We introduce a new approach to the anisotropic Calderón problem, based on a map called Poisson embedding that identifies the points of a Riemannian manifold with distributions on its boundary. We give a new uniqueness result for a large class of Calderón type inverse problems for quasilinear equations in the real analytic case. The approach also leads to a new proof of the result of Lassas et al. (Annales de l’ ENS 34(5):771–787, 2001) solving the Calderón problem on real analytic Riemannian manifolds. The proof uses the Poisson embedding to determine the harmonic functions in the manifold up to a harmonic morphism. The method also involves various Runge approximation results for linear elliptic equations.