About

In a typical work week, I spend as much time with farmers, soil experts, and community food workers as I spend with my medical colleagues. I am a practicing family physician, science writer, Clinical Professor at the University of California San Francisco, and Research Scientist at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health. I started the Health from the Soil Up Initiative at UC Berkeley Center for Occupational and Environmental Health to engage other health professionals in transforming our food system from the soil up. I am also Curriculum Director for Community and Integrative Medicine in the Lifelong Family Medicine Residency Program in Richmond, CA, where I partner with Urban Tilth, a local farm, to teach doctors-in-training about the the connections among food, soil, community, and health.

I am a regular health and science contributor to the Washington Post and you can read some of my articles here. I have two books about food, farming, and health: The Jungle Effect, The Science and Wisdom of Traditional Diets (HarperCollins 2008) and Farmacology, Total Health from the Soil Up (HarperCollins 2013).  Farmacology appears in four languages and was the basis for the award-winning documentary In Search of Balance. 

I have consulted for and presented to organizations around the globe including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Indigenous Terra Madre and Slow Food International. I was one of the pioneers in the “Healthy Parks, Healthy People” initiative which helped build linkages between our medical system and our park system. My 2009 Washington Post article “Take a Hike and Call Me in the Morning” is widely credited with introducing “park prescriptions” into medical practice.

I am a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Medical School and completed my family medicine residency and an NIH-funded primary care research fellowship at UCSF.  I serve on the Advisory Board of the Re:wild Your Campus, the Edible Schoolyard Foundation, the UC Berkeley Center for Parks, People and Biodiversity, and Berkeley Open Source Food, and am a past Fellow at the Berkeley Food Institute and the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine.

I live and garden in Berkeley, California.