The connection to Alice Waters and the Edible Schoolyard Project
One of the original and still most famous champions of the local food movement is Alice Waters, owner of Berkeley’s legendary Chez Panisse restaurant and pioneer of “California cuisine.” But she’s more than just that: In recent years she’s transformed herself into an educational reformer, promoting her ideas about sustainability through something called the “Edible Schoolyard Project,” which basically boils down to the introduction of gardening as a core curriculum in American public schools.
Sounds heart-warming — right?
Think again. The Edible Schoolyard, Alice Waters, and her entire worldview were utterly demolished in a devastating exposé published in last month’s Atlantic magazine which is actually the best piece of journalism I’ve seen so far this year. Before you click that link, however, first read this nice summary of the article published on the SFGate blog to properly prepare yourself for the experience of Caitlin Flanagan’s exposé:
Flanagan argues that time that should be spent on reading, writing and arithmetic is wasted on teaching children how to grow vegetables. This green-thumbing of students undermines their education and will ultimately turn them into field laborers, or, as she puts it, “intellectual sharecroppers.”
At the root of all evil is Waters and her Edible Schoolyard — a program she founded at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley that helped inspire the school garden movement. Flanagan essentially sees Waters, an advocate of locally-grown and organic food, as a gastronomic elitist who has no business shaping the curricula of public schools.
As luck would have it, I was making a trip over to Berkeley the very afternoon I read the exposé, so I brought along my camera and did a little in-person investigation myself.
Before I even got to the Edible Schoolyard I encountered the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, where one can indeed buy local produce in abundance — and at abundantly high prices, unfortunately.
And that, actually, is the flaw in the whole “sustainable food” movement. For various economic reasons, organic food, sustainable food and even locally grown food is almost always more expensive than food produced in massive bulk by large agribusiness concerns. As a result, only the wealthy and the dilettantes can afford to dally with the pricey hobby of eating locally. The average person — and especially poor people and disadvantaged minorities — can’t afford the $5/pound organic vegetables sold by local farms.
A typical Berkeley Farmers’ Market customer.
I then proceeded down Rose Street toward King Middle School and its famous Edible Schoolyard, which was the first school garden of a now nationwide movement. But before I even got there, I had a revelation….
By chance I approached the school just after 3pm when classes had let out. Students were streaming away from the campus, and it seemed like every single one of them had fled the Edible Schoolyard and went directly to the nearby corner stores and bakeries where they had bought and were now eagerly scarfing decidedly non-organic and non-local food — like ice cream bars…
…cookies…
…and sodas and candy.
Now, let’s stop for a moment. The pictures above are reality, not the utopian daydreams of the pie-in-the sky educators who were positive that the Edible Schoolyard curriculum at King Middle School would transform all the kids into snooty gourmands who only eat (and only want to eat) locally-grown organic healthy nutritious meals. In reality, pre-teens and teens desperately crave high-calorie sweets and junk food of all kinds; they always have, and they probably always will. All the well-intentioned indoctrination in the world isn’t going to stop the biological need of growing bodies to cram as many calories into their mouths as they can get their hands on. Is this the kids’ fault? No. Is it the fault of evil corporations who advertise junk food? No. The advertisers don’t convert health-conscious kids into sugar addicts; they’re simply taking advantage of a pre-existing and innate requirement for adolescent kids to eat eat eat high-energy foods.
In fact, contrary to what the administrators had hoped for and predicted, not a single student was hanging out in the garden once classes were over. Those who wanted after-school physical activity instead were all down on the playground training to be on the basketball team.
Here’s what one part of the garden looks like in the heart of the school year — and frankly, it seems pretty ratty, and one of the few vegetables growing successfully over the winter is (as seen here) the cabbage.
You tell me: Can you feed the school’s thousand students with just 30 cabbages? No. But that was never part of the plan — was it?
Actually, it was. The project’s administrators originally imagined that the garden would supply food to the school cafeteria, but due to safety regulations and other bureaucratic problems, they must now concede that “produce grown in the garden is not used for school lunch.” But even without the regulations getting in the way, the garden still does not produce enough food to feed the entire school for even one day out of the whole year, much less on a continuous basis. The kids who work in the garden only ever eat the food they grow in what seems like carefully stage-managed symbolic meals every now and then around harvest time.
And this very problem — the non-viability of garden produce as an acceptable substitute for farm-grown food — reached all the way to the White House recently, when it was revealed that when Michelle Obama hosted the TV reality show Iron Chef at the White House garden, the cooks couldn’t actually use any of the White House produce in their recipes, either because there wasn’t nearly enough of it or it was unsightly — even though the whole point of the TV episode was to use Michelle’s home-grown vegetables.
If you can’t pull off the fantasy for a single propaganda meal, how can you possibly sustain the dream of kids growing their own food all year long?
Only in California
As we saw earlier in this essay, California — especially central California, where Berkeley is located — has the kind of near-perfect climate where you can grow practically anything, as long as you’ve got the right trucked-in soil and 1,000 unwilling volunteers. This makes the Edible Schoolyard perhaps something you could pull off here, but in not many other places around the country.
For example, one of the many exotic fruits grown in Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard is the pepino — something which would be practically impossible to grow anywhere in the United States outside of a few select areas (and I suspect pepinos aren’t too successful in this garden either, since even this California climate is too cool for them).
Simultaneously, in the same garden where they can grow tropical pepinos, they can also grow winter wheat — something which is usually associated with cold areas.
“Cossack Pineapple” is an alternate name for a little-grown garden fruit related to the Cape Gooseberry. (I originally thought, based on the sign’s illustration, that they were attempting to grow pineapples, but realized that would be impossible, considering the climate.) Thanks to Alice Waters’ influence, the Edible Schoolyard is full of all sorts of unusual and exotic fruits and vegetables from around the world which you wouldn’t find in the average garden.
But not all of it is bizarre. For example, we have…
Have you ever seen anything more exciting?
Setting aside the sarcasm for a moment: I’m all for growing one’s own vegetables — I have a green thumb myself. But, you see, I’m an adult who chooses to dabble in the dirt of my own volition in my spare time. Imagine being a modern American 13-year-old in a world of ultra-violent head-spinning video games, text-messaging and cell phones and tweets and Facebook, hormones and peer pressure and ubiquitous pornography, adolescence and terrorism and war and economic collapse — and then look at these carrot sprouts. Hell, I’d run away as fast as I could too.
Here’s the compost pile. For the life of me I can’t figure out why there is a sign with the letters “FBI” next to the compost pile. There seems to be no known garden-related-meaning for the acronym “F.B.I.” For Burying Immediately? Fungus-Bearing Indigestibles? Or is it a bit of anti-authoritarian political humor — the Federal Bureau of Investigation is like garbage?
The Hidden Racism of the Edible Schoolyard
The Atlantic article more than once examines the undercurrent of racism in the whole philosophy behind the Edible Schoolyard. Its author Caitlin Flanagan writes, for example,
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.
and also…
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.
Ouch.
But, y’know — she’s right.
For example, in the official Edible Schoolyard Journal there is an article about the school’s program for sending students with learning problems to work in the garden for a week. In the minds of the educators who came up with this idea, it seemed so glorious: putting the disaffected urban youth back in touch with the land, teaching them all sorts of lessons about hard work and long-term planning. But as this picture from the journal shows, the students “turned five huge heaps of compost and cultivated a long bed in the back of the garden,” which, to the skeptical eye, seems like a giant step backward — basically, putting the minority kids out to do hard labor. All that’s missing from this picture is a sheriff with reflecting sunglasses and a shotgun, making sure the convicts on the chain gang don’t try to run.
And to confirm Flanagan’s suspicions about the condescending backhanded racism of the leftist ideologues behind the Edible Schoolyard: The peas are called “peas,” but…
…the beans are called “frijoles,” because well, y’know, beaners Mexicans sure do love them some frijoles, señor!
Seriously, could you get any more insulting?
Let’s get real, people: Globalization is the best thing that ever happened to mankind. Most of the edibles you enjoy on a daily basis come from thousands of miles away, grown in climates where you wouldn’t want to live: Coffee, sugar, chocolate, wheat, rice, cinnamon, vanilla — the list is endless. Civilizations have risen and fallen in pursuit of new foods. The Romans conquered North Africa to get access to its wheat fields; the Arabs invented international capitalism by gaining control of the spice trade; the French and the English colonized half the globe to bring home sugar and tea. The story of the last 4,000 years is the story of our quest for exotic foods.
And here comes the locavore movement to say, in essence, Let’s go back to neolithic times when we only ate what grew in the immediate vicinity. I say: Screw that. We worked hard as a species to gain access to every imaginable kind of food that this planet can grow. I’m not about to give it all up now just so I can feel a little more smug.
“The land of fruits and nuts” takes on a new level of meaning.
Oh yeah, dontcha just love California. Here in N. Colorado I would be on a diet of sugar beets, feed corn and a little wheat. In order to get anything from an ‘eat local’ co-op, I’d have to drive about 70 miles to pick up my order (and then drive back home). Yeah, that lowers my carbon foot print. You’d think I could go over to the local meat packing plant and pick up a few steaks or the local cheese factory and get some fresh made mozzarela? Apparently they havent heard the news. Just as well, I’ve been to the meat plant once and that was enough thanks. I’ll stick to the home garden variety of ‘eat local’ and maybe I should start raising my own chickens. Cheaper that way anyhow.
zombie, let us not overlook the shadow of Mao, who exiled his pesky intellectuals to the countryside where they labored like peasants on collective farms to correct their ideas.
But I would like to know: what does happen to that food? How delicious, to indulge in a pun, that it can’t be eaten in the schools due to bureaucracy and regulation, the major pastimes of contrarian Berkeley, where I briefly lived.
Finally, I will describe my pre-teen gardening experience. I lovingly planted and watered some watermelon seeds when I was about twelve, at my parents’ charming cabin in the mountains. We went up one weekend and they had sprouted beautifully! I would get fruit! The next weekend, every bit of green was gone, eaten by pests. The next weekend, all the tender roots were nibbled away, leaving nothing but knobs in the ground. I realized that gardening was more work than I wanted to do — and I was on the side of Mr. MacGregor instead of Peter Rabbit.
I’ve never thought of it this way, and frankly I don’t think the dingbats in charge of this movement are thinking in terms of racism. They’re pie-in-the-sky utopians, with no actual idea how the world works. They don’t listen to anyone else, and they have these impractical, rather silly ideas about how food and everything else in life should work. Everyone in their world winds up with a fulfilling, lucrative, *safe* job from which no one ever gets fired or downsized. They would probably be appalled at the idea that someone thought them racist, and would have some argument (“sustainable food is better *for* you”) that wouldn’t make much sense, and would tend to distract from the main point.
The whole point to this is that the elitist element in the country has no clue how ordinary people live. It’s my guess that most of the individuals involved imagine that food can be grown in places it actually won’t thrive, and that they have no idea how things actually work. A city/metropolitan area of 15-20 million people (both New York City and Los Angeles fall into this category) can’t sustain itself on food grown within 100 miles, even if the surrounding countryside is verdant, fertile, and diverse. Neither of those cities actually fits that description exactly–Los Angeles is too dry, New York City too cold.
Somehow no one ever thinks of these things when upper-middle-class yuppies insist that everyone drive a Prius (with faulty brakes), live in a solar-powered home (with panels that are horrifically expensive), eat sustainable food (that’s very expensive and not very easy to obtain) and reduce your carbon footprint. Most of this is just image and arrogance, along with ignorance and as I said a good dose of utopianism.
Garden Vs. Farm. Another great Leftist talking point full of ready-made-washed salad and bottled dressing.
I disagree with some of the points of this article, and I am no leftist. First, the locovore movement is pretty nuts. I live in the midwest. It’s freezing outside right now and unless I canned a bunch of vegetables I would be subsisting on a caveman diet of dried nuts and meat right now.
I think however, that child hood obesity, and obesity in general is a problem. You learn a lot about food by working in a garden and growing it. Also, if you throw a garden in your backyard, there is a pride of ownership that comes with it. You have to work at it and be patient to get gratification. Many other lessons to be learned here if taught correctly. Besides, who doesn’t enjoy a home grown tomato rather than a store bought one!
Additionally, there are many parts of the locovore movement that are actually correct. Grass fed, finished beef (like tallgrassbeef.com) is better for you than factory raised feedlot beef. Leaf Lard from the belly of a hog is better for you than the partially hydrongenated stuff in the store. However, the author is correct, organic and slow raised food is more expensive. So, there are two sides to this.
Are these (progressives) the same folks who want to control our health care?
Just sayin’.
The logical extension is to buy only goods and services produced locally. The aim (of the Ecofascists) is to de-industrialise and de-globalise us, and food is the logical place to start as it will cause least inconvenience and taken at face value has many merits: support local producers; fresher food; eat seasonal; “healthier” diet; lower prices.
Next step: each household resorts to subsistence farming, bartering the small surplus at the cross-roads for pots and pans and other stuff made by local artisans.
There is a plan. Make no mistake.
Zombie, as usual you do excellent intelligence gathering work. And Ms. Flanagan’s article is a must-read.
I hereby suggest we refer to Ms. Waters henceforth as “Kip’s Ma”, after the character with the soy obsession in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”.
If we’re not careful, she might be our next Secretary of Education. Or worse yet, Agriculture.
clear ether
eon
I think we would be better served by having the kids of the elite spend a year working on a real farm. Getting up in the middle of the night to start milking the cows; harvesting till 10 because of the storm that’s due tomorrow; eating only what you’ve grown and put up yourself, chopping the head off and plucking the chicken for Sunday dinner. You could get some serious math, science, and economics lessons relating to all these endeavors. Imagine cooking with the potatoes of February and calculating the cost of heating a greenhouse for your arugula and winter berries. If any group needs and education about food and gardening it’s the spoiled brats who plan a career in nagging others to save the earth.
The great thing about this is that it would cost normal taxpayers nothing. The parents can shell out 25 thou a year tuition.
I actually did live in Kansas for a year. The wheat is local and it’s spectacular. The flour is really fresh and fantastic. But what you find out about Kansas is they grow little else there because the climate is so harsh. Wheat, milo and corn if they irrigate. All the local fruits and vegetables at the farmers’ markets come from Texas.
