There were many comments here and over at Kevin Drums’ blog in response to my previous post on school gardens and progressive values. I think much of the criticism reflects a misreading of (and in some cases clearly not reading whatsoever) what I wrote, which in turn probably reflects a lack of clarity on my part. So let me try and respond to some criticisms and clear up some confusion.
Much of the criticism stemmed from a belief that I was arguing something like the following:
Low income people don’t like gardening, don’t garden, and/or shouldn’t garden
This is not what I said. Gardening is obviously a hobby that is enjoyed by people of all income levels. My point here is that as a strategy for increasing vegetable consumption for low-income families or, for that matter, anyone who works a lot, home gardening has very little potential. Obviously, some blue collar workers do grow gardens in window boxes, and some live in single-family homes with yards where they can have larger gardens. But given the amount by which Americans are falling short of their daily recommended vegetable intake, window boxes and backyard gardens for families who have the free time, energy, and desire to maintain them are not going to get us very far.
The problem here isn’t just with gardening as a solution, as Alice Waters’ and her organization clearly sees them as just part of the solution, but that gardens represents a broader slow food philosophy that underlies the entire movement. This focus on slow food is where progressive values get in the way of practical solutions.
For instance, I’ve argued that it’s important to focus on ways of making vegetables cheap, easy, and delicious. In contrast, supporters of the slow food movement, and some commenters, seem to believe that low-income and working people have a lot of extra free time to spend on gardening, food preparation, and frequent trips to the store for fresh vegetables. Quite frankly I never expected to see so many people claim that low-income people have a lot of free time on their hands; judging by the responses I got it would seem Americans are suffering from a glut of free time. I believe this presumption is unpractical and problematic.
Slow food is a luxury which many low-income and working people simply won’t be willing or able to make time for. While it’s okay for schools to teach kids to the ideas of slow food as a small part of a broader healthy schools program, a practical solution must also focus on fact, cheap, easy, and delicious vegetables. The mission of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation goes completely against this idea:
Our mass consumer culture has created an unprecedented crisis of diet-related disease among our nation’s youth… Not only are children eating unhealthy food, they are absorbing the values that go with it: the notions that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that abundance is permanent; that it’s ok to waste.
For those that would defend the local/fresh/organic focus by arguing this it’s really just as cheap, fast, and easy as other vegetables, keep in mind that this organization thinks those qualities are negative, and to be avoided.
The other thing to note from that part of the mission statement is that it doesn’t represent universally shared values, but the progressive values of the slow food movement. Tying a healthy foods movement to progressive values like this will limit its success in parts of the country outside liberal urban areas. While it’s reasonable to show kids that food can be more enjoyable if you embrace slow food, pushing slow food as a more prerogative is not.
For instance, the idea that local and organic foods are great is not a fact or universal value, but a progressive value. Many parents disagree, and it’s completely reasonable to believe that eating local foods for the sake of local foods is wasteful and foolish, and that specialization and economies of scale mean that farms should be industrial and located wherever they can be grown most efficiently. Many parents won’t want to spend their tax dollars buying local, organically grown food at a premium. The majority of consumers have certainly expressed this preference.
I’m not arguing that schools shouldn’t necessarily serve any local, organic, or fresh vegetables. But rather that these things are useful only to the extent that they are an effective means to a desirable end. Do they make kids healthier, or cost less, or help them form lifelong preferences for vegetables? To the extent they do, then they should be used.
For local and organic foods, I’m skeptical that they are useful means to desirable ends, and therefore skeptical that much if any money should be spent on it. To the extent that the goal of using organic is that it’s healthier, then I would argue that schools shouldn’t spend money on it, since it’s not any healthier. To the extent that the goal of using local is to support local farmers, then I would also argue that schools shouldn’t spend any money on it, since charity for farmers isn’t a desirable objective for schools.
The problem is that the mission of these organizations is to make local, fresh, and organic an ends in-and-of themselves. It doesn’t matter if buying 10% more organic foods won’t make the kids eat healthier; children must be taught that organic is good. It doesn’t matter if only serving students fresh vegetables means they won’t eat frozen vegetables; they must learn that only fresh, local vegetables are good.
If you don’t believe that pushing local, fresh, and organic are objectives of the organization then you should read their websites and statements. In their food procurement criteria list, Waters’ organization includes these requirement:
- Local. The average meal travels 1,500 miles before it gets to our plates. Find local farmers, ranchers, and dairies from which to buy directly
- Organic or sustainably produced. Buy from farms that take care of the land.
In a statement before Congress, the executive director of Chez Panisse foundation made the argument for local foods explicit:
Buying and eating locally is a very simple concept that could have a huge impact on the environment if big public systems like schools districts, cities, parks and hospitals and private businesses all began to do it. Imagine the way that we could stimulate local economies and reduce food miles by simply choosing to eat what is in season and buying locally from sustainable farms?
It’s impossible to make the case that getting the schools to buy foods from local farmers or those that “take care of the land” is simply in students best interest and not mainly about promoting a particular set of values. Asking schools to spend their money to benefit local farmers is egregious, and certainly not a universally shared value.
