Pleasant House

I don’t have much to say about The Atlantic piece “Cultivating Failure,” by Caitlin Flanagan, though I’d like to counter a few of the writer’s points. Hopefully by doing so I can show how practical both school gardens and the food education that goes along with them could be for our society.

Here’s a post that Chelsea and I put together as a reaction to a “60 Minutes” segment that featured Alice Waters and aired last spring. I hope you read it. The ideology behind this post is that we not only have the potential to increase our access to real food no matter where we live, but we also have the ability to learn how to prepare that food.

But learning how to prepare it is not an easy task. This education has to take occur in the same location where math, English, social studies, history, and art takes place: at school. If we teach our children where their food comes from, how it is grown, and how to prepare it, we will be both teaching them how to healthfully sustain themselves and offering them the ability to choose the direction of their diets. This knowledge is something that many Americans do not learn at home.

Flanagan says, “The suicidal dietary choices of so many poor people are the result of a problem, not the problem itself. The solution lies in an education that will propel students into a higher economic class, where they will live better and therefore eat better.”

I wholeheartedly disagree. As a food professional, I see firsthand how many people who happen to be of the highest socioeconomic status–people whom I serve on a daily basis–make terrible eating choices, are overweight, and have multiple health issues related to poor diet.  A big salary is by no means the answer to eating better. Education–knowing what real food is, where it comes from, its nutritive and restorative qualities, and how to grow it, and what to look for when buying and preparing it–will be the only way to make a difference.

This ideology can help build upon the greatness that grows around us and within our diverse population. It is a plan to structure a food culture, one that should have an opportunity to get off the ground.

Flanagan says that this movement is being pushed by “an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology.”

A “foodie” is someone who looks at food as entertainment; this trendy term suggests a sense of non-seriousness and fun. Flanagan is not considering the serious (yet hopefully fun loving) food people and educators who could potentially propel this ideology forward. Foodies are more like the fans of the movement. At the end of the day, it’s not the foodies who will change policies and institute change, it will be those professionals and doers who have the practical, working knowledge of the land, livestock, pots, pans, knives, and science behind it all. Nope, propelling ideology is not fun foodie business; it is a movement by real food professionals, among others, in the fields of education and politics.