Food for Thought: Campus-Wide Reading Project Focuses on What We Eat

By Gina Muscato (October 29, 2007)

The University at Albany has launched the third annual Reading Project, which will engage the entire UAlbany community in reading Michael Pollan's award-winning The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press, 2006).

The campus reading project was developed to bring students, faculty, and staff together for reflection, analysis, and debate, reinforcing the University's shared enterprise as an intellectual community. The project, with the assistance of UAlbany's New York State Writers Institute, will include group discussions with students led by University faculty and staff, as well as presentations and related activities in the spring semester.

In his groundbreaking book, Pollan follows the four food chains that sustain us -- industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves -- from the source to a meal. In the process, he develops an account of the singular American way of eating. His narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, and emphasizes our co-evolutionary relationship with the plant and animal species on which we depend.

Pollan's work was honored by The New York Times and the Washington Post as one of the 10 best books of 2006.

For previous campus reading projects, the University community read Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

Related Links:
New York State Writers Institute