It is also telling that one of their strategies to deal with the higher expensive of organic foods is not to purchase organic to the maximum extent useful, but the “maximum extent possible”.
It is clear that progressive values are the focus of these programs, and this is at the expense of practical lessons, like how to make frozen vegetables taste good. This is extremely unfortunate, because frozen, out of season vegetables from far away are as important and deserving a part of a nutritious diet as local, fresh vegetables. Yet Waters’ organization actively works to completely remove frozen vegetables from school lunches.
If you think healthy school lunches and school gardens are good, you should agree that these organizations pushing for them need to remove the emphasis on progressive values and focus more on practical solutions. Slow food may be useful part of a healthy schools program as a means to an end, but pushing those values for their own sake should not be the objective, and certainly should not come at the expense of more practical lessons.
43 comments
Comments feed for this article
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 10:13 am
Rebecca Burlingame
There is an important point about all this that I want to share with you. Think for a minute about your belief that this is a progressive idea. However, in economic terms, this is all about value in use and value in exchange. Both political parties have basically given up on the lower classes in many respects. Only there is a problem, propping up the middle class is making things even more difficult for the poor. In a value in exchange economy, most people in this country are agreed that money from the rich should not be redirected to the poor. What, then, might sustain the poor? Value in use economies are a good possibility, because no money is redirected from the rich, instead additional value is created by the lower classes themselves. What little money may be spent by the school program is certainly made up by the additional health benefits through life that keep these individuals out of hospitals perhaps a few years longer, because they discovered a love for vegetables. Honestly, I’m surprised it is the progressives that figured this out first in some respects, because value in use economies are the only ones that can rescue the poor in this country.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 10:18 am
DJAnyReason
Adam,in the specific case of school gardens, I think you may be making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Suppose, for sake of argument, that we have reliable data that school gardens improve children’s propensity to eat healthy lunches at school (I believe this fact was in your original post – I don’t know of any source data, so I’m making it a supposition here). Your argument seems to be that this is bad because home-grown produce (or farmer’s market produce, or other non-frozen produce generally) is costlier in terms of time, effort, and money. Granting that point in its entirety, school gardens are still a win if they improve the children’s nutrition in the short term. The causal mechanism here isn’t necessary education, but making eaitng veggies fun. A kid can think “I grew this myself!” when eating it, and is therefore more likely to eat it – far more so than if a teacher lectures them on how they should eat their frozen broccoli.
Childhood nutrition is a Joe Biden approved Big Fucking Deal. Should we be aiming to teach children skills to empower them to eat well later on in life? Absolutely. But that is an entirely seperate point, and we shouldn’t be cutting off children’s noses to spite their faces. If school gardens work to improve childhood nutrition, then they work – full stop.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 10:46 am
Johnnie Linn
Is not a course in gardening like other “shop” courses? It gets students involved in the act of production, not consumption. Its purpose , and the purpose of other shop courses, is to expose students to different manufacturing occupations and, perhaps for some, to spark enthusiasm to enter that occupation. The purpose of school in general is to enhance productivity.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Adam Ozimek
Their purpose extends far beyond exposing students to occupations and sparking enthusiasm in that occupation. There is an ideological agenda and their goal is to instill progressive values about consumption. You can’t really read their materials and conclude otherwise.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
MEG222
Hello???
ALL public schools these days are operating under “an ideological agenda”.
You just happen to support the commercialization of processed foods (the status quo you’re defending) over those whose bent is to teach children what non-commercialized nutrition is all about, and to teach them basics of healthy eating that in years past their grandmothers would have counseled over the kitchen stove.
Betcha a working-class backyard gardener (remember, it’s not time consuming work at all — the sun soil and water do the growing, not gardener over-attention…) would pass on eating your lunch, and still be stronger and smarter for putting the body’s required minerals and nutrients in it.
You pretty much have an overabundance of confidence that your ways are right, and you seek to tell working- and lesser classes what is in their best interests, even though it’s clear you know very little about this topic you’re writing on.
Chutzpah, anyone?
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 11:00 am
Matthew Nicolette
It seems your whole argument is based on economy of scale.
A few questions for the economists about this.
Does economy of scale still work in agriculture when one takes away government subsidies, cheap fuel, cheap fertilizer, and easy money to buy the large machines to work the fields?
Second question. How will risk associated with loss of biodiversity from monoculture and corporate monopoly of food production effect the availability, cost, and nutrition of our crops in the future?
Does pollution, soil loss and destruction, erosion, and unsustainable water practices factor into cost of production?
Do you believe the cost of more expensive food could be offset by the jobs created if we moved away from the more “efficient” mega farms?
While I agree that school or community gardens aren’t the answer and we should use all our options, I don’t believe further consolidation into mega farms is sustainable either environmentally or fiscally. I fear once again conclusions are based on the CURRENT monetary cost to the consumer and treating everything else as an externality. Is “efficient” the right word to describe mega farms?
