Sunday, February 21, 2010

Alice Is Supposed To Escape From Wonderland

"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.

It’s rare for an immigrant experience to go the whole 360 in a single generation—one imagines the novel of assimilation, The White Man Calls It Romaine. The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt). The galvanizing force behind this ideology is Alice Waters, the dowager queen of the grown-locally movement. Her goal is that children might become 'eco-gastronomes' and discover 'how food grows'—a lesson, if ever there was one, that our farm worker’s son might have learned at his father’s knee—leaving the Emerson and Euclid to the professionals over at the schoolhouse. Waters’s enormous celebrity, combined with her decision in the 1990s to expand her horizons into the field of public-school education, has helped thrust thousands of schoolchildren into the grip of a giant experiment, one that is predicated on a set of assumptions that are largely unproved, even unexamined. That no one is calling foul on this is only one manifestation of the way the new Food Hysteria has come to dominate and diminish our shared cultural life, and to make an educational reformer out of someone whose brilliant cookery and laudable goals may not be the best qualifications for designing academic curricula for the public schools.

Waters, described by her biographer, Thomas McNamee, as 'arguably the most famous restaurateur in the United States,' is, of course, the founder of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, an eatery where the right-on, 'yes we can,' ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a nice table d’hôte menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a modest 95 clams—wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and relentlessly conversation-busting service not included. (I’ve had major surgeries in which I was less scrupulously informed about what was about to happen to me, what was happening to me, and what had just happened to me than I’ve been during a dinner there.) It was at Chez Panisse that Waters worked out her new American gastronomic credo, which is built on the concept of using ingredients that are 'fresh, local, seasonal, and where possible organic.' Fair enough, and perfectly delicious, but the scope of her operation—which is fueled not only by the skill of its founder, but also by the weird, almost erotic power she wields over a certain kind of educated, professional-class, middle-aged woman (the same kind of woman who tends to light, midway through life’s journey, on school voluntarism as a locus of her fathomless energies)—has widened so far beyond the simple cooking and serving of food that it can hardly be quantified."
-- Caitlin Flanagan, kicking Alice Waters and her NewAge food freaks for depriving kids of an education - in favor of their whacked-out environmental/health/vegan bullshit - and who, one day, the Tea Partiers will throw into The Atlantic.

1 comment:

  1. I came across this article when it came out, and assigned it in my freshman comp class; we are doing a single-subject semester, and I chose food, so this fits in pretty well. My students are mostly first and second generation college, from working and middle class families, but there's a healthy mix of kids who've come out of schools just like the ones The Edible Schoolyard project targets.

    I agree with Caitland that school gardens are a good option for a voluntary after-school project, but not as a replacement for coursework - though I can see how gardens would fit into an ongoing biology/earth sciences semester program, but that's not the set-up for The Edible Schoolyard, anyway.

    Caitland draws a line from the Hispanic immigrant family's desire for something better for their kids to these gardens as regressive throwbacks that assume education is too good for their kids, and physical labor is the best they should aspire to. She's being a bit too reductionist in that argument. My dad grew up sharecropping cotton and worked hard to make sure we would never experience anything like it. He cut ties with that life, and we rarely even visited his homeplace. We didn't grow up hunting, or even going camping, because those things reminded him too much of his upbringing. But we did garden. He loved making food grow, and we always had a little plot of land outside town to work in. My point is that a family can value education and advancement for their kids and still value a connection to the land. Still, he would have objected if I spent an hour at school gardening instead of studying.

    A much better focus for someone like Waters would be school lunches. Kids are fed the most appalling crap - stuff that doesn't meet FDA standards to be sold in grocery stores - and so long as our taxes are buying school lunches, it would be nice to see students eat food that keeps them awake and alert, and isn't just a step up from a pig slop. If someone just has to have an outlet for advocacy, there's a place to start.

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