consumption, if literally everybody hurts – including vegetables?

Thankfully, Baluška seems to be an outlier. “Plants are down with a lot of our eating,” Pollan tells me, over Zoom from his light-filled office in Berkeley, California, a cliff of books on one side and sweeping views across the bay to the Golden Gate Bridge on the other. He’s a genial presence, his owlish glasses and perfectly smooth head making him seem like the archetypal sage, though a rather spry one (he is 71). “A lot of plants are designed to be” – he corrects himself – “they evolved to be eaten. Grasses, for example, need ruminants.” And as another scientist told him, pain is only useful if you can move quickly. “If you’re a plant, pain would not be of any value. You’re aware that something is chewing on you, but pain only works when you can run away.”

We’re having this bizarre conversation because A World Appears is all about consciousness: what is it, who has it, and why. Plants might seem an odd place to start, but Pollan maintains that, as an edge case, they force you to think hard about what you’re really investigating.

It was probably the hardest thing I’ve written, but the most rewarding, too

A former executive editor of Harper’s Magazine, he has devoted himself to writing since the success of his first book, Second Nature, in 1991. That was about gardens – the “middle ground between nature and culture”. Since then, his work has transformed many Americans’ relationships with food – exposing the underbelly of industrialised farming in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and, with In Defen