(My friend’s ancestors were the first white people on the section outside of Wichita. The Pawnees reaction to them–Are you serious? You white guys are going to live here year round? We winter in Oklahoma and summer in Nebraska. We only use Kansas to hunt in.)
BTW, they do realize that in order to eat from a local garden all year round, in most cases you have to prepare the food for storage, right? That means things like freezing, drying or canning, and keeping pests out of your stash. Or is Berserkley so magical that you don’t need to bother with things like that to have zucchini and strawberries available all year long?
This type of elitism doesn’t exist just in California. There is also the issue of supermarkets in poor neighborhoods, particularly minority neighborhoods, that have less healthy foods for folks to buy, but have tons of junk food. Whether it’s the environment or healthier foods, it’s always out of reach for most people because of availality or expense or both which is something these nut cases never factor into the equation.
Speaking of nut cases, this reminds me of the idiot woman at a Santa Cruz City Coucil meeting who babbled (literally)about free food and vegetables that grow on trees.
We’ve always grown a little garden and gone to a farmer’s market. This is great from about late March (spinach) to October (winter squash and turnips). However, that leaves about 4-5 months when we can’t grow anything. Then there is drought, like the one we had two years ago when the farmer’s markets were just about empty. I live in Kentucky, and if these idiots had their way, I’d never taste citrus, or avocados, or coconut or even chocolate. For that alone, they should be banned.
Well, here in small town Central Illinois, we’ve been eating local produce for as long as I can remember (I’m 65). Throughout the summer and early fall months, various individuals set up roadside stands to sell all kinds of local produce. We can get strawberries, asparagus, sweet corn, tomatoes, peaches, apples, pumpkins, melons. There are facilities to butch any game you killed or livestock harvested. You can get live chickens off the farm, and farm fresh eggs. Who knew we were part of some locavore environmental wacko movement. It’s just been a way of life. We all know the difference in taste between ahome gorwn tomato and one bought in the grocery store. These liberal yuppies think they’ve discovered something new. We snicker at them as well sell them our produce.
Locally grown only? Hmmm, I guess I’d be living on beef and wheat. I’d never go #2 again. Come to think of it, you’re not supposed to flush after #1, so this could be a vast water-conservation conspiracy. The light dawns.
I was just thinking the same thing mentioned in comment 10. My grandmothers on both sides spent lots and lots of time canning.(and lots of time hanging the wash too) There is so much work involved in growing foods and so many things that can go wrong. If only those with these bright idea had had to live in the time before WWII; they’d hit that fast-forward button before the sunset of the first day.
I love that I can find fresh fruits all year long. I don’t miss the 3 week strawberry season at all.
The mindless urban ‘intellectuals’, who shop at Whole Foods and fawn over organic produce as more tasteful than that awful corporate stuff from Safeway, are in a world so removed from reality that they really can believe in a locavore movement – because they have no concept of how their groceries are raised and processed and transported to their boutique shoppes.
Their existence raises serious criticisms of a culture that allows them to take their groceries, and their transportation systems, and their water supply and sewage removal and electricity, wholly for granted. Those mechanical props for living will always be there without effort, and someone ELSE will actually labor in the vineyards while they compete with one another in displaying sensitivity and discussing film noire and sending their kids to ballet and their dollars to Arafat.
In one small sense, Mao was right in sending them off to the fields for unpaid stints raising crops. Stalin and Tito did it too – that’s where the term ‘subbotnik’ comes from, your Saturday donated to the Party. It did give the urbanites enough hands-on training to understand the labor involved producing their groceries – and to harden their resolve to ensure that it should be done by others, preferably their political opponents, after the Revolution.
Winter wheat? Besides the association that has with Lysenkoism, isn’t it rather low-yielding, so it would take an acre to grow enough to make bread for the school for more than a day? OTOH, I have nothing against teaching kids a little about growing food plants – or flowers, for that matter. One of my clearest memories from grade school was a little patch of radishes and beans and such we grew in second grade. Maybe we each got one to eat, it wasn’t intended to supply the kitchen at all. And these days, city kids especially haven’t the foggiest idea where food actually comes from. Heck, Obama apparently thinks dollars grow on trees.
Anyway, after the approaching financial meltdown, and/or in the era of trillion-dollar deficits, we may soon need to be growing our own food locally, gasoline will go to $8/gallon, if not $8000/gallon in Obamabucks, food trucks won’t be safe on the highway, Chile won’t take our dollars for winter produce.
Bonny Kate: But what you find out about Kansas is they grow little else there because the climate is so harsh.
Horse beans. In my two years in rural Kansas, every farm in the county had a garden plot, and many had small orchards, all for home consumption. The variety of vegetables and fruits comprised everything that could mature in a Kansas growing season. But these were admittedly people living on the social momentum of their elders, and a steady stream of them left every year, permanently, for urban life where they could use every precious hour of the day for activities of their choice. As opposed to all those hours cultivating and planting and weeding and harvesting and preserving and storing all that exquisite produce that these socially conscious ‘locavores’ would mandate for the rest of us.
There’s also the problem of family size. It just isn’t feasible for a family of five to focus on organic foods, never mind the even more constrained concept of focusing on locally produced food. But I suppose having three kids makes us irredeemable environmental criminals anyway.
The only reason I try to eat locally is to help area farmers and other producers. Interestingly, the store that has the most local food is NOT the organic food co-op, but a small mid-town IGA supermarket where I can buy locally produced, safe food ( raw products and manure fertilizer are dangerous, I don’t care how “natural” they are). At any given time I can get eggs, tortillas, milk, spices, meat, bread and wheat products at competitive prices. Seasonally I can find turkey and sweet corn. And even if I don’t buy local, I at least support a store that does.
I found out about the store’s commitment to local farmers through the Rural Life committee at our church, which had a brochure describing what could be found where. I would imagine that your local USDA Extension Office might publish something similar, or know who does. So it is entirely possible to be a partial locavore, not go broke doing it, and shop at a regular supermarket- IF you know where to look, and happen to live in a farming area.
#9 Bonnie Kate–LOL! Guess we could really learn a lot from the original inhabitants of the country. (Although, I’m glad someone does live in Kansas)
That said, I, being a west coast dweller, do have access to much of the bounty of the very fertile Willamette Valley in which I live. However, we like to buy local for a very different reason: we like to support the local business people here in the valley. We feel if they can make a living here they’ll be more likely to stay. As we all know, hard-working, productive citizens are sometimes hard to come by. My thumb ain’t so green so I’m happy to exchange my indoor-job pay for someone’s skill in the garden!
The FBI sign was marking out the cannabis plot for the medical Mary Jane. It’s nice to see the upper middle class west coast elite has their brand of urban survivalism, being rednecks in paradise without knowing it. Only in Santa Cruz and Berkeley can you be nuclear free zones in an ICBM world.
My apology, that’s bonny (with a “y”) kate
Zombie …my hat is off to you. This essay is a piece of art.
wonder what the one with the nice arms is growing in the Washington DC garden today. I will venture to say snow peas.
If all the fluff was off the curriculum, teaching some gardening would be no worse than teaching some music. I am a gardener and a music teacher.
Very few music students get actual skills, but some do, and most benefit from it a little.
Gardening is rewarding, and not many parents are teaching it to their kids. It’s not financially rewarding, my vegetables cost as much as store veggies, but they taste better. I’m in the desert mountains of California, not a great place to garden, but if you work hard enough you can get stuff to grow. Work is the operative term. Teaching kids to work is not a bad thing.
But the mental fluff that goes with it deprives it of value.
@Lili von Shtupp:
Yes, Berserkley is a magical place. Where you would be hard pressed to find anywhere to grow enough food to sustain the large suburban populations (and spoiled, college-attending brats of trust-fund hippies) that live there. It’s a filthy, crime-ridden urban sprawl right next to an even bigger filthy, crime-ridden urban sprawl (Oakland). The only agriculture in Berkeley happens in the back of smoke shops under specialized, power-sucking lighting.
The closest agriculture in the Bay Area happens miles outside of it, either in Modesto to the east or Watsonville and Salinas to the south. Using those areas to feed people “locally” would still require shipping it in as much as a hundred miles.
And if I sound bitter about it, it might be because I paid my way through San Jose State. We Spartans tend to get a bit irritated with the self-righteous rich kids at Stanford and UC Berkeley. =)
So we asshole Californians invented the locavore movement to lord over the rest of the country how superior we are.
can you say asshole? I agree it is appropriate ..just saying.
sms@11: If you have not yet read the Atlantic article, perhaps you should. On page 3, Flanagan dismembers the anecdotal “supermarkets in poor neighborhoods, particularly minority…” conventional wisdom with an interesting anecdote of her own.
11. sms:
This type of elitism doesn’t exist just in California. There is also the issue of supermarkets in poor neighborhoods, particularly minority neighborhoods, that have less healthy foods for folks to buy, but have tons of junk food. Whether it’s the environment or healthier foods, it’s always out of reach for most people because of availality or expense or both which is something these nut cases never factor into the equation.
it isn’t elitism that is the reason for less healthy food in low income and minority communities.
it isn’t out of reach of those people either. they chose not to buy such things (yes sometimes for reasons of cost.
you speak as thought the government should fix that. …isn’t this precisely what most patrons of pajamas media are against?
I went to school at MLK Middle when it was called Garfield Junior HIgh (no doubt named after the cat). Then they had wood shop and metal shop and actually tried to teach math to students. Zombie does great photo essays. This isn’t the first time utopianism and food combined to produce disastrous results. This whole nonsense reminds me of the famous Food Coop shootout of 1977. A group devoted to ‘social justice’ was trying to establish a ‘people’s food system’ free of taint from the ‘capitalist pigs.’ They recruited a bunch of black ex-cons (blacks being the vanguard of the revolution) to man the warehouse. What resulted was a bloody and fatal recreation of the OK corral.
http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=People's_Food_System
Don’t suppose there’ll be any killings over the edible school yard, just the murder of good sense. The least they could do for Berkeley students is to take them on a field trip to the real world every month so they’ll realize they’re living in a fantasyland. I lived in Berkeley, it’s definitely ‘Let’s Pretend Land.’
“F” is for Fungus
“B” is for Bacteria
“I” is for Invertebrates
Together they are composting… google is handy sometimes.
There are lots of liberals around here.
This makes me mildly in favor of eating local.
PS Excellent column, thank you.
PPS Think globally, act locally, defeat the commies everywhere.
Last year, the naive, brain-dead Greenists around here were claiming in their arts rag that in order to be properly green, one should forsake beef and chicken and eat fish. Here in the hinterlands that meant that instead of eating meat from local sources, one should eat the fish that is trucked in from the coasts. Never mind the (gasp) “carbon footprint” of that 18-wheeler! Fish is good, chicken and beef are bad! So sayeth the Greenists!
And people wonder why I give them so little credence.
Americans used to think of French cuisine as a snobbish exercise based on rare and expensive ingredients like truffles and foie gras. Then Julia Child showed us that it was actually about getting the best out of whatever ingredients you have, even oxtail or turnips.
Now we’re back to snob ingredients that ordinary people not only can’t afford but are excluded from getting at all (because of the 100-mile principle), only this time it comes with an insufferable sheen of political snobbery as well.
This is a GREAT article — and let me tell you, it is ALL true. I live in a small community in the San Francisco Bay area. Our town council (chosen by voters) is chock full of these “sustainability” nutcases. On an empty parcel of land in our town, one council member hopes that the city can attract an organic restaurant that will produce it’s own menu items right there on the restaurant grounds. That is actually on her website! And the voters of this town voted for these people to run things. The town council also wants to generate its own electricity with windmills for the city. Totally insane.
…The closest agriculture in the Bay Area happens miles outside of it, either in Modesto to the east or Watsonville and Salinas to the south. Using those areas to feed people “locally” would still require shipping it in as much as a hundred miles…
Actually there is plenty of locally grown fruits, vegies and you-name-it in Brentwood which is maybe an 45 minutes to an hour from Berserkley. It is 20 minutes from where I live in the east bay. Very accessible. Its a great place to get quantities of produce at decent prices if one is into putting there own food by.
BTW, the Flanagan article is great food for thought….
39. Connie:
This is a GREAT article — and let me tell you, it is ALL true. I live in a small community in the San Francisco Bay area. Our town council (chosen by voters) is chock full of these “sustainability” nutcases. On an empty parcel of land in our town, one council member hopes that the city can attract an organic restaurant that will produce it’s own menu items right there on the restaurant grounds. That is actually on her website! And the voters of this town voted for these people to run things. The town council also wants to generate its own electricity with windmills for the city. Totally insane.
yes it is a bit crazy. …there are (or were) several communes in northern British Columbia. but there was an upside, they didn’t ask for anything from others and were a friendly groups of people.
but it is not easy or cheap to be self sufficient. especially if you want to do it in northern climates, there simply isn’t enough wildlife to kill to feed people and vegetables don’t grow fast under snow. and eventually it becomes untenable as people tire of a fixed lifestyle with limited opportunities.
in anchorage the people would go hungry, at least for 10 months out of the year. The rest of us who live in the country can survive on moose, rabbits, and fish, if you live next to the coast in the southern part of ak. I wonder how long the moose will survive if everyone in ak. shot a moose for survival
For the areas of the country where livestock is not able be herded, ranched, slaughtered and rendered, I suggest road-kill. It’s locally produced and comes in a variety of flavors. It would give a whole new dimension to Adopt-a-Highway. During slow seasons, bait could be put on the asphalt. It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you just put your mind to it and allow others to do your dirty work.
The “locavore” movement, like many other stupid ideas, is based on the premise that the naturally occurring element carbon is bad. It’s actually very good that the environmentalists have built almost their entire house of cards on this argument, since it is beginning to be exposed for the absolute fraud that it is. As goes the credibility of the anthropogenic global warming community, so goes every other carbon-phobic enterprise. That probably won’t change the mind of anyone in Berkeley, but it may help others who would otherwise be sympathetic to ideas such as the Edible Schoolyard.
#16 George,
I grew up similarly, and my family back home still does buy from locals they have known all their lives. It was the city snobs who told us that all that canned and frozen stuff was inferior to fresh. These people are ignorant.
