"Dowager Queen of Local Food Movement" Challenged in The Atlantic

For myself and many of my friends, early gardening experiences shaped our long-term connection to food and its ethics. In my case, my mom dropped me off at Mrs. Frieda's place, a bona fide German kindergarten, on her way to work at General Electric where she was employed for 30 years. I was one of five or so kinder, and the garden was about an acre of land beside the house on a road ending in tobacco fields (I'm from Wilmington, NC). Mrs. Frieda had a hen house where some of we kinder collected eggs.

Acres of soybeans spread out behind the chickens toward someone else's small property. We ate what was grown on that property, plus a few imports from the candy section of the gas station at the other end of the street. Mrs. Frieda confiscated cans of Chef Boyardee dropped off by parents with their kids assuming that's all they would eat because that's what they ate at home. She kept these "banned materials" in a section of the cupboard sequestered from legitimate items, like baking soda.

I attribute my interest in food, history, and German culture and language to this experience. I was never particularly good with the German language, though I studied it for eight years and am still proficient enough to have polite conversation with German waiters.

When thinking about what I want for my kids, I can't help but hold up Mrs. Frieda's method as an ideal. I want my kids to grow vegetables as an integral part of their comprehensive education. I can't imagine not doing this.

So I was compelled by an essay in the latest Atlantic Monthly by Caitlin Flanagan, "Cultivating Failure: How School Gardens Are Cheating Our Most Vulnerable Students."

Flanagan takes issue with a California school program spearheaded by Alice Waters, one of America's most famous restauranteurs, and certainly one of its most political. A vacant lot in Berkeley next to the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School inspired the "Edible Schoolyard" program that provides "experience-based learning that illustrates the pleasure of meaningful work, personal responsibility, the need for nutritious, sustainably raised, and sensually stimulating food, and the important socializing effect of the ritual of the table." Waters worked with the school's principle to create a curriculum around this.

Michelle Obama has lead the White House's healthy food's initiative and kids have been the Administration's primary target. Gardens are popping up in schools everywhere with support from all directions.

Flanagan's primary issue is the problem of priorities in schools with disastrous test scores, particularly those with first-generation Latino American students. Here's a sampling:

"Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U. S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce."

The problem with the program, Flanagan argues, is that it takes away from core educational objectives like reading comprehension and math in schools with high numbers of immigrants. To get into college, these kids have to meet minimum requirements that many aren't meeting. When gardening programs branch out into other coursework -- like English where recipes rather than essays are written, and math where plots are measured rather than more algebraically heavy exercises -- kids are cheated. The program may work for kids who have their bases covered, but it isn't "one size fits all."

Here's a quote from the state's standards regarding gardens:

"Some families, particularly those from other countries, may feel uncomfortable when asked to help out at school because their English skills or educational background do not give them a solid classroom footing. For these families, the living classroom of a garden can be a much more inviting environment in which to engage their children's education."

Flanagan notes, "if this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education."

Here's the link to Flanagan's piece:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/school-yard-garden

For myself, I think the Edible Schoolyard and similar programs are a good idea, but could be started much, much earlier like a "head start" program or as a complement to kindergarten. By sixth grade, eating patterns and tastes are already formed. Early agri-learning work wouldn't compete with later core learning kids need to get into college and succeed generally. I don't think my "Mrs. Frieda experience" could be replicated without a league of Black Forest transplants, but I do think U.S. daycare could improve significantly by teaching food values and fill a critical public need (and market niche).