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Adam Ozimek
There are lots of problems with commercial farming, I agree. Fixing them on the margin by having public schools pay a premium is not going to get us very far. Remove ag subsidies, tax carbon, etc. I’ll sign up for these things. That’s a long way from having public schools subsidize local and organic farms.
Wednesday ~ October 6th, 2010 at 10:33 am
Walter McQuie
Yes, a school and community garden/local foods movement won’t reform the agriculture system. But if commercial farming collapses or is reformed there will be jobs for people who know how to grow good food. Having the public schools address this eventuality in their curricula seems a good idea regardless of what some progressive advocacy group says it wants. Since when are vocational education classes merely subsidizing industry?
What should the working class think about the prospect of a bunch of agricultural manufacturing jobs in a sector of the economy that a century ago was much vibrant but has since been decimated by industrialization.?
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
Henry
I like Mr. Linn’s comment. Working with plants makes them seem a little less alien and a little more appetizing. The hope (and I think it is a very reasonable one) is that that people who have tilled the soil themselves will be more likely to eat veggies, whether they are frozen or fresh. The possibility that many proponents of school gardens may have a wish list of other goals that you consider impractical, I hope, does not blind you to the practical benefits of such programs.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
notchris
after getting roundly spanked across the blogosphere you resort to “i was misread!” and “i wasn’t clear”.
here is an idea: do some research. gather some data. stop pretending that what you think is at all reflective of what is.
fine, you don’t garden. you think gardening is only for those that have time. but, that doesn’t make it so as ample commenters here, on sullivan’s blog and on drum’s blog have pointed out.
what we have is a yuppie blogger telling everyone else that yuppies don’t have the solution to the vegetable crisis. in that respect, you are correct.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Sam
I think that kids are smarter than you think. I don’t think that “only serving students fresh vegetables means they won’t eat frozen vegetables”. Even if kids only get messages in school supporting organic, fresh, and local food (which are competing with innumerable messages supporting convenience food that they get from commercials outside of school), that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be stranded and hungry later in life if they can’t afford to buy fresh vegetables because of budget/time constraints. If you teach someone how to prepare fresh peas, chances are that they’ll be able to figure out what to do with frozen/canned peas if they end up buying some. Also, they’ll probably be more likely to enjoy peas altogether if you show them the fresh ones.
Sure, this is about promoting values, and if those values include “abundance is not permanent” and “don’t be wasteful”, is that really a bad thing? Maybe they go a little overboard on organic and local, but they’re not as hard and fast as you suggest.
For example, you misrepresent the food procurement criteria list–it’s not a list of “requirements”, it’s a list of example criteria set up for the school district in Berkeley based on the resources available to them. They even describe how they opted for lower-cost options when they found that buying organic meat was too expensive. The summary of this section one page later says, “start small, think big” and “create criteria for the food you want to buy”. If a district that is not as well-funded as the one in Berkeley finds that they need to buy frozen corn for cost/convenience reasons, they’ll probably buy the frozen corn instead of letting kids go hungry.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Adam Ozimek
I would not call an agenda that removes all frozen vegetables and strives for organic and local foods to the maximum extent possible to be “a little overboard”.
That budgetary constraints will stop them from achieving their goals of 100% organic doesn’t really comfort me. They will waste money and not just ignore but actively oppose fast, cheap, and easy vegetable options in the mean time.
Not to mention an overly ideological agenda may prevent some schools from adopting a healthy food program in the first place. That would be the real shame.
Wednesday ~ October 6th, 2010 at 2:04 am
Sam
Based on this comment and others you have posted, it seems that you have a different reading of the “Procurement” chapter of Lunch Matters than I do–perhaps we come in with different viewpoints and interpret the same material different. I don’t see the agenda as overly ideological at all. It highlights the goals the program had, the challenges faced sourcing and affording food, and the compromises made as a result.
They still buy food from Sysco and they still use USDA entitlement dollars to buy processed foods (they note that turning away this money would be “unconscionable”). They note that “almost no public school can afford to buy everything organic and locally”. In fact, they spend more of their budget on processed commodity foods (8%) than they do on organic, local produce (6%).
Okay, so maybe they don’t buy frozen vegetables. Only a quarter of their budget is set aside for produce–how much money can they be wasting here? Also, consider that Berkeley happens to be in an area where it is possible to grow a variety of produce year-round, which is likely why they strive toward an ideal of fresh vegetables. Even then, only 30% of their produce is organic and local. I can’t imagine a school administrator who lives in Boston or Minnesota reading this report and coming to the conclusion that they cannot implement any aspects of this program because fresh vegetables are not available in the winter. It strikes me as a report that outlines lofty goals and then describes pragmatic, incremental steps toward their implementation, highlighting the challenges faced even when operating within a community with a particularly liberal, food-centric reputation.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Josh Cramer
Adam,
You toss around the phrase “progressive values” and tie it to local, organic vegetables. First, what makes this progressive? Local (limited and typically produced by smaller farmers) and organic (traditional and old-fashioned farming methods) are both conservative and traditional values, not progressive ones. Second, if progressives have caught on to the benefits of these conservative values then they have done so through the force of argument and experience, not as presuppositions in a “progressive” platform. So, to say that Chez Panisse is “pushing those values for their own sake” and that this “should not be the objective” is simply backwards. If they are pushing these values, then they are doing so as a part of a bigger argument – about what consumption and production should look like and that teaching kids to be producers and not just consumers is a good thing – not simply an easily labeled and rejected “progressive value” system.