Zombie, you have once again exposed the raw underbelly of bad thinking as practiced by that unique species of N. Calif. liberals. I’m glad you touched upon one aspect of this kind of thinking; which is the latent racism that lies just beneath the seemingly benign, multicultural-friendly surface.
I raise this because a strong underlying component of lefty environmental/AGW dogma is the recurring theme of urging humanity to return a a primitive state in nature where people live in little villages while growing their own food and forswearing the use of any modern conveniences.
If you look at the history of many of the U.N’s patronizing and wasteful aid programs thrust upon poor, third world countries you will note they have one common end-game: Keeping the poor little wogs dependent on subsistence-level agriculture. What better way to keep them immobile, isolated and never in danger of spoiling the aristocrats’ clean and orderly plantation?
I’ve volunteered in the schools since 1966 and tend to agree with Theodore Sizer about as much effort as necessary on teaching reading, writing and math as many hours as necessary to develop students able to suceed at post secondary-school education, be it college or vocational school. Gardening should be extra-curricular for those who have difficulty with the three R’s.
One comment: When the-powers-that-be started busing students to and from school, eliminated physical education and recess, and instigated fees for extra-curricular sports, obesity and learning “disorders” seem to increase. Does it occur to anyone that lack of physical activity might impact both problems?
Perhaps they should try the Dahmer diet. Makes eating locals is a perfectly sensible idea. And it need not be racist, just accept that you will have to eat both white and dark meats. However there is one caveat.. stay away from the leftist, if you thought “mad cow” was bad try eating one of those nuts. Besides liberals give me gas.
my new neighbor, a part timer city dweller, thought it was a good idea to start a garden, so he covered a unkept section of his yard, with black plastic, and left, only to return two weeks later to find that the weeds left under the plastic were now pushing the plastic up about 6 inches or so,not to be outsmarted by the weeds, both he and his wife, stomped all morning on the plastic, untill it was flat enough so that they could cut slits in it, in order to plant the seeds for his new country garden.The next time they showed up, they took a look at the vegetable patch, and returned to the house
#21 Insufficiently Sensitive
I’m sorry I was insufficiently correct. Where I was the wind blew all the time, it was 100 degrees nearly every day for the 3 summer months and I didn’t know anyone in the section who grew anything to eat as home. (Tomatoes won’t even pollinate at those temps.) I did live next to a milo field, tho, and my horses ate the Osage Oranges. Maybe I was in a different Kansas.
The Romans: Rome was sacked by nomads.
the Arabs: were driven back into their wasteland
the French and the English: Became impoverished dead ends
Does not touching the land always mean success? You are right of course, about the Leftist Idiocy. However, teaching children about gardens and hand tools is not racist.
Also, remember Racism is defined as….Whatever the Left says it is…. :: ))
31. A Balrog of Morgoth:
And in the article she states:”Over the past decade, many well-intentioned factions have made a focused effort to bring supermarkets—and with them, abundant fresh produce—to poor urban areas. Although the battle is far from over, there has been some progress.” She only sampled 2 stores in one neighborhood. Not exactly quantitative research.
Your assertion that poor people won’t buy healthy foods is unfounded and frankly insulting. You suggest that poor people choose a less healthy diet than more afluent people do, thus implying that the poor are ignorant or simply don’t care about their health. I’m pretty sure any one of us can look around at our friends and aquaintances, both poor and rich and see good choices and bad choices in equal measure. In an article on Reuters posted just last year, numerous studies (54 studies) have shown exactly what I stated: poor neighborhoods, less healthy foods in stores. The study in the article also stated, you’ll be surprised, is that in the few poor neighborhoods where there was a wide variety of healthy choices, people actually did buy more of those healthy foods.
32.Allied Commander
“the government should fix that” ????? I said nothing of the kind. Nor did I imply it. If we must go there (solve the supermarket disparity) I am all for consumers demanding what they want from their stores. It doesn’t take government to do that. If folks in those areas dont know that or are willing to put up with it, then that is their choice. I’m not trying to be a crusader here. It just seems to me that the supermarket disparity went hand in hand with the locavore thing. Not a lot of difference between an elitist movement and corporate elitists. With a movement, you can jump on the bandwagon or not. When it’s a corporation you can boycott.
I think the point of the article is that many of us are sick of people like the locavores bragging about how great they are when most of us can’t participate at that level, even if we want to.
Balrog, my apologies, part of the second paragraph was meant for Allied Commander. I’m sure you’ll figure which part.
39. Connie:
This is a GREAT article — and let me tell you, it is ALL true. I live in a small community in the San Francisco Bay area. Our town council (chosen by voters) is chock full of these “sustainability” nutcases. On an empty parcel of land in our town, one council member hopes that the city can attract an organic restaurant that will produce it’s own menu items right there on the restaurant grounds. That is actually on her website! And the voters of this town voted for these people to run things. The town council also wants to generate its own electricity with windmills for the city. Totally insane.
Folks, there’s nothing inherently “leftist” about trying to live sustainably. I’m about as far from the left as you can get, but I aspire to be able to not only generate my own electricity by the use of solar panels and a wind mill on my property, but with my own garden as well. That being said, I have no problem purchasing food from the local supermarket that is only able to grow outside of my area, the Mid-West. I do not subscribe to the beliefs in “Peak Oil” or “Global Warming”, but I also believe that we would be better off as a nation if the vast majority of our energy came from solar and wind power, where economically feasible, of course.
50. sms:
Balrog, my apologies, part of the second paragraph was meant for Allied Commander. I’m sure you’ll figure which part.
that is what I got out of it. but if you say that isn’t what you meant fine with me. either way I, like you am just stating a point of view.
I do agree people will chose badly if they are uneducated or prefer short term solutions.
regards
Zombie, the PEPINOS or rather use of the word, could just be more of the “beans/frijoles” thing. In Spanish, particularly as used in Mexico, pepino is cucumber, not necesarily Solanum Muricatum. So one wonders, since there weren’t any there to see and the little drawing actually looks more like a cucumber, were they just being cute like the frijoles thing, or trying to pass plain ol’ cucumbers off as something more exotic?
Winter wheat, well, they can grow it sort of. They’ll not get any grain from it unless they have enough weeks of cold weather for it to flower.
I’m a southern California gardener. I live in a mountain, desert, foothill area in the boondocks. Gardening here is different from Berkley. Here gardening is a form of siege warfare. Varmits. Ravens, rats, squirrels, gophers, rabbits etc. are weak for my vegitables. I have an armored drip system and the plants grow in cages. I really like the wildlife but if they try to take what I grow, they must die. The produce is great, so is the hunting.
Great article. Some well meaning folks in West Oakland, 6 miles or so south of this school, have pushed this idea through “Community gardens”, while trying to squeeze monies (subsidies) out of local govermnent.
Some of the results have included the opening of a “Co-op”, that seems to me to be noticeably less busy than the 99 cent store and the liquor store that are located nearby…they are usually swarming with people, compared to the Co-op.
I spent way too much (7, 8 bucks) on a single orange, and single bannana, and a rice based drink at the same Coop to want to go there again. (7-8 dollars).
As an aside, as a high schooler in Centeral Cali in the 1970′s, we had a program where students grew crops and raised livestock (some for consumption). It was called “F.F.A”…Future Farmers of America.
Nobody tried to make a political statement out of it.
There is a dual purpose to this agronomist-curricula. It was thought to be an antidote to school violence by minorities when first introduced, to special ed students in the 1980s (my son had to take it as “school-to-work” training although I told his counselors he would take the mandatory class but to forget any idea he would willingly spend his life working in a greenhouse) and in the early to mid-1990s for minority students in inner city schools. This issue brought concerned parent to an anti-education reform meeting in Washington State in 1994. I met his son, a straight-arrow young man in a white button-down, short-sleeve shirt with pocket protectors and multi-colored pens who had “future engineer” invisibly stamped on his forehead…. and because of his race and attendance at an inner-city school was required to take “horticultural classes”. This kid was a math/science phenom! You can listen to the finale of his father’s magnificent rant here!
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheBloomergal#p/u/4/X5Mpx9H2dgM
If conservatives lose the war for the soul of America, as seems likely, the main reason may be their flatfootednes, dull-witted inability to provide wisdom or leadership when it comes to education.
A conservative vision would include local control of schools, along with a respect for local knowledge and self-sufficiency. It would include a vision of success that was somewhat deeper and more tangible than the measurements of nationally standardized tests. It would see gardens as not merely the source of food for the elites but also as a means of self-improvement and wealth creation for the poor.
As San Francisco locals know, you can live in a very upscale neighborhood and be within walking distance of much poorer neighborhoods. This was our situation and due to differing store hours, we patronized grocery stores in both neighborhoods on a regular basis. There was no question that the stores in the better neighborhood had better produce and less of what you would call junk food. And a quick look into the shopping carts in the checkout lines told an interesting story as well. If you could wave a large reader over the carts in both stores to automatically determine the salt, fat and calories per pound of food – I am convinced the differences would be stark and frightening to any dietician. And I am sure I don’t need to say in which direction.
It was popular even back then to blame this on the supermarket chains, i.e. they dumped the bad and old produce and pushed high margin items in the stores serving the poor and minorities. But it seemed to me always that this was pure and utter BS. It is simply that individual stores are tuned to the buying habits of their local customers. If the best seller is the 10 pound bag of Cheetos, then you stock more of those. If it takes 2 weeks for a batch of carrots to be sold off, they get a little wilted and you don’t reorder as frequently. I never heard any of the “poor or disadvantaged” people complain about this and not many sought out the tofu or sprouted wheat bread in the upscale stores. It was always people like Alice Waters looking to engage in some comfortable “activism” with symbolic gestures and easy targets.
I live in the Bay Area and eat local food all the time. I eat local pizza, local hamburgers, local KFC. I drink local water and buy food from my local grocers.
What`s their beef? Mmmmmmmmm, speaking of beef. it`s what`s for dinner!!
Well, number one these people have no concept of how much land is required to grow crops. Thanks to the environmentalists it can cost as much as $8.00 – $10.00 per bushel to produce if you’re lucky. If it’s dry irrigation can run the cost way up. Speaking of irrigation, many crops were lost last summer in California thanks to the environmentalists again, saving a 2 inch minnow or something like that. So one by one farmers are being run out of business, who in their right mind will invest all of the time and money to plant crops, when one rogue judge can destroy you. These are farms that have been there for generations. http://westernfarmpress.com/environment/esa-restraints-0121/index.html
Why are many children over weight? simple, their parents can’t afford to feed them a healthy diet. Now that we are putting our crops in our gas tanks, a box of cereal from the grocery store can run $6.00 – $10.00, milk $4.00 a gal, now if you have 2-3 kids to feed x 30 days, well you due the math. If you add toast, bread $2.00 a loaf, juice $2.00 1/2 gal, well you get the drift. That covers breakfast two more meals to go. At most fast food joints you can fill their bellies for less then $10.00.
And speaking of putting our crops in our gas tanks, it’s really impacted third world countries big time, they were starving before now they are starving worse, if that’s possible.
Great work, Zombie!! I lived in Southern California for over 20 years, Northern California for 3 years and for the last 11 years have lived in Wisconsin. It’s not my idea of heaven here, but people are definitely more “down to earth” in a good sense here. Far fewer pretensions, but they do “talk a little funny.” Also many fewer BMW’s, Mercedes, Lexus’s, etc., here.
Given your interests and point of view, you are living in heaven in the Bay Area.
55. Supreme Allied Commander “but if you say that isn’t what you meant fine with me. either way I, like you am just stating a point of view.”
I see. You can state your point of view, but mine is allowed to be turned into something it most definitly was not…something pajamas media patrons would be against as well. At least one would think so.
“Eat local” is the latest intellectual fad on the Left Coast. These “locavores,” as adherents like to call themselves, want you to eat only food grown near where you live — say, within 100 miles of your home.
I can almost guarantee that they don’t give a sh%^ what you or any of the other readers here do. Trying to start a movement of busybody’s poo-pooing anybody that’s not sitting in front of the tv stuffing their obese American forms with hamburgers made with African cattle isn’t going to get you very far. They’re just going to keep stuffing their faces. Keep doing that and let other people eat locally if they want. What the hell business is it of yours?
I think the local food movement is a crock for many reasons but it is racist too? No. That is the crap the left pulls, I don’t see the point in going down that road but whatever floats your boat I guess.
I don’t think kids should be forced to tend the garden but if some of them want to play around with plants and do a little manual labor outside that is fine by me. All they are getting in class is a liberal indoctrination anyway. I think cooping them up all day and making them sit around and hear teachers droning on is causing them to learn less. Let them get their hands dirty in the real world, and not just gardening either.
Of course in the true interest of being locally sustainable, localvores should also eschew food grown with water which has to travel say over 10 miles to the fields. This unfortunately would really hurt California, but no one said being a localvore was easy did they? It would be interesting to see a city like Los Angeles try to exist only on water from within 100 miles. It would also be kinda fun to see how much food great garden areas of the Greater San Franciso Bay area would produce without the distant water from the Sierra Madres. If you are going to go local, then go local – transporting water to grow crops is no doubt as unsustainable as transporting crops.
Here’s a hilarious critique of Flanagan that shows turnabout is fair play. She’s apparenlty an obtuse hypocrite. No surprise that this doosh is quoting her:
Thanks in part to a husband with a big paycheck, she works cozily from home, on hand for her now preteen twin boys, and in command of a panoply of household help—from a full-time nanny at one point to a “personal organizer” and a gardener now. From her perch, privileged by the standards even of her professional-class readers, she scrutinizes the selfish pretensions and self-defeating contradictions that sprout like marigolds in affluent American mothers’ hearts and hearths.
I’d say that’s pretty accurate.
Child Bomb 66 and 68: Somebody obviously tweaked your nose here. The problem is that this type of elitist activism ends up poking itself into the politics of education – and before you know it there are “loco-vore” government regulations affecting everyone’s children, lifestyle and pocketbooks. You know that this is where this is going if someone doesn’t expose the lunacy and hypocrisy early on. And what the heck does it matter if Flanagan is wealthy? She is not the one promoting dumb gardening tricks. And one more thing – young children actually start out with pretty logical minds – but over time they get a lot of ridiculousness drummed into their heads by our politicized educational system – instead of learning fundamental skills and developing their ability to reason. And they learn that being an “adult” is proposing some wacky feel good idea about growing vegetables while the mechanisms of the real world stay out of reach of their understanding.
