Welcome to the Common Reading Program and our year-long consideration of Priya Fielding-Singh’s book, How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America!
The goals of the Common Reading Program are to stimulate thinking and discussion between and among students, faculty, and staff as well as to highlight the ways in which WSU’s areas of study can better equip us to understand complex issues. This year we are focusing our attention on food—a topic that ends up consuming a fair amount of daily mental energy for all humans as we consider the questions how, when, what, where, with whom, and whether we will eat. It is a topic that is the source both of considerable pleasure and of considerable anxiety. And, as author Priya Fielding-Singh makes clear, food is a topic inextricably tied to our individual, family, and community identities.
Throughout this year you can expect to participate in conversations in and beyond your classes that will help you think in new ways about what we eat and why; about how gender, ethnicity, and economic class impact our available options and the labor involved; and about how food insecurity is tied to larger issues of systemic inequality. Along the way you will also be introduced to many aspects of WSU’s own groundbreaking research across a variety of areas, as well as to resources on your campus that address the basic needs of college students.
To stimulate these discussions, this year’s entering first-year class across the WSU system is receiving paperback copies of the book, thanks to funding from the Office of the Provost. Author Fielding-Singh will be joining us on campus on October 15 for a public talk, book signing, and moderated virtual discussion.
We also will be hosting a weekly array of opportunities to engage in the topic beyond your classes—films, talks, workshops, demonstrations, exhibits, and service-learning activities that we hope will both challenge and inspire you.
Please join us at these events throughout the year. We welcome you into this conversation and are eager to see how it leads all of us at WSU to think in new ways about the daily topic of food!
—Karen Weathermon, Ph.D.
Director of First-Year Programs, Pullman Campus
kweathermon@wsu.edu