Josh
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 9:04 pm
Adam Ozimek
Josh,
Local food can be supported by conservative or progressive value based arguments, but as justified by the slow food movement it is undeniably liberal. I suggest you read the websites of Waters’ and her groups and they’ll be little question it is progressive values they are pushing, and the support for local food follows directly from these values.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
pinetree
Why does Ozimek believe that working class people don’t have time to garden? if that were true, the amount of gardening that goes on would increase with income, and then drop off at the 2-executive level of income. But instead, gardening (for food) is most common in working class areas.
Even immigrants, just off the boat, working 2 restaurant jobs, seem to have gardens.
It is true that it’s most common in working class, empty-nester or retired households. There, you will find people growing pretty much all of their produce, and canning/freezing the extra. But, they are living next door to school kids, who of course see what the whole process looks like. And it’s also true that really poor people living in large apartement buildings have the least opportunity of all. Unless they go visit their grandparents.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
a_prof
I think you and many of your critics are still talking past one another. Your perspective on what “low-income” or “working class” means seems to have a strong urban and perhaps Eastern urban bias — the ‘window box’ notion, for example. That’s certainly one slice of the American working class, but there are also millions of rural poor and working class and those are who many of your critics seemed to be thinking of.
As an example, one branch of my family out west is mostly rural blue collar with unstable incomes. For them and their neighbors, buying food in grocery stores that you could make yourself is considered a luxury! A significant share of their annual protein comes from deer, elk, and fish that they shoot or catch themselves, and all have large vegetable gardens, they can jams and applesauce, etc. They would never think of that as a “hobby”, but as a necessary and normal part of providing food security for their families.
Actually, the people in my family who *don’t* have ample land and seemingly ample time for vegetable plots are the most well off, living in urban condos with basil growing in a windowbox — the poorer relations live in single family dwellings (even if a trailer) on large lots.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Joshua
Yes.. I agree with this post wholeheartedly. In my original response to Adam, I pointed out that the one thing I really thought was wrong with his post was the assumption that blue-collar people wouldn’t be interested, have the time, or experience with gardening.
That was the main point I thought was wrong–and I gave evidence from my experiences here in Wisconsin. For an East Coast urban elite–I think the outlook is very different, and his points almost certainly make sense, in say, manhattan–but the country is much bigger and the options out there are a lot more varied.
In any case–I do think there’s a couple of different issues going on here…
1) Teaching gardening in schools–and what this brings out
2) The notion that gardening must be linked to organic foods–something that I think many gardeners may righteously scoff at when they apply their own fertilizers and pesticides.
3) The claim that whatever the literature that is being associated with this program–it really must have anything to do with the gardening activities that are going on at the schools. Yes, it is possible that the kids are being fed ideological information along with the gardening–but it is making a HUGE assumption that the kids all swallow this whole in comparison to the actual physical actions that go along with the gardening.
In any case–I noticed that this post said a lot less about gardening than it did about ideology–and that is a sign to me that the critiques about blue-collar gardening pretty much hit the mark… It would have then been more persuasive for Adam to acknowledge this point–note that blue collar groups are often into gardening–and to instead step back and say that what really might be a problem is the need to make gardening the same as organic foods..
Anyway–an interesting thought that came to mind–it would be an interesting research question to see how obesity actually relates to people who have their own vegetable gardens. Is it the case that these gardens make a difference for people or not? Seriously–all the people that I know who do have gardens that they get food from–they tend to be thinner and healthier–but that’s just anecdotal.. Such a study might really provide a concrete measure upon which to judge this whole shebang..
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Adam Ozimek
Josh,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I think what you’re saying is that I was wrong to say that blue collar workers won’t garden, and perhaps that is how my previous post came off. But as I explained above, what I intended to say is that you’re not going to get a lot more blue collar workers to garden, and certainly not enough to make a dent in the vegetable deficit we have. I thought that “Gardening is obviously a hobby that is enjoyed by people of all income levels” and that clearly some blue collar people garden went without saying. I assumed people would understand I was focusing on marginal choices. The comments in the previous post showed me that I hadn’t made my point clearly.
You’re probably right that saying I was incorrect rather than misunderstood would be more persuasive, but alas it would not be true.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
MEG222
Respectfully, I don’t think the author here knows very much about food and good nutrition. Is he barking against “organic” vegetables or fresh veggies in general?
Guess what? Fresh veggies do taste more delicious. They haven’t been bred for travel and long life, and taste best fresh picked.
We need to teach children about minerals and nutrients, and food combining. (ie/ If you eat a healthy meal, and dump a sody pop on top of it… not good.)