Comrade Zombie was kind enough to share his disgust with liberal pre-occupation with promoting the local food. I most surely share the feelings, and I think it’s fair to add a few thoughts on the subject.
Firstly, it does not surprise me that schools in Berkley, California substitute classes on math and reading with agricultural work. After all, same schools, decided to close science labs because White students (and quite possibly evil Asian students) spent inordinate time learning science, while some minorities (Blacks and Latinos) did not bother to do so. So, by all standards, Berkley is the place where sanity is rare, and stupidity rules.
But the whole “local-foodism” and stress on teaching kids to grow own food is hardly new to the far left. Two examples stand in mind.
The Great Leap Forward
The first one is surely the Great Leap Forward in China, when Mao ordered peasants to establish small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood. According to wikipedia: “Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal. To fuel the furnaces the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants’ houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the “scrap” for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production as were the workers at many factories, schools and even hospitals.”
The result of Mao’s attempt to produce steel and iron locally was tones and tones of useless crap – and the starvation and deaths of millions of people.
Idea Juche
Another infamous attempt of state-wide “localism” was tried in North Korea. One of the tenets of Kim Chens Ir’s ideology of Juche is local self-sufficiency. Indeed, what’s the need in trade with other countries if patriotic Korean people can produce anything they could possibly need?! And why can’t all citizens produce their own food?! Of course, it is widely known that North Korea is one of the most poor and oppressed society, and millions of people die from starvation every decade in this communist nation.
All in all, as a former Soviet citizen, I recognize the liberal ideas of localism and “local-foodism” as nothing more than a rehearse of tired communist principles, which underlie Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and North Korean “Juche”.
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Trying to start a movement of busybody’s poo-pooing anybody that’s not sitting in front of the tv stuffing their obese American forms with hamburgers made with African cattle isn’t going to get you very far.
Mr Child Bomb, I agree they should not stay in front of TV stuffing liberal propaganda. After that they do stupid things like voting for crooks selling hope and change.
BTW, African cattle? That is liberals who eat silly things like zebra or ostrichs. There are no import of plain eef from Africa
They’re just going to keep stuffing their faces. Keep doing that and let other people eat locally if they want. What the hell business is it of yours?
It is my business if my children are planting cabbages instead of doing math (now the reason liberal teachers prefer the former is that they are failures at teh latter). It is my children because they are brainwashing people with this tripe (and children) leading latter to liberal votes and me payingn higher taxes or if government ends subsidizing these losers. It is my business if it leads to higher food prices. It is my business if the movement gets enough traction vast amounts of land are inefficiently used and people in Third World die because of this crap.
Also have you given a thought (in case you are able of it) to why there were such famines during the Middle Ages? Because due to insecurity trade was scarce ad everything had t be produced locally.
Now when there uis trade and no brain damaged people wanting to eat local f region A has an excess crop nad region B a shortage they trade so people in B don’t starve and crops in A don’t rot.
Now let’s assume that producing food is cheap in A but clothing is expensive That means that vast surfaces of land have to be diverted from food production in order to produce the flax and wool for clothes. Tha means that people in A have to choose between being fed and dying from cold or being adequately clothed but starving. Now suppose that in B it is teh opposite (expensive food, cheap clothing). They trade and everyone is adequatelly fed and clothed.
Now let’s assume that both food and clothing are cheaper to produce in A but you get two units of food for one unit of clothing while in B it 1 to 1. You could think A would not trade with B but it is wrong because A’s resources are finite. The best strategy for A is to use all its surface for producing food, then with those 2*N uniits of food t B and get 2*N units of clothing instead of the 1*N it would hae got producing clothing by itself.
Those concepts were mastered by humankind somewhere around the Neanderthal era but apparently are too difficult for liberals. If you haven’t understood fell free to ask the nearest
conservativeNeanderhal around. He will be happy to teach you once he has finished his daily meal of raw meat.I wondered how you were going to support the dreaded “racist” accusation in the headline. I can see how you needed it, since that’s the word that silences all dissent, and your arguments are petty at best. So I read the whole article, and I was not disillusioned. It’s the “sub-text”, of course. Somebody labelled the beans in Spanish: “Raaaacist!”
You reason like a leftist. You’re playing their game, and it’s not edifying.
Living in California’s central valley it’s easy to eat local, but bay area liberals are are making it harder every year. People like Congressman George Miller have made it their mission in life to destroy agribusiness in central California. It seems the water we have traditionally used to irrigate crops is desperately needed up north to help dilute Sacramento and bay area sewage. They have used the Endangered Species Act to cut off our water and valley farms, communities and families have dried up and are now blowing away in the wind.
Maybe you all better learn how to grow your own food because liberals are doing their best to kill off real farmers.
Why don’t you get out here to Tennessee and find out about the conservative libertarian locavores that have eaten local before it was fashionable. Buying local from individual farmers you know and not government subsidized corporation is neither a liberal nor conservative idea. It is just smart.
Perhaps you should concentrate on free market articles that would focus attention on the fact that it is illegal for small producers (that don’t necessarily show up on your map) to market their milk & meats to the public without government intervention in its production that make it impossible for small producers to compete.
Oh, and cossack pineapple is a fruit (a.k.a a “ground cherry”) and winter wheat is grown in winter time in southern areas. I’ve grown both.
My guess is you shop the Wal-mart frozen section and cook with a microwave.
BTW, our income is below the poverty level, we have no health insurance, and homeschool our 5 children. Our children have never darkened the door of a doctor’s office. We can’t afford to eat bad food. Clearly the liberal/conservative paradigm is not valid. Go ahead and follow the herd over the cliff healthwise if you like. We’ll be “elite”.
65. sms:
now I don’t think I miss read that one.
you seem to not be able to comprehend what I wrote. and now you say I said something I did not. (where as in your case I just stated that that when I read your piece I got a sense that you implied what I thought you implied)
sorry things are that difficult for you.
good luck with things.
63. Duane:
Why are many children over weight? simple, their parents can’t afford to feed them a healthy diet. Now that we are putting our crops in our gas tanks, a box of cereal from the grocery store can run $6.00 – $10.00, milk $4.00 a gal, now if you have 2-3 kids to feed x 30 days, well you due the math. If you add toast, bread $2.00 a loaf, juice $2.00 1/2 gal, well you get the drift. That covers breakfast two more meals to go. At most fast food joints you can fill their bellies for less then $10.00.
…………well that is a stretch.
it is a much more complicated reason that children are fat today. but the fact that they are making ethanol with corn doesn’t even make a the slightest difference.
it is the education or lack of it and a lack of discipline and personal responsibility. genetics also play a big part. Corn for ethanol …no.
as to the poor people in third world countries …not so much impact there. those farmers don’t trade on the futures market that much (it hurts more the city people in those countries who don’t grow food).
the corn subside is a mistake. I will not argue with that. it is just another example why the government needs to stop picking winners and losers.
The problem is that this type of elitist activism ends up poking itself into the politics of education – and before you know it there are “loco-vore” government regulations affecting everyone’s children, lifestyle and pocketbooks.
Stupid paranoia with absolutely no basis.
And that, actually, is the flaw in the whole “sustainable food” movement. For various economic reasons, organic food, sustainable food and even locally grown food is almost always more expensive than food produced in massive bulk by large agribusiness concerns. As a result, only the wealthy and the dilettantes can afford to dally with the pricey hobby of eating locally. The average person — and especially poor people and disadvantaged minorities — can’t afford the $5/pound organic vegetables sold by local farms.,/i>
What a ridiculous argument. By that same token, anything too expensive for poor people should be met with the same indignation. Pricey restaurants everywhere should cause this retarded author apoplexy. Only and idiot would fall for this kind of argument. This is perhaps the stupidest thing I’ve read in a long time. Why don’t you spy on your neighbors instead of stalking pre-adolescents you freak?
72. Allied Commander it is you who is having difficulty here. After I pointed out to you that your “sense” was off the mark instead of a simple retraction like ‘I see now that I was sensing something that wasnt there.’ or something along those lines, you come back with: “BUT IF YOU SAY that isn’t what you meant fine with me”. Any fool can see that you STILL think that what you thought I implied is what I meant. It doesn’t get much more passive-agressive than that.
I don’t usually bother taking so much time arguing about things that are not on topic but when someone ascribes a point of view to me that was pulled out of thin air and refuses to retract it, I take umbrage with it and try to set the record straight. So, I guess if your POV is still that I am for government intervention and you can’t be convinced otherwise, then there isn’t any point in wasting any more board space on it. So let’s just leave it at that shall we?
Look. There’s no arguing the fact that Liberal wing nuts like Waters are one dimensional thinkers loaded with more hypocrisy than can ever be explained. But, there is not one darn thing wrong with attempting to use fewer natural resources to obtain the nutritional sustenance you need to survive if you can afford and are willing to pay a premium (in some cases) for it.
As a Libertarian and staunch Conservative I try to eat local, organic foods as often as I can. Yes, I often pay a premium to do so but here are the benefits:
1. Less fuel used in the production and transportation of the foods I eat. (In other words more efficient/Conservative)
2. No man made chemicals in my food or the ground they were grown in. I prefer not to eat man made chemicals.
3. Fresher food that hasn’t been treated with waxes or other preservation methods.
4. Food that tastes better because it is fresher and without chemicals.
5. Food that improves the capitalistic and entrepreneurial opportunities for the local smaller farms and business that provide the food.
6. I could go on but hopefully you get the point.
I’ve got nothing against mass producers of food and purchase their products as well. I just choose to purchase local food whenever possible for all of the reasons listed above.
Again, I understand that we have to keep the kooks like Waters out of our public policy process and let local food growers thrive or die based on the local market’s ability to support them. But Conservatives, world famous for their critical thinking and reasoning skills, conserve natural resources when and where possible and practical. Food is no different and we should be the ones leading the way with the buying local theme.
I cringe every time I go to these local markets and see the throngs of Code Pinkers wandering the aisles (all with that far away, crazy look in their eyes). And, I think to myself, where are my Conservative counterparts? We are the efficient ones.
Original Child Bomb writes, “By that same token, anything too expensive for poor people should be met with the same indignation. Pricey restaurants everywhere should cause this retarded author apoplexy.”
You seem to keep missing the point. There’s nothing wrong with pricey restaurants. What’s wrong is when wealthy liberals talk as though the lifestyles of the poor are immoral because they aren’t green. I’m not going to say that they are hurting the poor deliberately. But they are doing it all the same, and they really need to stop.
78. Child Bomb: Yep, that’s from the standard left/liberal debating play book: When cornered logically, accuse the other person of being stupid and paranoid. But thanks for repeating my point:
“The problem is that this type of elitist activism ends up poking itself into the politics of education – and before you know it there are “loco-vore” government regulations affecting everyone’s children, lifestyle and pocketbooks”.
- and btw there are only about a thousand examples for what you claim has “no basis in fact”
What a depressing dialogue. Is there no room for subtlety? Isn’t it just possible that there is something to the locavore movement besides elitism? #81 gaultfalcon is oh, so right, but his kind of conservative has gone the way of the horse an buggy, I’m afraid.
The most important detail in this whole story is the connection to putting people back into the fields instead of learning.
It is the grass rooted communisum of ” food security and social justice”. These people are proffessional grant seekers who use farmers markets and the left overs to promote a political agenda that is to destroy America. It’s an odd puppet show of BMW yuppies and inner city public welfare controled by anti American chavez worshiping traitors posing as humanitarians. All in plain veiw and for YEARS now.
The ability to grow more food than the world can eat is without a doubt, the greatest achievement of America. Otherwise, there would be no other time to pursue other ideas and activities.
So the irony is that the people who benefit the most by having tons of expendable income , thanks to capitalism , along with the people who have never worked a day in life {since they are ‘victims’ [here is your REAL racisim ]} through the taxes paid by capitalism by people being able to do something other than raise food for themselves, demonize a food production and distribution system that makes everything available to everyone at pretty much anytime.
And finally the bottom line…. there is nothing wrong with anyone getting in the dirt to grow something. Not that it will save the earth from all the carbon that the plants already here need, but it will make them appreciate what they have. Something that the left seeks daily to destroy. Afterall, if stupid people are happy, how can you possibly motivate them to kill what nurtures them?
Fresh food is without a doubt, the best tasting most nutritious thing you can get. It will never cost less. For those of you who think it should, pick up a shovel, get some seed and see how much you want for the few tomatoes that come up. I’ll bet a thousand onions to your one tomato that you won’t take what whal mert gets. When the hell has better ever been cheaper anyway? Eating healthy is a priority for those with the means to do so, that includes back yard gardens that can supply almost everything at some time in the year, regardless of where you are. A better place for kids to spend time with family, visit a farm community some time. And thank them.
Perspective Zombie, perspective.
#84 Kansan:
That’s a valid point, but reading the comments here I don’t see a wholesale condemnation of the “localvore movement.” I doubt if anyone here cares what agricultural hobbies or amusements people may engage in. What I do detect is considerable outrage at the idea of attempting to use the public school system as a playground for pet projects that have no direct bearing on the core mission of inner city schools – especially when they’re failing at teaching the bare minimums in reading, writing and mathematics.
I run in some of the same circles of the Elitist movement. Guess what folks, almost all of them are in the lower-middle class to poverty range. It is easy to point your finger at California and laugh but there is a another 49 states where this is happening and we are not rich. It seems that everyone that critisizing this movement is dealing in absolutes instead of baby steps. In addition, they really sound like they have little knowledge of how and what to grow locally. You can plant a fruit tree in your backyard and eat it fresh or dry them for winter. Trees that produce nuts like pecans can be stored for the winter months too. You can do that in every state with little restrictions except for Alaska. There are vegetables that produce regardless of your climate. When they are planting exotics, it doesnt mean “tropical”. There tons of exotics that grow in the frigid areas of the U.S. but people just arent aware of them yet. They produce more and cost less than the tiny staple of veggies that you are offered at the grocery store. Many fruits and veggies are not grown in the U.S. commercially because they are too cheap. They produce too much too easily and there is no money to be made. I know this cause I am growing them.
