Michael Pollan in Madison

The Big Event that everyone has been waiting for is here: Michael Pollan is going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, speaking about food and diet and word has it he will be bringing his rose-colored glasses!

There are several events where Pollan will be the big cheese:

Thursday at 7 pm at the Kohl Center, he will be giving a talk to what will likely be a packed auditorium. His talk is called The Omnivore’s Solution. I’ve been dying to find out what Omnivores can be dissolved in.

His talk is part of a campus-wide project called Go Big Read. I know, the name is lame. But they put thousands of copies of Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food, in the hands of students in many disciplines. From sociology to nutrition and political science, the idea is to get students in many different fields talking about the same thing from different angles.

There is a blog on the Go Big Read site, and they were taking question submissions for Pollan, a handful of which will be selected. I submitted a question, along with Ariela.

Will this story impact Madison pedestrians?

Forgive the pun. But I have a little local news to complain about. Ever since I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, I have noticed the awful behavior of pedestrians in the downtown area. Citizens, many of them students, cross high-speed, major streets when they are not supposed to. In particular, the parallel one-way streets of Gorham/University and West Johnson, especially where they both cross State Street – the backbone of downtown Madison.

When driving through town, I often see pedestrians starting across the street, crosswalk or not, and they may or may not be paying attention to oncoming traffic, which is often going at 25-35 miles per hour. Sometimes pedestrians are walking along State Street, a pedestrian/bike/bus-only mall, and instinctively start across a street that crosses it, only to catch themselves as they remember that 2-ton hunks of metal are bearing down on them and they forgot to look.

Considering that kindergarten was not that long ago for some of these people, you’d think that they would remember the simple lesson of looking both ways.