The University of Wisconsin’s new Go Big Read common book program, which begins this fall, announced its first book selection Wednesday.
“In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” by Michael Pollan was chosen from nearly 400 other titles as the inaugural book of UW’s Go Big Read program.
The program, initiated by Chancellor Biddy Martin, is intended to provide a shared reading experience for the campus community, the Madison community and UW alumni, according to Ken Frazier, director of UW’s library system.
“I think the really interesting thing about this as a pilot program is we’re going to get to think about how we as a university community work with ideas, talk about ideas, play with ideas, have a conversation about the ideas and implications of a book that’s a topic of significant social importance to the country,” Frazier said.
About 7,500 copies of the book will be provided for free, mostly to first-year students and other students interested in participating in the program, according to Sara Guyer, director of the Center for Humanities. It will be integrated into some Communication Arts-A courses, agricultural and life sciences courses and biological sciences courses, among others.
Guyer said the book was chosen from the nearly 400 other titles that were submitted to the selection committee because of its interdisciplinary approach to a common activity.
The selection committee, which was comprised of students, librarians and academic staff, sifted through the list and chose 20-40 top contenders. From there, the committee whittled the list down to 15 and Martin made the final decision.
“[The book] has the opportunity to bring the whole campus together to think critically about an everyday activity — which is food and eating — and to think about the ways in which the activities that we think of as the domain of one discipline actually involve a whole range of disciplines,” Guyer said.
“In Defense of Food” is a non-fiction book that analyzes the composition of the American diet, explains food label jargon and delineates the relationship between food and nature.
According to Bill Cronon, director for Culture, History and Environment at the Nelson Institute, Pollan offers “practical, concrete recommendations for how we may eat better for ourselves and for our environment.”
“It’ll get [readers] to think about every piece of food they put in their mouths and it brings lots of different intellectual perspectives to this thing we do every day all the time,” Cronon said.
Pollan is a New York Times Magazine contributor and professor of journalism at the University of California-Berkeley. Pollan will visit campus Sept. 24-26 to discuss his book as part of the Go Big Read program.
“He’s an extraordinary writer, he’s a wonderful storyteller, he’s one of the very few serious intellectual writers who can also be hysterically funny,” Cronon said.