My point is that you dont have to go 100 percent local. Just do something. Farming can be taken as an elective course or instead of PE. If you go to the rural schools, they are been doing it for 100 years or so. Do you suggest they shut down all the AG classes in rural areas? Are those kids elitist pigs?
I have a medium yard and I planted all edible trees, bushes, plants and groundcover. I took care of them the first year and ignore them pretty much after that. I probably get about 800 pounds of food a year. Since I researched it first, I dont have problems with pests, I dont use poisons and I only use organic fertilizer twice a year on some of the plants. I thought that it was impossible to grow stuff until I really researched what I was doing. If I had learned some of this in school, I would have been growing some of my own food 15 years ago.
This article really showed a lack or research or they just ignored the contradictory information that they found.
61. Mike G “If you could wave a large reader over the carts in both stores to automatically determine the salt, fat and calories per pound of food – I am convinced the differences would be stark and frightening to any dietician”
I agree with you on much of what you have said particularly regarding activism insinuating itself into politics (Bravo!)but, regarding your personal observation of other people’s shopping habits, I confess I have observed the very same thing as you did, until one day I looked down into my shopping basket and wondered what did what was there say about my MY eating habits. The perception was not good if someone only observed my purchases that day compared to what I purchased on other days. Some shopping trips are all about fruits and veggies. Sometimes it’s just about the occasional bag of chips and six pack of soda that coinsides with the purchase of some bacon, butter, icecream and mayo etc that I buy periodically but I don’t necessarily eat daily or eat tons of. I just happened to be buying them at the same time. But I am certain some one that day looked at my fat laden groceries and thought the same thing you (and I) have. That or the woman behind me with her basket of rabbit food thought: I hate that skinny little B***!
I am torn by this story.
On one hand, I detest with every fiber of my being the liberals who see nothing wrong in indoctrinating our kids rather than educating them. These people who are sincere in their delusions of grandure, just bug me. I realize that like all mentally ill people they are worthy of my pity, rather than my ire. The damage they do just costs so much that it is hard to feel pity.
On the other hand, I find the lack of practical vocational education in our modern schools to be a terrifying performance gap. By the end of Junior High, I could read a mechanical drawing, and draw a simple one, I could run a block plane, weld, work sheet metal, and do basic foundry. I am now a pediatric hematologist, but there was a time when even getting into the second year of pre-med was a financial question mark. I always knew that I could fall back on practical skills to keep me alive.
Without teaching kids to be more self sufficient, and giving them the skills they need to flex their way through a tough and ever changing economy, our schools are letting them down.
Right now, my wife and I are the current tenders of a strain of black raspberries that have been in my family for since the sod house generation. When we are gone, they will be too. I should think that I would like to have had people in the next generation who could carry these one.
I can’t address every critique in every comment above, but a few points:
a. I’m not opposed to growing one’s one vegetables. Like I said in the article, I’m a gardener myself and grow as much as I can. And for those who have the space to so, I encourage everyone to grow food themselves. I applaud the kind of self-sufficiency shown by some of the commenters here. HOWEVER, the whole point is, that most people who live in big cities, a.k.a. “dense urban environments,” don’t have backyards in which to grow anything. Take New York City for example: of the 8 million people who live there, probably around 6 million live in apartment buildings or townhouses or side-by-side row houses with zero yard space, and consequently have nowhere to grow anything; the remaining 2 million live out in the semi-suburban areas in single family homes, but still have to cope with blizzards and freezes in the winter, and shadows from surrounding buildings, and soil not particularly conducive for growing, etc. As a result, it’s not really possible for the average New Yorker to maintain a private orchard or grow much of anything at all. And as the suburbs expand outward, there’s less and less nearby land available for agriculture. So that basically ALL the food consumed in New York must necessarily NOT be “locally grown.” So, it’s an impossible fantasy for most big cities. What holds true for New York also holds true for many other cities as well: San Francisco is similarly dense, as is Chicago, Boston, and countless other big cities. And those cities which do have a higher proportion of single family homes with yards — cities such as Seattle, Phoenix, and so on — often have some harsh environmental setting which makes home gardening not always feasible except in some seasons. Yes, in some fantasy America where everyone lives in a semi-rural setting with a one-acre property, or in a big single-family huge with lots of yard space, then more people could grow their own food. But that’s not reality. “Eating locally” and/or growing your own food is simply not physically possible for the vast majority of Americans. I’m not saying that food self-sufficiency is BAD, only that it is unfeasible for most people, and hence elitist and insulting for the political food snobs to hold it up as an ideal for everyone.
b. The above scenario is doubly true for poor people and minorities. Disadvantaged minorities are much more likely to live in housing projects or apartment buildings or inner-city neighborhoods than are middle-class white people. It takes money to be able to afford buying your own home or land, or even to rent a single-family dwelling with a big yard. So the average black person in America, even more than the average white person, simply can’t grow their own food even if they wanted to, because they do not own nor have access to land; and as mentioned by several commenters, since organic/local/etc. food is often much more expensive than food grown by big agribusiness, that means that many black people are similarly financially incapable of “eating local” that way either. So once again, the racism manifests as a criticism of blacks for not participating in a high-end self-congratulatory hobby which is in reality completely beyond their reach.
c. And as for #66. Original Child Bomb who says,
Actually, you’re completely wrong. If the locavore movement was simply a club of people who like to eat local foods, no one would mind. But read their literature: Quite contrary to what you claim, the locavore movement’s entire purpose is to make EVERYBODY eat local. It’s about revolutionizing the food distribution system to NOT be globally interconnected. It’s not meant to be just a boutique whim of just a few utopians; it’s intended as a model for society as a whole. That‘s what business it is of mine.
d. Even if people could grow some of their own food in their American backyard gardens, they still couldn’t grow most of the daily staples, such as wheat, rice, sugar, dairy products, coffee, chocolate, most spices, vegetable oil, etc. etc. etc. The goal of the locavore movement is to ONLY eat locally grown foods, which would entail giving up most of the stuff we eat at every meal. (Furthermore, backyard gardening is very seasonal, and even in the best climates, for half the year you wouldn’t have much to eat.) If the locavore movement was nothing more than encouraging people to eat home-grown vegetables or (if you’re lucky to live in a farming area) to support local businesses, then I would have no problem with it; but instead, beneath the flowery language is a drive to totally abandon all foodstuffs that aren’t from your immediate vicinity, which for most people (as I mentioned in the essay) would mean abandoning most of their diet.
e. And lastly, it’s the involuntary nature of the Edible Schoolyard which makes it offensive. Gardening as an elective class? I have no problem with that. But as a requirement and as the basis for the entire school curriculum (something which is explained in more detail in the Atlantic article)? That’s going too far.
There are elements of the “locavore” concept with which I agree; but they’ve taken an idea and ruined it by trying to foist it on everyone else against their wills. This is the essence of leftism: compulsory sanctimoniousness. If you want to eat local — fine by me. If you want to lower your own carbon footprint — fine by me. But you cross the line when (through the Edible Schoolyard curriculum, or through cap-and-trade policies) you try to make EVERYONE adopt your little utopian hobby.
I just read the posts again. Here are the common themes.
1. Gardening is too hard.
2. I dont want my child to grow up to be a farmer or gardener.
3. If you eat local, even a little bit, you are an elitist.
4. I cant grow citrus and tomatoes in Michigan. Boo Hoo!
5. Obama is behind all of this.
6. If we cant do 100% percent local, then we shouldnt do any.
7. Make the rural areas pay for all the AG education in their schools so we can reap the benefits. No one that lives in the city would want to be a farmer anyway.
8. What is a community garden? Is that communist?
9. If it doesnt smell like insecticide, I wont eat it.
10. There was a drought in my town 10 years ago so I dont grow anything because there might be another one some day.
#87 Lee
“Guess what folks, almost all of them are in the lower-middle class to poverty range.”
By choice or by necessity?
I’m less than sympathetic to a couple – both of whom have advanced degrees – who decide to go “back to nature” – and find out what any subsistence level farmer in the Third World could have told them.
In any case perhaps you miss a point that was made early. It is impossible for most areas of this – or any advanced industrialized – country to survive on locally produced food.
The other major point is that minority children, would be better served in spending their time learning academic subjects as opposed to using them as stoop labor, in the service of some leftist’s utopia dream.
Zombie, well stated. Both times.
I would like to add that water is also an issue. Looking at the map, one can see that many of the states with the fewest blue dots are pretty dry places. In N. Colorado it doesn’t rain a whole lot and access to water for irrigation from the S. Platte is jammed up in water rights issues. Interestingly, Nevada, Arizona and California all depend on water from Colorado’s western slope. So while they are enjoying their locavore lifestyle, I hope they are enjoying all that water too since if they make a “call on the river” and reduce the amount of water we get use, we won’t be able to enjoy it ourselves.
No, the current infrastructure of the US could not currently support everyone following this diet. 30 years ago it couldn’t support everyone having an Internet connection, and 100 years ago you couldn’t fit enough automobiles in New York for everybody to drive to work.
Infrastructure changes as there is demand for it. If enough people start using this diet then there will be farmers and companies who will want to market to them, therefor growing a larger variety of crops in areas where traditionally only one crop has been grown. Food crops were grown all over the USA when it was first settled, so it is quite possible to do, even with primitive technology.
I don’t personally follow this diet, I’d probably do something closer to 80% within an 80 mile radius than the full 100%, but the idea of doing it really isn’t as silly as you all make it out to be. It has only been in the last couple hundred years that humans have been able to obtain foods in bulk from large distances, adapting back to the old method of growing food within an easily transportable radius would make starvation far less likely to occur in cases of civilization shattering disaster.
The main point against seems to be that you can’t do this in big cities. What if big cities are just designed entirely wrong? What if New York was unable to bring in food for a few months? There probably would be few people left alive. Compare that to the situation in an area where people are already growing their own food locally. Assuming they don’t get eaten alive by the refugees from larger cities, there is going to a massively higher survival rate.
Perhpas it would be less of a racial issue if the emphasis was on getting educated and moving beyond the housing projects rather than try to grow a head of cabbage with the help of a communist posing as a liberal getting a porkulus ear mark while trying to build a political movement to destroy our nation.
There…. that sums it up rather nicely. That and the traitors to our country like to marry thier own aunts for money.
It’s called ” Free Food for Lazy People “
Mike Giles,
Did you even read my post? Everyone knows we cant supply all the food locally. That teacher knows, the Obama’s know, I know, EVERYBODY KNOWS! Geeeez. The point is to do what you can. You need to try. Give back a little and support your neighbor. Everything starts off small.
By the way, I will tell my friends that you think they are poor by choice. I will tell the homeless lady that goes down to the community garden so she doesnt have to take handouts she is an elitist pig. I will tell the lower middle class family with one kid and two jobs that they dont gain your sympathy. You obviously havent met the grassroots people doing this in middle America. This is the suburbs, inner city, rural country, high school dropout, college graduate. This is what your grandmother did out of neccessity and your mother did for fun. Why attack a such a good thing regardless of the impact it is making right now?
Anti Chavez,
No one will take you seriously with statements like that. Explain your arguments instead of throwing out propaganda.
I cant believe that people are trying to make gardening an evil thing. Only in America.
there are only about a thousand examples for what you claim has “no basis in fact”
Duh, but I didn’t write any. I was aiming high, apparently, when I called you an idiot.
Take New York City for example:
You were talking about Berkeley you idiot, now you switch to New York because its suits your argument. There is so much unused land that can be used for garden space in Oakland and Berkeley, its not funny. I suppose an idiot like you would rather they remain brownfields and eye-sores. Finally, you seem confused. Can you point to the place where anyone is making anyone else eat anything? Really, you remind me of a nosy neighbor trying to hide her antagonism and schadenfreude with supposed good intentions. Keep your camera and your snout out of other people’s business. Talk about nanny state, sheesh.
Wait — I’m the busybody?
Who tries to tell everyone what to do and how to behave? The locavores.
Who controls the local school system? The locavores.
Who views with criticism everyone else’s lifestyle? The locavores.
All I’m doing is pointing out that they’re the busybodies.
Pointing out that someone else is a busybody does not make one a busybody oneself.
Am I telling people what to eat? No.
Am I dictating the school curriculum? No.
Am I trying to make people feel guilty for enjoying the benefits of globalization? No.
The locavores are doing all that. Which makes them the busybodies.
If you can’t see that, then there’s no hope for you. Telling people what to do “for their own good” is the essence of leftist philosophy, of which this whole movement is a prime example.
On the issue of whether making kids participate in gardening during school hours is good, well, it’s hard to see how disadvantaged minority youth will be helped by shoveling compost. Those kids are at an age when they will be choosing which fork in the road to take shortly, a life enhanced by education or the life of a dropout. I’m sure it’s alot more fun to goof off outside than sit indoors and do math or read the Great Books. The difference between a school garden in a minority school and a well off suburban school is that the suburban kid is gardening in addition to studying academics. The gardening is a lifestyle choice, like taking piano lessons.
On the issue of “food deserts” in the inner city, there are several reasons that stand out. First of all, major grocery chains have experienced high rates of theft & robbery in certain neighborhoods. The cost of providing extra security is too much to pay in an industry with such small profit margins. If there was money to be made, stores would be located there.
Instead, the stores that are located in food desert neighborhoods tend to be small mom & pop, or brother & brother corner groceries. Often run by recent immigrants to this country who see an unserved market and don’t understand how dangerous it is to run a cash business in a poor neighborhood. They stock & sell what their customers want to buy. Nobody in the ghetto is demanding arugula. They want salty & sweet snacks so that’s what the market provides.
99. Zombie,
People who can’t attack the message usually resort to attacking the messenger.
That being said, I enjoy seeing PJM bloggers stand up for themselves here rather than leaving it up to chance that people will just ‘get it’.
Me? I’ve grown my own veges and it’s rewarding (well, up to the point right before you just want to GIVE away your extra bounty) but it sure is nothing I’d ever want to HAVE to do unless it was for survival.
Head for the hills! The Locavores are coming!
They’re taking over the schools!
They’re taking over the food!
They’re taking over the bloody Planet! “Run”, says Zombie, “Run!”
Zombie presents this message purely out of concern for the public good. Zombie is not a busybody.
Wait — I’m the busybody?