“Slow food” essentially means understanding what your body will benefit from — thinking about why more is sometimes less, and all the compromises “fast” makes you give up.
Also (I hate to break this to the author, who has never ever gardened — it’s obvious — yet wants to lecture us on what he sees as “charity to farmers”…), it’s really not all that time consuming. See, once the planting is done, the sun and earth take over. You don’t have to work daily to make the plants “grow”.
There are ways to avoid weeding (ground tarps to choke out weeds, straw/newspaper cover to keep them down, etc.) Pretty much, after planting and harvesting (which is fun and easy and NOT time consuming), the skills that need to be taught are how to cook and preserve the fresh food. Yep, freezing works.
This author ought to admit he prefers to believe that commercial nutrition is as good as it gets for our less wealthy folk. That “fast and cheap” is the answer. It’s not. Back to basics, and understanding what is food (nutrients) and what is not (sugar water and processed Fritos) will go a long way.
Getting kids to think about where food comes from and why (please ple
ase please start teaching about minerals in the diet America!!) is a starter. If you have time to eat and poop, you have time to think about what you’re putting in your mouth, and why commercialization — people making money on “fast easy cheap” pseudo food — indeed ought to be confronted in our agribusinesses.
Of course, if people linked diet and nutrition, that would also affect the for-profit “health industry” too. I hope the author takes on those “charities” soon, because somebody out there is intent on forcing us all to play in that industry. Talk about cheap, fast, and easy solutions…
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Matt
You’re still basically arguing that locally grown or gardened food = yuppie liberal food, and that teaching young kids how to garden in school is a bad idea simply because it’s something that Alice Waters thinks is a good idea. Still not sure I follow that line of reasoning.
Also, “a majority of consumers” haven’t necessarily “expressed a preference” for commercially produced crops. For the past five decades at least, the majority of U.S. consumers have been purchasing what was available at their local supermarket.
In fact, the growth of farmers markets throughout the U.S. during the past 15 years, and recent initiatives that emphasize locally grown products or products grown in-state–by chains ranging from regional independents to Wal-Mart–indicates that consumers from a variety of demographics are now expressing a preference for food that was produced locally.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Adam Ozimek
Supermarkets stock the foods consumers demand, and sales of organics are a very small minority. Consumers are expressing a preference for organically grown foods. Walmarts recent actions say more about their attempt to target different demographics than it does about changing preferences.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
cinesimon
Ummm, you do realize that most grocery stores intentionally hike the prices of organic produce so their gig with the chemical-dependent food producers isn’t threatened?
Just ask any local person who sells the most expensive organic(or even ‘locally produced’) produce – the local supermarket that should theoretically have more purchasing power should be: but it is always the local independent grocer whose organic/local produce is cheaper – when the grower is the same.
It appears that most of your arguments are developed in the abstract of your mind. What may seem like a reasonable deduction for you is actually not the case, from all the suppositions you’ve out forward so far.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Adam Ozimek
cinesemon
Waters herself concedes organics are more expensive even when you buy direct from farmers. That industrial farms can produce food more cheaply than organic farms is not controversial
Wednesday ~ October 6th, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Walter McQuie
Supermarkets also stock what producers pay them to stock and give it prominence on their shelves based on how much producers pay them. Walmart is nevertheless a huge force in the grocery market. However you spin it, their actions speak to what they think they can sell. And if they can sell it, other markets (local, grower oriented) can as well. Or could with support from cultural and educational–vocational ed., university extension services–even governmental institutions.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
MEG222
Also, I think you’re picking the wrong fight in not understanding the line about local growers “taking care of the land”.
See, if they are taking care of the land, they are taking care of what’s harvested from it. The soil, the nutrients and minerals contained within, is what makes the plants, the fruits and vegetables nutricious.
I’d love to believe that your commercial growers care just as much if Johnny is getting a fresh clean product, grown in the best conditions possible. The smaller, the more committed to the product, the better.
Do commercial growers have an incentive to dump chemicals on their land to encourage growth — because bigger with less nutrients is better in the commercial world? I’d love to believe they care about the product, but I think like the author here, they care more about being “efficient” and letter the lesser people get what nutrition they can from the commercialized, frozen bags of product.
Anybody read the newspapers about how much the big commercial food businesses care about quality products? If so , why all the recalls if indeed they are properly caring for their land, our food sources?
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
lawyerinthemaking
I agree with most of the other commenters here… but I’d like to add my own beef that I have with your argument.
It seems that you are stuck on the consumption habits it may foster, but growing gardens in schools teaches the children who participate bigger lessons than just nutrition: It teaches them about the reward that comes from making things with your own two hands, it teaches them to value the earth, and it teaches them the twin values of hard work and patience. In a of “I want what I want and I want it right now” consumerism, gardening in a lesson in delayed gratification, and studies have shown that children who are able to delay gratification do better in school, have higher test scores, and generally lead better lives. School gardens teach lessons that reach far beyond the dinner table. Teaching lessons that provide students with more tools for success shouldn’t be seen as a progressive plot to indoctrinate children — it should be seen as schools and teachers doing their jobs and it certainly should not be subject to partisan bickering.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 4:05 pm
a_prof
While I think Adam’s view of the working class is too narrow (see above), I actually agree with him about the problems inherent in the localism movment — and agree there’s a real urban liberal bourgeois feel to it.
