I was going to blast out another trenchant and insightful foodie blog, but feeling slightly lazy this morning, I thought I'd let do someone else do the talking for me:
Not terribly wonky, obviously, and I wouldn't have minded if he'd also mentioned sodium (oversalting food = many a chef's sin) along with fat and processed sugars on his list of dietary offenders. But it also jogged some memories from my own childhood that are probably worth re-telling. To somebody, somewhere, I suppose.
First, if Jamie Oliver had barged into my First- or Second-grade class, waving around a batch of strange-looking vegetables and asking my schoolmates and I what they were, I probably would have fanned on a lot of answers too (though I'm fairly certain I at least knew what a tomato was, for God's sake). But like a lot of kids of my ('60s and '70s) generation who grew up in the suburbs, my Food IQ was not very high. Most of what I ate came out of boxes, cans and freezer bags, though my mother (bless her heart) made sure my sister and I at least consumed a couple of portions of fresh fish and vegetables each week. There actually were a few small family farms in my neighborhood---citrus groves and cornfields, mostly---but by and large, I knew as much about food---where it comes from, how it's grown, how to prepare it---as those West Virginia schoolkids did.
When I enrolled in middle school, however, everything changed. In the late '60s, the L.A. Unified School District still had an agricultural and horticultural curriculum that ran from Seventh to 14th (jaycee) grades--most likely, a legacy from the previous (pre-War) generation, when much of what is now metropolitan Los Angeles was still productive farmland. And my middle school, like virtually ever other in the district, had its own agriculture department, with its own outbuilding (classroom and science lab), storage facilities for tools and compost, and a generous patch of land for cultivating and harvesting fruits and vegetables. And if memory serves, it was actually a mandatory class you had to take if you were a Seventh-grade boy. I know I took the class, and lot of what I learned there stuck with me to this day.
For starters, simply put, I learned How To Grow Stuff---carrots, onions, squashes, tomatoes, peppers, corn, beets, cabbages, you name it, and I learned what the best seasons were for growing these foods. I learned about soil erosion, and how to prevent it. I learned the basics of soil depletion and crop rotation, and how prevent our little fields from flooding during the winter rainy season. I got to experiment with all sort of fertilizers, both organic and chemical (manure, bone meal, blood meal, NPK, humus---like I said, a lot of what I learned in this class really stuck with me), and I learned about recycling via composting. And while the quantity of food that came out of that garden wasn't anywhere near enough to provide cafeteria lunches to the whole student body---as Alice Waters' famed Berkeley middle school project does---it did teach me some basic Life Skills that I could (and would) carry with me for the rest of my life. And at the end of the semester, when it was time to harvest the fruits of our (child) labor, there were plenty of fruits and veggies for us kids to take home with us, to share proudly with the rest of our families. Most important of all, the class affected my dietary habits in the most direct and positive way; vegetable dishes that I might never have liked if my mother had served them---zucchini and cabbage come readily to mind---became self-grown delicacies that I came to savor like fine wine because I grew them myself, and they're foods I still consume regularly today. Basically, it taught me how to grew and appreciate Good & Healthy Food.
One thing I didn't learn, however, was how to actually cook and prepare the food. That was reserved for girls, who learned those fine arts in Home Economics (another mandatory class, but only for females). Obviously, we've come a long way in obliterating corny sex-role stereotypes since then, but it seems so self-evident now in retrospect, that both classes should have been mandatory for both boys and girls. And they still should be now---that is, if public schools still offered such courses. My guess is, areas of study such as agriculture and Home Ec have probably taken pretty big budgetary hits since I was a kid in cities such as Los Angeles (my old middle school doesn't even exist anymore per se; it's an adult education center now, and the old agriculture lab is now boarded up, and its fields overgrown with weeds), though apparently there are still are some school districts (on more affluent communities) that offer such courses at the high-school level, albeit with a greater emphasis on specialized (i.e., private-sector) career training in rather than on simply imparting some basic everyday life skills.
Still, while we're pondering macro-solutions to the environmental and health problems posed by industrial-scale farming and fast-food production and marketing methods, we shouldn't overlook the importance of hands-on food education in public schools as an integral element in our quest to solve our national Bad Food Dependency Syndrome. Alice Waters's Berkeley middle-school project might not be sufficiently scalable, or economically viable, to feed large student populations in high-density urban areas (those will require larger-scale political solutions), but there's no reason why every public school system in America shouldn't be required to incorporate similar programs into their existing K-12 curricula, just as we mandate basic levels for achievement in mathematics or the sciences (of which agriculture, ahem, happens to be one).
In concept, it's dirt-simple: just set aside a patch of land on a playground, dig up the asphalt and replace it with topsoil, teach kids how to grow and prepare some basic staples, let them take "pride of ownership" in the entire process from school-farm to home table, and I can't see how the societal ripple effect that would ensue twenty or thirty years hence could be anything but positive for all of us. It certainly was beneficial for me, and I am guessing that the "food consciousness" that was awakened in a lot of kids of my generation from such instruction has been, in hindsight, an influential factor in the origins and growth of the cross-generational phenomenon that's generically called the "farm-to-table" movement.
But it will take real money to fund these initiatives, and more serious proposals from our political leaders than providing tax credits for food-diversion schemes and privatizing institutional cafeteria programs. Michelle Obama, you've done a pretty good job of setting a good example at home. Now why not use that bully pulpit of yours to challenge every public school in America to plant its own sustainable student-run victory garden? Just a thought.
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Vitelius