Yes. I thought you were literate. You. Are. The. Busybody. Get it now?
Who tries to tell everyone what to do and how to behave? The locavores.
Who controls the local school system? The locavores.
Who views with criticism everyone else’s lifestyle? The locavores.
You’ve actually provided no evidence for any of this. You’re just repeating the same assertion over and over, that they’re “telling people what to do”.
Am I telling people what to eat? No.
Am I dictating the school curriculum? No.
Am I trying to make people feel guilty for enjoying the benefits of globalization? No.
You’re stalking children and taking pictures of them without their knowledge for your own ends. Yeah, in any universe known to the lord, you’re a busybody and a damn creepy one. If I were the parents of these kids I’d take a restraining order out on you. You don’t like the edible message fine. They got a program into the school system, its been there for fifteen years. Its not telling people what to do, its not ordering them to eat locally. How absurd. You don’t even present anything in your article that would suggest anything of the kind.
Here is a response from the school and a parent in the Atlantic:
http://food.theatlantic.com/corbys-fresh-feeds/school-gardeners-strike-back.php
For a view from another and yet more dysfunctional school system, I called Tony Recasner, the charismatic and farsighted head of the Samuel J. Green School, in New Orleans. Recasner opened the charter school he had spent several years building two weeks before Hurricane Katrina, and had it back up and running before almost any other school after the storm. It and a second charter school he built, Arthur Ashe, now teach about 550 students in grades K-8.
Recasner had read Flanagan’s piece (I sent it to him before we talked). “If I felt it was a waste of public money and students’ time,” he said, “if I felt I was crippling kids we serve and robbing them of valuable time, I wouldn’t have participated in this.” As in California and in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Edible Schoolyard program uses no public funds other than maintenance and some staff time—costs Recasner called “not unreasonable, given the number of government programs that have come down pike to address the same type of thing.” He said, “We feel that with all the programs we’ve seen over the years—I’ve been doing this for 20 years—this comes the closest to addressing the problems kids have.”
Those problems are eating a healthful diet and doing well in school, and Recasner told me he had seen measurable improvement in both. “All our food goes to our kitchen,” Donna Cavato, the director of the New Orleans Edible Schoolyard, told me. “Families take home the remaining produce—we harvest 3,000 pounds a year. Parents tell us that the biggest impact has been changing the way kids eat. The school is in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a grocery store. My own neighborhood doesn’t have one.” “What we know about gardens is that it opens experiential pathways for kids to learn,” he said. “Different learning experiences correlate highly with improved test scores. This gives kids a stronger background knowledge in the kinds of subjects that are likely to appear on standardized tests. They’ll see the kinds of ideas, people, concepts, and different languages they’re exposed to with the Edible Schoolyard appear on tests. It’s very helpful.”
…..
I asked Melanie Okamoto, of the Berkeley school system, to address Flanagan’s claims about student achievement;
Flanagan’s claim that garden-based education fails to help our students achieve academically takes an incredibly narrow view of how garden-based programs have been used around the country to support student learning and achievement. So often it’s a teacher who reports how a student was able to grasp a key concept within a hands-on context in the garden, or how another student who had not participated at all in class joined in on the discussion once in the cooking class. While these stories might seem fluffy or trite to Flanagan, they are very real to the teachers and students in the program.
Indeed, this is not just an issue of the locovore. That’s your stupid take, based on an article by an equally ill-informed and self-aggrandizing hypocrite. You liked what she said, you followed some kids around, and claim that they weren’t hanging out in the garden or eating the food there. God knows if what you say is true, all you’ve offered is photographs that could have been taken at any time and place to make your assertions. Given your complete disinterest in decent reporting, I can’t see why anyone should believe you.
Yes, you’re a busybody. No one is making kids do anything. The garden is part of the curriculum the same way math is. Parents haven’t complained. Its just you and people like you trying to get into the business of other people.
Boots, if we followed your logic, we would need to cancel physical education as well. Football, Track and baseball would all be considered “goofing off outside”. Gardening allows the children to get exercise, learn responsibility and teamwork and how to eat healthy. The old saying goes “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” Why would you be opposed to a child having an option between physical education and gardening? I would rather my child do that instead of destroying their body on a football field. I know cause I destroyed my body playing football and track.
On another note, I agree totally with the creepiness factor to the child photography. That definitely would not go well with parents in my area. Why would the author do that?
Finally, where the heck are all the locavores taking over. Definitely not in middle America where this movement is really taking off. I think the author should visit Mom and Pop America and try saying some of these things to them. He would probably get run off the property and called a Commie!!!!
I have no problem with anyone choosing to have a garden or hobby farm or to buy food from those who do. I shop regularly at my local farmers’ market and other local sources because I can get things not available at supermarkets and/or of higher quality, but I value supermarkets highly. Having grown up in a time when the produce sections were tiny and limited, I would never want to return to those days. Winter produce was pretty much root vegetables, cabbage, winter squashes, apples and occasional citrus fruit and bananas. Iceberg lettuce and (pale, tasteless) tomatoes were real treats. I do object to wasting school time on gardening, when schools are clearly not doing well on basic literacy and numeracy, and I object to the political aims (and the sanctimonious attitude) of the Edible Schoolyard movement. In addition, it should be remembered that people who grow food, wherever in the world, are earning a living doing so. In the case of the Third World, agricultural products are one of the few sectors where local economies can compete on the global stage. I much prefer that method of assistance to foreign aid, which has not only had little or no result, but has been rife with fraud and corruption.
re: 103. Original Child Bomb:
a. The evidence is overwhelming for those three statements–I’m not just stating some random claims. The curriculum of King Middle School is indeed dominated by the Edible Schoolyard and those who implemented it. Read the Atlantic article again. And I live amongst locavores and listen to their attitudes every day, and in their minds it’s not just some kooky hobby: their goal truly is to eventually make EVERYONE eat local. It’s a component of the anti-globalization movement. This stuff is all over the Web. You already know this and are just being disingenously contrarian.
b. I’m not “stalking” children. I passed kids exiting the school as I approached the edible schoolyard. I did not follow them, seek them out, or even know kids were going to be there until I chanced upon them. And after a minute of passing by, they were gone. I respectfully and very carefully cropped the photos so the kids could NOT be identified. Quite the opposite of stalking. But no one would believe my assertion that the kids at the school still eat junk food unless I provided photographic evidence. If I had just claimed they ate junk you would predictably say “You have no evidence!” If I provide the evidence, you would predictably say, “You’re stalking!” I know that game — it’s called “Heads I win, tails you lose.” I don’t pay that game.
c. Criticizing Caitlin Flanagan and me is just the typical “attack the messenger” tactic used by leftists on the defensive. Criticizing our personalities in no way negates or renders untrue what we’ve written. When you shoot the messenger, the message remains.
d. Predictably when asked to provide evidence that edible schoolyards are helping kids with academic problems, the defenders come up with intangible and utterly unverifiable claims about how a kid “joined in the discussion once” or “grasped a key concept.” But meanwhile, on any measurable criteria, as the original Atlantic article shows, there’s no improvement on things like grades or test scores.
Don’t want to believe my reportage? Fine. Don’t believe me. Go read some other blog post. I’d be more than happy.
If trying to stop our educational system from going off the cliff into the Abyss of Kooky Progressive Pipe Dreams makes me a busybody, then so be it.
And I live amongst locavores and listen to their attitudes every day, and in their minds it’s not just some kooky hobby: their goal truly is to eventually make EVERYONE eat local.
No. You have no evidence that they are trying to “make” anyone do anything. Given your low debating skills, I can see why you wouldn’t understand the idea of persuasion by argument. What you’re saying is stupid. There’s no other way to put it. You should be embarrassed to have your name in print next to such ideas; and apparently, you are.
I respectfully and very carefully cropped the photos so the kids could NOT be identified. Quite the opposite of stalking. But no one would believe my assertion that the kids at the school still eat junk food unless I provided photographic evidence. If I had just claimed they ate junk you would predictably say “You have no evidence!” If I provide the evidence, you would predictably say, “You’re stalking!” I know that game — it’s called “Heads I win, tails you lose.” I don’t pay that game.
First thing. Photography is only evidence in extremely controlled environments. Again, this is the lazy antagonistic ideas of Breitbart at work. Taking a photo, for example, of a man walking in front of a porn shop with a brown paper bag in his hand could seem to some [like your readers] evidence that he went in the store. It isn’t for obvious reasons that have obviously escape you. We have no way of knowing what these photographs are meant to tell. Your photos of an “empty” garden after a school day could have been taken at any time. Your photos of children eating things have no direct probable link to what you are describing. This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. And yes, by photographing children without their knowledge you are stalking them. Indeed, I wonder if what you did is even legal. I’m thinking of reporting you to the police in Berkeley. I live close by, you’d better not do that kind of crap again. I’m serious, this is my community, the idea of some delusional idiot out there taking photos of my children to later use for her own political ends sickens me. I still might do it.
Criticizing Caitlin Flanagan and me is just the typical “attack the messenger” tactic used by leftists on the defensive.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. I can criticize you as well as your ideas. The reality that the messenger is as corrupt and stupid as the message only heightens the critique. This is the last defense of idiots who are unable to articulate non-emotion based arguments.
Finally, you are completely uninterested in education and it shows. Rather than attack a gardening program, you should be making sure kids in Oakland and Berkeley schools have proper funding and qualified teachers. THat’s what people who are actually interested in education do. They don’t follow kids around after school pretending to investigate their eating habits and try to get rid of a completely outside funded program. Obvious.
I am very interested in education at the local level in my midwest, middle America hometown. All of the schools in my community have multiple gardens (butterfly gardens for spring, prairie gardens for history, organic vegetable gardens for growing food from seed, and all of the gardens are used in nice weather for art classes & recess). But this is a community that values education, where two-parent families are the norm, and parental involvement in the schools is high. It would be impossible to locally grow on-site even a fraction of the food used in one day’s lunch.
If gardening were to take the place of real instruction, the parents would be out there with the bulldozers and asphalt. Gardening is trendy, doesn’t cause any harm, and makes the back of the school look nice. It’s an opportunity for parent involvement (building fences, hauling compost, building paths).
Unfortunately for many inner-city schools, liberals get these half-baked ideas in their heads and get them implemented. Many of the problems in inner-city neighborhoods can be traced to some feel-good liberal policy or other. It has been noted for years that good schools in safe neighborhoods tend to hire the most competent teachers, and unsatisfactory schools in dangerous neighborhoods tend to hire less competent staff. Who then implement dumb ideas like gardening instead of academics. And then justify it, not with data-based results (i.e., match scores for 5th grade were X last year, and X plus 2 this year) but with nonsense like the quote above, so-and-so says that a student made a comment in class last year about liking the garden.
The charter school principal in New Orleans is doing a much better job of implementing the program. He knows that if it fails, he fails and he’ll be out. The program can work, but it’s WORK and needs to be worked at just like any other curriculum implementation. The impression left by the Atlantic article, and Zombie’s post on it, is that inner-city youth are being ill-served by a slapdash approach to feel-good environmentalism at the expense of the education of these children.
For those who say they dont want their childrens education money wasted on gardening, it is already being spent that way across the country. It has been for generations. Agricultural classes have been ingrained into the educational system of America up until recent times. They were available to me as I grew up, my father, his father and so on. They still are for any school more than 20 miles outside a major city. They were also availabe to a much lesser extent in metropolitan areas up until the 1970′s.
When you say you dont want educational money spent in gardening or farming, you are spitting on the good folks of middle America. When you call it a “hobby”, you are belitting the folks that but that food in the grocery stores. Do you think your children are too good for this because you live in a city? Farming and gardening is a noble profession that is a part of the American way of life. It will not be pushed into a corner and ignored.
What is happening here is that they are trying to remove the “CHOICE” that free Americans should have. You have a giant industry/government vs. locally driven community action. The author fears the insignificant little guy that is promoting choice, health and community. There is no way we could ever replace the grocery stores and large scale farmers. How could one ever think that is possible? The authors whole argument is based upon the little guy having that power which is fantasy at best. The real argument here is choice vs. no choice.
Finally, do you really think children will stop eating snacks and candy just because there is a garden. My Granny used to tell me how prized candy was back when she was a child. Nothing has changed. If we can just get them to eat a veggie or fruit instead of candy every now and then, we have have succeeded.
GO TEAM!!!!
Things they teach in school instead of gardening. We need food to eat folks and we need farmers to grow food. Well, here is what we teach instead.
Auto shop
Woodworking
Drama
Band
Sports (Football, softball, tennis, track, dodgeball?, badmitton?)
Art (Drafting, sculpture, finger painting, crayons 101)
Now I am sorry if I made fun of some of these because I think they are all important. My point is that gardening/farming is a career and a career that must be offered as a choice at an early age. It is not easy and that is why people go to college for it. Why would we teach people how to fix cars and not how to grow food? It doesnt make sense. Oh yeah, the liberal elitist agenda. I forgot. Who would want to be a farmer anyway.
#96 Lee.
Anti Chavez,
No one will take you seriously with statements like that. Explain your arguments instead of throwing out propaganda.
Hey Sparky…. I’m not arguing. I’m not repeating what I heard either. I’m saying what I know. A big part of the fun here is when folks like yourself figure it out. This has been going on for years. Zombie was kind enough to bring it to a forum.
Here’s some additional info to help you get started.
Look up the Truth and Reconciliation Project. Follow it back to where it started ( at the UN ) See whose involved and then just to make your knickers all warm and toasty, follow that up with the millenium project, which obama promised to support. Then put on the lens of gorebal warming, cap & tax and childhood indoctrination of communisum under the guise of social justice. A big part of which is…. the so called local food movement. Here’s where it reveals itself and this is what Mr Zombie has not brought to light. This program tells a farmer what he can grow, what he can sell it for and…. what he has to pay the help. THIS IS ALL THE SAME.
All the rest of this diatribe about this and that misses the point, gets a little boring but perhaps you’ll catch up one day. Trust me, I get no joy from being right.
All of you need to ” dig” just a bit deeper. It gets way f*ing worse really fast.