I’d love to hear hardcore “locavores” answer a few questions:
1. I live in New England. During the summer we actually do buy most of our produce at farmers markets. But for more than half the year, the only thing local and fresh around here is snow and mud.
What am I supposed to eat in the winter if not produce trucked in from Cali or other faraway paradises? Is it really healthier for me to eat local home-canned canned green beans than fresh organic green beans that have been shipped from Florida? Green salad becomes a June-Sept item only?
2. What about items that just don’t grow here? I love cooking Asian and Latin, but half the ingredients have to be imported — unless I missed a grove of coconut trees in Boston somewhere. Heck, what about oranges, lemons, and limes!? Olive oil? To keep it local, do I limit myself to clam chowder, baked beans, and apple pie?
3. The really big issue is this: where is the land for all these farms??? Within a hundred mile radius of me are something like 15 million people. Only about 7% of the land in that area is farmland (crops or pasture); the vast majority is developed residential or commercial/industrial land, with the rest protected as parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, and other green space.
So to feed those people “locally”, where exactly will the food be grown? Do local food advocates suggest we turn the parks, national forests, and wildlife refuges into farms — is that the “environmental” solution? Are we going to bulldoze houses and start farming them? Sure, individuals can do some backyard farming (though backyards here are often small or non-existent), but not the kind of acreage needed to feed many millions.
I get how the local/organic movement makes sense in Northern California, but I don’t see how you possibly feed Boston-Conn-NYC locally.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Matt
The problem I’ve still got with Adam’s argument is that it presupposes that most people who want to buy local foods are doing so as some sort of eco-political statement, and that teaching kids to garden in school is somehow forcing that eco-political ideology on those kids. Like most of the people who have disagreed with him, I just don’t see how gardening or shopping at a farmer’s market is somehow liberal behavior.
Hard-core “localvores” who refuse to eat anything grown or produced outside of a 150 mile radius of where they live are a tiny, tiny minority in this country. Food activists like Alice Waters, who talk about healthy eating as some sort of broader ethical ideology, are also a minority in this country.
So, it’s hard to argue that this minority of U.S. consumers is somehow the reason that the number of farmers markets in the U.S. has doubled since 2002. Or that it’s liberal progressives who are encouraging cattle ranchers in the Midwest to start cooperatives to sell locally produced meat, or that their liberal agenda has recently forced the USDA to develop mobile slaughterhouses to service rural areas.
Food activists aren’t the primary reason that sales of organic milk grew 20% every year for most of the past decade. And, they’re not the reason that sales of organic produce have continued to demonstrate double-digit growth even during the recession. Growing concern about how food is produced has been a mainstream trend in almost every pocket of the country since at least a decade ago.
Teaching kids to garden in school may ultimately prove to be helpful or it may not be, but I still don’t get how having a class on gardening as part of a curriculum to teach kids about healthy eating has to be inextricably linked to Alice Waters. She started an innovative program that might help a few kids. It doesn’t mean it’s a worthless idea, just because some liberals have applauded it.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Adam Ozimek
Matt,
I think we are in almost complete agreement, I don’t think anything you’ve written contradicts what I’ve written.
Local as a means to an end is fine, and in my first post I said this:
“If integrating a school garden into curriculum can help teach kids subject matter better and get them to eat healthier, then I’m all for it. Likewise, I think improving school lunches and making them healthier are something worth spending money on. People like TV chef Jaime Oliver and school garden maven Alice Waters who are working to push these issues into mainstream deserve praise. Unfortunately, it seems that these genuinely useful policies and programs are being bogged down with wasteful progressive ideas.”
And in my very last paragraph of this post I said this:
“If you think healthy school lunches and school gardens are good, you should agree that these organizations pushing for them need to remove the emphasis on progressive values and focus more on practical solutions. Slow food may be useful part of a healthy schools program as a means to an end, but pushing those values for their own sake should not be the objective, and certainly should not come at the expense of more practical lessons. ”
I have sandwiched my writing on this with the argument that school gardens can be good, and that the problem is when these values are being pushed not as a means to an and, but as an end in itself, as an “eco-political statement”. Waters’ website, statements, and actions is clear this is their purpose. Using your food budget to make an eco-political statement is what I am calling liberal upper income behavior.
If Waters’ won’t abandon these ideas, then I’m arguing that “having a class on gardening as part of a curriculum to teach kids about healthy eating” should not be linked to Waters’ and that this will hold it back. Eco-political statements should be purged from school gardens.
Wednesday ~ October 6th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Walter McQuie
1) Elliot Coleman — http://www.fourseasonfarm.com/ — has a huge reputation among the organic gardening community by growing for local market year round in Maine. Just because it isn’t being done (or hasn’t since centralized agriculture took over), doesn’t mean it can’t.