So ta ta and sia mammy freakin nora.
ac
#110- Lee:
I think it’s wonderful that you have found personal fulfillment from your activities in gardening and agriculture. But your replies here have the tenor of someone who feels that they and their way of life is under attack. I don’t see anyone here maligning the work of farmers and those who wish to pursue a career in that field. What I’ve read here is a valid concern that there is an effort underway by some LocalVore activists to REQUIRE that students take time away from core learning activities like reading, writing and math so that they can raise fruits and vegetables in the schoolyard. That’s all this discussion is about.
The other coursework you described still does take place in public schools, but these are ELECTIVE course- ot mandatory. (and frankly, many of the course areas you listed are being slowly dismantled anyway). The bottomline is that while farming is an essential activity (obviously) the career prospects in that field are continuing to decline as they have since the 1940′s. According to the Bureau of labor Statistics total farm employment was slightly over 1.2 million in 2008 and is projected to further decline by another 5% in 2018. The fact is agricultural employment is only about 3% of the U.S. labor force, which is All the more reason that it makes no sense to force children to learn these skills in public schools.
A school garden as an activity that children can pursue during recess/after school, or during specific curriculum related activities is one thing. There are multiple points to tie the garden to curriculum – the science of biology, the history of useful plants to America’s pioneers, edible landscaping for people, edible landscaping for butterflies & birds, soil science and geology, drawing and painting and photography. No one is denying that.
But to argue that middle schoolers in inner city neighborhoods should learn gardening so they can become farmers is just crazy, esp in California. How many people sneak across the border from Mexico every day who are already experts at farming? The business of farming is tough work, and it’s not a growth industry for jobseekers.
As an enhancement to curriculum a school garden can be wonderful. As a way to escape math class it’s not such a good idea. These children are not going to be well served in the future by playing outside in the dirt now.
Mister H,
I didnt realize that the farming work force was that large. The decline of the local farmer to big industry is alarming I agree. I think that if we work hard we can turn those numbers around. You never want to put all your eggs in one basket.
I was wondering if you could site an example of a mainstream school that REQUIRES all of it’s students to take a gardening class for a whole semester. I saw a reference of a week long experiment for troubled teens. I am looking for a metropolitan high school, just one, that requires all the students to do that. Is it possible, that this is a bunch of hype that someone made up? Blogger references do not count as REAL sources. A legit newspaper, video off of YouTube with the school officials or an official school website will do.
There are 24,468 high schools in America according to Newsweek. If the locavores are taking over the schools, I would expect you to pull out a few hundred at least.
Good luck with that.
But to argue that middle schoolers in inner city neighborhoods should learn gardening so they can become farmers is just crazy, esp in California.
Only Zombie makes this argument. Its a testament to how useless this article is when the comments section is full of comments like this that have no connection to reality.
I am thinking more and more this is one of those publicity articles where someone makes an outrageous claim like “asbestos is good for you” or “autism isnt real”. The primary goal is to make people angry with outlandish claims of opinion with very little fact. The secondary goal is to get publicity for themselves no matter who they hurt. I bet he dragged some really nice people with good intentions on his side by feeding them nonsense.
The Chicago Public School District has a specialty high school devoted to agriculture, The Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences. You might expect that in a state which is closely identified, even today, with farming.
Here are their vision and mission statements:
“Vision
Our vision at Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences is to create a positive learning environment that will support the integration of our academic and agricultural programs. Our goal is to create competent and literate citizens.
Mission
The Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences is a college preparatory high school that provides opportunities for diverse students from across the city to study agriculture with the goal of developing marketable skills as well as college level competencies. We will produce technologically proficient graduates who will have the power to change the image of urban agriculture.”
http://www.chicagoagr.org/index.jsp?rn=2339252
Nowhere on the website for this high school, I mean nowhere, will you find any claptrap about “localvores” or any of that other feelgood liberalism. CHSAS is a serious school for serious students. They would be insulted if some nutcase teacher tried to start a hippie garden in the back.
I commend them for starting a high school specifically for future farmers. That is wonderful. I guess I missed your point here. I think that is great. We need more farmers. The more the better. I am sure these children were exposed to farming and gardening so much they decided to make a profession of it.
Go Team!!!!
Ha Ha,
hey Zombo
good comebacks,
I didn’t read everything, but the busybody slant caught my eye,
I would almost think one could call any Journalist a busybody Ha Ha
great photo work by the way :: ))
“Given your low debating skills”
that’s a really ridiculous thing for you to accuse zombie of when you are one of the least competent debaters in this whole thread. i may not agree with everything in zombie’s article, but at least she makes arguments and can reasonably back them up. so far the only arguments you’ve made are “you. are. not. literate” and “photography is not good evidence, and the reason is because i don’t think it is.” other than that, you just make ad hominem attacks against people who’ve never done the same to you. you’re not a debater, you’re just a lowly internet troll.
Here is a thought. Why can’t we bring some commonsense to this discussion. Eat local when it makes snese. i live in Maryland. I can go to a farm a pick apples off the tree. they tase better and have more nutrients. Why on earth would I chosse to buy a Wasshington apple when I can have a local one.
And by eating locally, we screw the third-world farmers in Mexico, Bolivia and elsewhere who struggle to grow crops and earn a living by selling to the rich north Americans. What a conundrum for you snotty liberals–if you want to support the downtrodden masses and peasants of the third-world who are exploited by evil imperialist corporations, you have to buy grapes from Peru and carrots from Egypt, but then you can’t eat locally! What is a Obambi elitist to do?
The racism trope is not particularly warranted, but then Zombie likes to sensationalize.
What I think is hysterical is that judging from the Atlantic article what we’re looking at is a yuppie mom who feels her kids aren’t going to get into Harvard because they spent an hour and a half a week looking after some cucumbers.
The article isn’t anti-elitist, it merely replaces populist lefty agrarian romanticism with a snobbish disdain for working with one’s hands.
If localvore’s are obnoxious and effuse snobbery to Zombie, that’s understandable. There is none more insufferable than the newly converted. That said, Zombie’s mockery of localvore’s displays a rather shocking embarrassment of knowledge when he claims only liberal enclaves on the coast have access to local meat and produce.
I am encouraged at how many people here know that gardening is a good thing because they do it. Me too.
In education there is always a tension between the fact that the least motivated and skilled kids need to put in the most hours on their work if they are ever to “catch up.” The kids who are already up to speed have the luxury of doing some of the fun, enriching, and/or different stuff. But you can’t take the least able and insist that they spend all their time learning reading and math just because they need it the most. Sure many teachers go in the other direction; since they kids don’t like to work hard and may act out when you try to make them, the teacers take the easy way out and do fun stuff.
I think that it always has to be a blend of the two and God grant us the wisdom to get the blend right.
No, inner city gardening can’t save us/them all, but some exposure to gardening is a good thing. I didn’t like it when I had to work in my father’s garden, but when I got my own little acre and a quarter, one of the first things I wanted to do was to put in my own garden. No, it’s not for everybody, but it’s a good thing and the feeling of being closer to the land and a slightly increased sense of self-sufficiency is also a good thing. I repeat, I am pleased that so many people here also know that, maybe even know that enjoying what we like is more important than blasting those who espouse philosophies we don’t like, even if the PJM credo often seems to be otherwise.
Anyway, I’ve still got about seventy lbs of last year’s potatoes that we need to eat up before the eyes and sprouts take over. The compost pile out back has thousands of worms in it, even if we have had thirty nights in a row under 25 degrees. Neither GWB nor Obama keep me from my gardening, or hunting, or wood-burning etc.
Hmmm. Sounds like the free market working perfectly to me, people voting with their dollars about what types of goods and services will be provided to them – what a liberal idea [sic].
zombie, old friend, how the hell are ya!
Great piece. But you left out one thing – or maybe the article in the Atlantic did (will read that next)
The locavore movement has incorporated the concept of ‘food miles’ as part of its justification – a way to measure the infamous ‘carbon footprint’. The moral hookup with the anthropogenic global warming hoax is proof positive that (to me) that complete deindustrialization and the destruction of capitalism is part and parcel of their intent.
The California Luddites apparently never heard of the gains from trade. Trading is not a zero-sum (or negative-sum) game. Both sides benefit. If we all followed the moronic model Zombie describes, we would be dirt poor.
nothing like finding an inflammatory article that reinforces your narrow world view published in a prestigious journal, is there?
just stumbled across this post randomly, but i’ll adress both articles. the piece in the atlantic is hardly devastating, and amounts to little more than a conservative screed about a pretty boring, non-issue. ignoring the dripping condescension for the apparently “liberal” idea of teaching agriculture and gardening at a public school (which is already pretty common practice in many places), the author states that the gardening program is taking time away from students’ other subjects and it’s negatively impacting their performance in testing areas. this might be a reasonable point, but similar arguments have been made about all other manner of extracurricular/non-required programs in schools, such as music, theater, gym, home economics, shop classes and the like, but most educators stress the importance of these classes to a student’s performance (while i’m willing to take the author at her word that she pored through studies for hours and somehow found zero evidence correlating gardening and positive student performance, i found several positive studies on gardening and children using google a minute ago. maybe google’s too liberal for the author?). it’s also hard to say exactly how much time students spend doing gardening per week, because the author left that information out of the article. this would seem to be a pretty key fact to her argument. i checked the Edible Schoolyard website, and students attend 12-30 sessions a year, depending on their age. wow. clearly a serious drain on students’ time. the author waves around poor performance scores, but can’t make any direct correlation to the gardening classes. this isn’t to say that there might not be some connection, but it’s almost certainly overblown, and this conclusion is fundamentally ignoring the other reasons of why some students may be under-performing.
the article by zombie makes even less of a compelling argument. by regurgitating certain points out of the article’s already biased context, and then providing some “hard-hitting investigative journalism” achieved by going to a berkeley farmer’s market and creeping around a school and surreptitiously snapping pictures of students (which is super-creepy, by the way), spins off into the paranoia zone, implying that somehow liberal granola-heads are trying to make everyone eat the shit that grows in their lawn. please. oh, also, zombie implies that these schools are somehow racist for having gardening programs in the first place.
i mean, i understand you’ve got to pander to your audience, and we all love it when it turns out that liberals are bigger racists than conservatives (which happens about as often as Republicans try to address the pay inequality between men and women), but this is bananas. there are very serious issues concerning inequities in different races and classes and their access to healthy food, but zombie and the author and the atlantic are mostly ignoring them, zombie much more so. at least the author of the atlantic article tries to appear balanced by acknowledging that access to healthy food is (well, she would say “was” based on her compelling research of going to one neighborhood in Compton) dangerously limited in communities of color. admittedly, it doesn’t sound like alice waters has the best analysis of the racial nature of the problem either, but her attempt to bring gardens to urban communities has already been underway for years in communities of color, independently of her, so she’s not completely off-base.
racism in food is real. it’s tragic that healthy (which can, but doesn’t have to mean, local) foods are unaffordable to people of lesser means, which are usually people of color. but the reason local foods are more expensive is because the people who grow them need a living wage to be sustainable. food should be affordable, but not if it means keeping farm workers underpaid and mistreated, which is exactly how large farms and corporations make their profits. this is the connection the author of the atlantic article fails to make when she visits a bodega and marvels at how “dirt cheap” everything is without understand why. food has a real cost, and if it’s not paid for by the consumer or the farm owner, it’s gonna be paid for by the worker in terms of how hard they’re forced to work and how little money they make, and this means, overwhelmingly, poor, black, and latino workers. THAT’S racism (and classism). white people overhwelmingly have access to healthier foods by virtue of where they live and what they can afford, whether or not they choose to buy those foods. THAT’S racism. trying to address the issue of food inequity in a small way by introducing urban children to growing food? not racism. so not racism. so far from racism it’s hilarious.
the elitism you see in the locavore movement (an expression i’ve always felt is moronic, btw) is not willful elitism on the part of those involved. in fact, as demonstrated by the gardening program, the goal is to make healthy food accessible to everyone, and to strengthen communities by supporting local farms. what about that seems elite? is now it a conservative goal to let small farms get plowed under by massive multi-nationals while we all get fed a steady diet of genetically modified, pesticide washed corn? i want everyone to be able to afford healthy, local food, if they want to. your article is disingenuous from the start, and your attempt to piggyback on the marginally better journalism in the atlantic article is transparent. no one’s going to force you to join our elite hippie foodnazi utopia, but stop taking pictures of schoolkids eating ice cream.
To recap: Adults are free to buy their food from any store they choose to patronize. Adults are free to buy any food that strikes their fancy or their tastebuds. Adults are free to choose food grown across the ocean, across the continent, or in their own backyard.
Businesses are free to locate in any neighborhood, and to stock whatever variety of products that local consumers will purchase. Hence, arugula and waygu beef will not be stocked in the average inner-city convenience store, but flaming cheetos and grape pop will be abundantly available.
Where the rubber meets the road in this discussion concerns children, and how those children will spend the hours of their day that are devoted to compulsory education. Children don’t go to school just for fun, in most states children are required to attend school until age 16 or so, or to be enrolled in an approved private school or home school environment.
The question on the table is whether it is appropriate to waste the time of the most vulnerable students (minority youth in failing inner-city schools) on feel-good nonsense dreamed up by liberal hippies who feel free to experiment on those kids because the (mostly) single parents of those kids don’t understand how their children are being used by the hippies. That’s my take on this thread.
Middle class & upper middle class students have better support systems in place to make sure they learn what they need to know to become productive citizens. Although the relentless dumbing down of all curriculum in all schools is astonishing. The Chicago Public Schools just implemented a program of one-on-one tutoring, on-line in real time, in math & science. There are so few competent tutors of math & science available here in America, that the program is using math & science tutors in India.
The math, science, and engineering students in America’s universities are increasingly from abroad. Arguing passionately about the merits of hippie gardens in inner-city schools misses the point. Those children are being left behind. Doing well in math & science is hard work, apparently the hippie teachers aren’t any more up to the task at hand than their unfortunate students. Playing in the garden is just a pleasant diversion.
Well, I couldn’t disagree more. I am a Sarah Palin/Rush Limbaugh conservative—but I think teaching kids how to garden is one of the best ideas there is. It’s pitiful how little people know about where their food comes from. I’ve met kids who don’t know that beef comes from cows. Plus, gardening presents many opportunities to reinforce what they’re learning in the classroom–and as any teacher can tell you, doing things hands-on really does make lessons “stick.” On-the-ball teachers will use composting to teach about the nitrogen cycle, irrigation to teach about the water cycle, plant spacing to reinforce arithmetic skills, crop selection to teach about botany and nutrition, etc., etc.
Plus, most parents these days don’t have a clue how to grow their own food, so it’s a good thing the schools are stepping up to teach the children. The fact that kids are turning into zombies (the bad kind) from sitting on their asses all day at computer screens, video games, TV, etc., only makes it that much MORE important that the schools give them a chance to go outside, get some fresh air and sunshine and get their hands dirty—not to mention, learning something about how to grow their own food. THAT IS NOT A BAD SKILL TO LEARN. Indeed, it will come in awfully damn handy if either: 1) the current economic madness continues until there is a complete economic collapse, and people who can’t grow their own food stand a good chance of starving; or, 2) Iran explodes a nuke high up in the atmosphere over the U.S., causing an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which will shut down everything containing electronic components, including the electric power grid, communication systems, the trucks that haul food into the cities, etc.
Gardening is one of those basic, essential skills that’s been lost, like basic knowledge of weather, the moon and stars, geography, arithmetic, correct grammar and decent manners. Gardening is essential–just ask anyone who lived through the Great Depression.
P.S.
I bet Victor Davis Hanson, who writes for Pajamas, would totally disagree with this article! He knows how important it is for small farmers to survive–and for urban people to appreciate where their food comes from!
And one more thing. The map you posted only shows where local-grown food CURRENTLY is sold. The whole point is that we want to put MORE dots on that map, we want to see MORE people buying their food locally. Just because California and New Jersey are ahead of the curve doesn’t mean that we in Kansas and other places are incapable of buying local-grown food! Indeed, our family sells beef directly off our farm to local consumers, and I only wish MORE local people would buy it, since we still end up selling most of our steers to the big packers. We have friends in this area who make a living by producing and selling vegetables and fruits all year long–even in the winter, thanks to coldframes. Other families we know in this area produce and sell chicken, lamb and pork locally, and anybody can keep a few chickens and gather the eggs.
Kathy from Kansas,
Thank you for your comments. It is nice to see people making sense.
You seem to misunderstand the point. The idea is to eat more local food, not to eliminate all foods from more than 100 miles away, or any other specific geographic distance. Everywhere I have lived from CA to AL and even in Northern Europe had farmers markets with a variety of local and near local produce for most of the year. Supermarkets even in AL labeled local produce. Buying this produce supports your local community, often saves money (or at least breaks even), and you generally get a much tastier product. This is particularly true of tomatoes and other soft skinned fruits.
Do you really not understand this or are you just trying to inflame people against some supposed coastal elite class?
Jeb,
Perhaps Zombie is trying to inflame the masses pointing out a perceived liberal plot. More likely, he is reacting to the extremist hippy wannabe who has nothing better to do than harass a person for not doing the pc thing and buy local. Buying local is not an elitist thing for many of us who buy local. For some of us it is a community pride thing. If I lived in Texas, I sure would not eat meat shipped in from Colorado when I could eat fresh beef that was butchered and sold closer to home. It’s kind of like buying Ford instead of Nissan.
Really people, quit being dense. Most areas of the USA do NOT have growing conditions like California or Texas. In the upper midwest where I reside, locally grown produce in February would be root vegetables. Yum yum, pass the rutabagas. Or perhaps we should eat tasteless mush out of a can, or three meals a day of oatmeal, like the peasants you so clearly think we are.
Every big city and little town in the upper midwest hosts farmers’ markets during the growing season, and they are well supported. But nothing grows here from October until June. It is possible to run a greenhouse operation and use enormous amounts of energy heating that greenhouse to 80 F, and grow fruits & vegetables. Even tropical plants like bananas can be grown up here if you are determined to do so. But why? It’s less expensive to ship the food from warmer climes, and it provides trade for the third world countries that grow those foods during our blizzard season.
It saves energy, provides jobs and trade, and healthful fresh food for the snowbound. I for one do NOT want to go back to the days of my grandparents, when oranges were so rare up here that you were lucky to get an orange as a Christmas present.
The problem with the left is that they just can’t leave other people alone. There was an old saying about the puritans being worried that somebody somewhere might be having fun. The left has become the new puritans, neo-puritans if you will. Somebody somewhere might be enjoying strawberries in February, or trans-fat in their french fries, or salt on their pretzels, or …….
So could eating locally support the huge population that the U.S. has now, as compared to our population pre WWII? Doesn’t our ability to mass produce food have something to do with our current populations? So taking this into account would this really work? I see folks on this thread complain about high prices of organic food, but couldn’t this be off-set by not buying that 24 pack of pepsi and that $4 box of Captain Crunch that has absolutely no nutriional value? I also read that apparently urban grocery stores are racist because they only carry junk food. Basic economics tells me that this is because they are only buying junk food. Why would a grocer purchase what he will not be able to sell? Are carrots and brocoli more expensive than that $4 box of sugary cereal? I think not.
My last comment then I am done. This is not an all or nothing idea. You buy locally when it makes sense. Don, eating locally exclusively cannot support the US population. Boots, most of us who promote common a sense approach to buying local would tell you that if you are going to buy a root vegetable, it is better to buy one locally than buy one that came from halfway around the world.
I for one am not telling people that they should not eat anything that is shipped. Oranges, bananas, mango, peaches and other wram weather foods would not be available with out the cuurent system of producution, but as I said earlier, if I have a choice of buying a homegrown apple off the tree right here at home, why would I have one shipped to me from Washington. To me that make no sense.
If we hope to ever find middle ground on some of these social issues, we need to start thinking like Kathy from Kansas. Just because liberals supports buying local does not mean conservatives should throw out the baby with the bath water and reject the entire idea. By the same token, liberals need to pull their heads out use common sense. Buying local is not always feesible. To have a complete diet, many people in many parts of the the country will have to eat mass produce products.
Common on people, not everything has to be an us against them situation.
This is a very strange article- I didn’t really think this was a partisan issue. In Canada at least this idea of buying local from local farmers is supported by both the right and left. Farmer’s Markets are widespread and always supported by local councils and counties, and general public as the food is pretty cheap and fresh. A lot of the churches and charities offer boxes of local organic produce (sometimes meantested). There is a growing number of CSAs which are massive in the States so its strange that an article on local food would ignore the concept of Community Supported Agriculture.
Climate gives Cali an advantage but a wide variety of produce can grown in a wide area of North America (outside of the traditional export crop system of course) Hell if Eastern Ontario and the St. Lawrence Valley can support a diverse and balanced range of food then anywhere in the States. I was under the impression that many American were interested in survialist literature and small scale and local food production would be an intageral part of that.
I’m also extremely puzzled by the elitist remark. With Community owned and farmed land often in former industrial areas of cities enables a widespread application of local food systems. And as previously mentioned- the farmer’s market couldn’t be further from the elitism of the conventional system. (In my Eastern Ontario city there were all the fancy supermarkets way out near the suburbs for rich people with cars which us in the poorer downtown has to make do with far lower quality food with less selection amid constant security.)
In conclusion, a very strange and hopelessly misguided battle to choose.
You might be able to do this in my state, LA;rice, corn, pecans, pears, blackberries, figs, oranges, strawberries, watermelon, wheat, sugarcane, soybeans,peaches (GA can take their peaches and cram them, Ruston 4 ever). However, the reason we can make 3 rice crops a year is because we use tractors and combined harvesters and trucks (oh noes carbon footprint) and blast the weeds and bugs to kingdom come with chemicals (oh noes roundup ready). Watch the tree-huggers heads explode at the column of tractor-trailers lined up from Crowley to the horizon, loaded with amber waves of grain.
Obviously, people are too stooopid to know what’s good for them. So, really, the elites OWE it to the unwashed to dictate their diets.
As we used to say in the 80′s: “Let them eat endive.”
They’ll probably turn their pets into vegetarians next.
Zombie,
You miss one other central idiocy of the localvore cult: crops grow in this thing called seasons! Do you not eat when its January and no crops grow? Do you settle for just what is available in local hot houses and at what expense? There are huge economies of scale when crops are grown in bulk. Most people could not afford if their wheat and corn were grown by hand nearby (assuming there was land enough for the crops sufficient to support the local population!).
I am all for supporting local farmers but localvore is just leftist half baked idiocy and why America is doing so well with a President whose wife is growing local on the White House grounds.
I am 60 and live in the suburbs in NJ, the garden state. I grew up in Ky in the 50s and 60s. My family had a garden when we lived in town and a larger one later when we moved out to the country. My parents grew ~ 90% of the food we ate. Nearly all the people we knew had at least small gardens. The variety was not great — supermarkets today carry many more vegetables than we grew then. In the winter we ate food preserved during the harvests. One hundred quarts of green beans, 100 pints of frozen corn, 100 pints of Mom’s pickles, 100 half gallons of tomato juice. Potatoes in the bin. Applesauce, jams and jellies. A few cows, pigs, chickens and rabbits.
I do not put up the quantities of food my parents did or have meat animals but for the last decade I have been able to harvest from early spring through Thanksgiving things from the small raised beds next to my driveway. My husband kindly compares the price of fresh herbs in the grocery with what I bring in each day. There are other things I do not do because I garden but it is very pleasurable and satisfying — both the work of gardening and the eating.
Am I the only one that noticed that dollar total in the bottom right of the graphic?
The total amount of local food sold in the U.S. is 1,200 million dollars. With 300 million people, that’s $4/year for each of us – perhaps a pound of organic cherries a piece.
BTW: I live in one of those pastoral flyover states. One locally grown food that we could survive on would be cattle testicles – we average about one from each animal. Somehow I don’t think the locavores would approve.
I first encountered locavore when living in Europe. There, it really is the concept that you are evil if you food has traveled a distance, and there is a strong effort to compel supermarkets to label products with “food miles” in order to allow informed purchase of more local options.
But in really looking at research on the actual “carbon footprint” of foods, the lower productivity of organic methods and the the costs of artificially extending the growing season in northern climates make the local options much higher in carbon footprint than the stuff grown in its appropriate region and season.
The most interesting thin that I found was that the best and most consistent proxy for the carbon footprint of a food item was its cost per unit weight. The more productive a farmer is, the less the carbon footprint of his whole lifestyle is reflected in your cabbage.
The best reason to grow your own and eat local is because you find it aesthetically pleasing. The taste is different, because of the local soils and because you can grow varieties that are not optimized for shelf-life, bruise-resistance, and perfect appearance.
In working with volunteer food pantry, I find that for many people in need of help and social housing, if you hand them a basket full of good raw ingredients they haven’t a clue what to do with them. My schooling as a teenager included a health class with a quarter on nutrition and two years of home economics. I wonder why theirs didn’t, because these (cooking “from scratch”) are basic skills for coping in life that they were not getting at home, and their children are not learning at home now.
I thought Libertarians had the attitude that people can do what they want with their free time and their money. If someone wants to buy from local farmers, fine. If they want to buy from the big supermarkets, fine. If local organic farms wish to sell their wares in the local farmer’s market and others wish to purchase said wares, what’s it to you “zombie”? Why does everything have to be political? It’s getting really weird.
The only problem I see here is the creepiness of “zombie” taking kid’s pics without parental permission. It doesn’t matter if you cut off their heads in the shot or black out their faces. You can still get sued, fyi.
Cheers.
Real gardeners don’t use signs.
If we really want to go back to nature here in Cally4nya, we should eat venison, elk, acorns, mussels and birds of various types, hunted and gathered using our own hands. Fuggeda about the heirloom tomatoes and tofu.
The author of this article is a hack. She wrote a book about women that work are horrible mothers. She wrote this while sitting in her mansion with servants. She isnt taken seriously in the journalistic community just because of articles like this. Just research her and you will feel foolish for agreeing with her. She is just trying to get a rise out of gullible people. You will find that this “elitist locavore movement” is pretty much made up. There are a few hundred out there that are extremist and the rest are just plain folks that like to garden. This “gardening in schools” being mandatory is made up too. These are not real issues but she sure upset a few of you.
This is a poorly researched article. Just one example. Georgia grows more than peanuts. Maybe Zombie should come down here and discover that Georgia is mainly an agriculture state and there is a multitude of great local produce and vegetables we grow besides peanuts. Collard greens, Kale, Arugula, white peaches, apples, tomatoes, sweet onions, garlic, and much much more.
Gardening in school? Damn those liberals! To heck with 4-H!
The concept of localizing food is very advantageous assuming that all of the localities can within a conservative distance can grow all the variety of food required for the population. This is of course in consideration of the exemption that there are certain food sources that only grows in specific parts of the world.
Nevertheless, the more sources of food grown in many if not all parts of the world or the country can vistually decrease the vulnerability of communities from disasters and food shortage.
Your assumption is that the local food movement is about eating at local industrial farms that only produce one or two crops. Its not, its about eating at small local farms that grow more of a variety of foods. Of course a large farm couldn’t sustain its local population because large farms, in order to crank out quantity need to be homogeneous in what they grow. This movement is about decentralizing farming and even encouraging DIY farming. The US population used to be 40% farmers. Sure if you live in Buffalo, you probably won’t eat a kiwi, but they can still grow many types of warm climate fruits/vegetables in the summer. Remember, its voluntary…don’t like it, don’t participate: )
It seems like you’re trying to find a reason to be angry at this movement, which is in no way affecting the wide selection of foods that you can buy at your local grocery store, which, as you correctly point out, are shipped in from all around the world. If anything, though, maybe this will encourage your grocery store to sell local potatoes and beets, which are likely to be fresher than the ones shipped in from halfway across the country, which frankly is doing you a favor.
We don’t have a proper connection to our food in this country. We like to see beef steaks wrapped up in plastic, and imagine that a steak just comes that way rather than having a conversation with a farmer about how that steak was taken from a cow and what that cow was fed during its life. I have no problem whatsoever with kids learning about farming. Half the kids in the classroom probably don’t know what an eggplant is, but they could happily list off their favorite processed foods if you asked them to. At least this way they start to learn where their food comes from, and that real food doesn’t always come out of a box.
And as for you, you don’t have to shop locally if you don’t want to. Do you really have that much of a problem with a farmers market set up on the street for those of us who do enjoy shopping there every once in a while? I hope not.