2) So you’re saying that since local grower’s can’t supply 100% of the food you wish to consume a system where they provided 40% is useless? Or that it threatens to bring down the system that will continue to bring you sub-tropical items as long as you can pay for them?
3) A lot of local food advocates may be aware of the approximate population within a couple of hour drive of all the major metropolitan areas of the country. Some may even suspect that there aren’t many national parks within those areas so at least that portion is unlikely to actually be advocating turning “them” into farms.
I lived about 75 miles east of the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area in the eighties and nineties and there were huge fields of cantaloupes, tomatoes and sweet corn and trucks heading west. Probably still are, alongside even bigger fields of corn and soybeans, lots of which went to feed local chickens.
We could also decide to build less and less sprawling suburbs. At least we could if enough people valued other uses of land that is a couple of hours drive outside of major urban centers.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Matt
Yeah, I guess I conveniently overlooked your conclusion. And I agree, Waters (and a lot of activists from California) can come across as a little too self-righteous with regard to local foods. It’s California. As a_prof pointed out, most other regions of the country don’t enjoy California’s long growing season or its variety of crops. You just can’t grow avocados or oranges in Vermont, and unless you plan on subsisting on dairy, meat and pickled vegetables for six months every year, it’s tough to be a true “localvore” in most parts of the U.S.
But, I still think that Waters and the Slow Food movement are only one manifestation of the local food trend. The language of the Slow Food movement appeals to the school board members and other officials in Berkeley, which is one reason that Waters uses it to promote her agenda there. But, a 4-H program in Boise or Wichita could launch a similar gardening effort at a local high school, and the kids would learn similar lessons couched in completely different terms. Actually, I’d be surprised if programs like that didn’t already exist.
Anyway, it’s just weird to see something like gardening get caught up in identity politics. Thanks for responding. It helped me think through my own perspective on the issue.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Adam Ozimek
Matt, I think you’re right that there are other ideological groups that would support local foods for different reasons than the slow food movement do. I don’t think it’s a PR decision on Waters part to sell her program in the language of slow foods, because her slow food interests predate her healthy school interests.
The Boise or Wichita examples you give sound plausible. But regardless of the ideological position motivating it, as long as the local food is being pushed for ideological reasons rather than for it’s practical benefits to the students I would argue it is a mistake. It should be an means not an ends.
In any case, I appreciate your thoughtful comments.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Benefits Behavior
[...] School gardens and progressive values « Modeled Behavior Second, if progressives have caught on to the benefits of these conservative values then they have done so through the force of argument and experience, not as presuppositions in a “progressive” platform. So, to say that Chez Panisse is . [...]
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 9:25 pm
Lona
So, Adam, your only real objection to school gardens is political? that there’s some elitist agenda at work that shouldn’t be? But even if that were true — and it doesn’t seem entirely to be the case — is that really a good reason to deny kids the opportunity to grow stuff and see how the fruits of their labors taste and feel in their bellies? There is an old adage in education that seems to be consistently forgotten: “I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.” If for no other reason than that, kids should be gardening (and drawing, and making music, and playing games) and all those things that some like you view as “fluff,”it should be remembered, also necessarily involve in an active way, the other “school stuff” — doing the math; reading the directions, learning patience, following orderly process, etc.
Beyond that, your assertions about time and money don’t seem to hold up terribly well as many of the comments do show. It really does cost less and uses less energy to transport stuff from, say Delaware to Philadelphia or Baltimore and DC or from New Jersey to New York than from California — that’s one cost saving. If you grow stuff in your yard, however small it is, that food really is cheaper than buying it from the supermarket. Yes, stuff labeled “organic” is usually priced higher in the stores, but out of your own garden it’s not. Will tired, low income people crammed into apartments grow stuff? Maybe not, but even if they don’t go get it from the community garden, or off their balcony or their building’s roof, they still have to eat somehow, so they’ll still have to take the time to travel to the store, haul the stuff home, store it and prepare it, or go out and pay money for someone else to find, stock, prepare and etc. for them.
Given this, are schools that buy “locally,” then, “subsidizing local farmers” which you assert they shouldn’t? Frankly, it seem to me to be just good, common economic and business sense; even my local supermarket buys that way — why shouldn’t the schools?
As to nutritional value, I have read that frozen vegetable are often just as good or sometimes better than fresh, but I have also seen California’s fields, and I’ve been appalled. The soil is really just a root holder — the only way they make it produce anything is to pour tons of chemical soup on it, several times a year as one crop is harvested and removed and another is tucked in in it’s place during California’s “long growing season.” It may well be that this is what your elitists, Waters et al, are actually reacting against rather than touting. Is that possible?
There is, of course, the fact that California and Florida and places around the world do grow things that you can’t in Vermont or Delaware or Michigan or Kansas. Once upon a time, people really did eat only what they could grow during their summer and “put up” and use during their winters, but now we don’t have to, if we can afford to buy at a store (my Mom, by the way, traded “organic” eggs and cream produced on our North Dakota farm for things from the grocery store like apples, oranges, bananas, cocoa and coffee as well as salt and flour that really do have to come from other places, just as they do now — so that’s how she “afforded” those “luxuries”) How seriously low income or impoverished people spend their food budgets may be another matter, though, and may well be another reason that school gardens and schools providing better choices, whether “organic” or not during the school year is important.
Bottom line: can it hurt? Shouldn’t school budgets go for optimum results, not cheapest or most expedient or just lowest common denominator? Can we really afford to sacrifice anybody’s kids on any of those altars — especially if it’s only because we disagree with what we think is Alice Waters elitist, progressive agenda? I fervently hope not. Please think it through before taking a hard line in opposition, Adam.
Tuesday ~ October 5th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
Adam Ozimek
Lona,
No, I have not suggested schools should not have gardens and children should not be fed fresh vegetables.
Also Waters and her organization readily admit that local foods and organic foods are more expensive, so that’s not really a matter of debate.
Schools should go for the optimal results, which means they shouldn’t pay a premium to satisfy an ideological agenda.
Wednesday ~ October 6th, 2010 at 1:52 am
Joseph
Mr. Ozimek,
Given your condescending misconceptions about “working class” people and food, it’s ironic that a big part of your criticism is based on associating progressives with yuppie snobbery. And you disagree with any public funds being used to teach kids to grow vegetables, but you would apparently agree with public funds used to teach kids to make quick and easy recipes from bags of frozen vegetables? Am I mis-characterizing you? Because your position appears to be ridiculous.
“Cheap, easy, and delicious” frozen vegetables cannot compete with “cheap, easy, and delicious” doritos or pizzas or cheese burgers. The idea that food should be “cheap and easy” is part of the problem, not the solution. The programs are aimed at attitudes about food because our current attitudes about food are the problem. People at all income levels and of various political stripes recognize this and have the sense to be concerned about our current food culture and its associated health problems.
And yes, working people are busy, but they certainly have time to garden and grow vegetables. We know this because they do garden. It’s a very pleasant and not very expensive hobby so even people who aren’t liberal yuppies can do it.
Wednesday ~ October 6th, 2010 at 6:34 am
Adam Ozimek
Joseph,
Yes, you are mischaracterizing my position. See the first paragraph of my first post.
Wednesday ~ October 6th, 2010 at 8:31 am
rjs
most of the backyard gardeners i know can or freeze their surplus and use it all year…some fresh produce lasts until december in ohio, onions last all winter, & i always have potatoes and winter squash leftover in the cellar in spring
Wednesday ~ October 6th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
davido
One of the sadder things I had to do after my dad passed away suddenly at age 83, was to decide what to do with his garden. I grew up in a black working class family in Cincinnati and my father kept a garden for all of the 41 years I knew him and had kept one long before I came along. He didn’t grow vegetables in window boxes or in the backyard, but on a plot of ground he owned on a steep hillside in a poor neighborhood that no developers were interested in (He’d have sold it if he could).
There were other such gardens on other such plots, owned by absentee landlords and otherwise idle. Indeed, there is today a great deal of empty land in that neighborhood largely because only the poor live there now, and there are no commercial or residential developers putting it to use.
Could we feed ourselves vegetables year round from his garden? Yes. My mother canned (and sometime froze) those vegetables and when she passed away, there were still canned vegetables stored in our basement.
My father kept his garden for several decades while working a minimum of two jobs and sometimes three. He did it to save money and because it gave him more pleasure than watching TV in his downtime. My mother canned vegetables for the same reasons.
My point for Adam Ozimek is that it is one thing to speculate about what kind of time and resources poor and working people have to put into something like keeping a garden and canning (or freezing) the products of it. It is another thing to actually know something about it. A lifetime habit of saving money, born from experiencing the Depression, necessitated practices that I suspect (but don’t know) they engaged in more frequently than the upper middle class people they worked for.
I suspect that tight money is pushing others in those same directions today.
Wednesday ~ October 6th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Adam Ozimek
davido,
Thanks for sharing your story. Of course some people, like your father, are willing to work very hard and sacrifice a lot of time for their hobbies. We have a tremendous shortage of vegetable consumption in this country, and the presumption we could affect this by convincing people who don’t garden to develop the passion and willingness to sacrifice that your father had is unrealistic. We need practical and realistic solutions, home gardens are neither.
Saturday ~ October 9th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Bourdain Backs Me Up « Modeled Behavior
[...] words of praise, for slow food maven Alice Waters, who I’ve also criticized, and praised, here and here. Here he is agreeing with the substance of my criticism of the slow food movement and [...]
Monday ~ December 20th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Jsizzle
We have a community garden around here. For ten dollars and ten hours of labor (one weekend) per season, you get a weekly basket of fresh produce enough for a family of four. The selection is not always the best but its cheap and not so much effort like planting your own garden. A lot of the low-income Hispanics and recently unemployed participate along with the hippies. It’s pretty feasible actually. It is pretty “progressive” here, though. lol.