by Kurt Michael Friese
In the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine, Caitlin
Flanagan has written a surprisingly harsh critique of the
popular and growing movement to include gardens in our public schools.
In a nutshell, she states that pursuing this activity over and above
the three R’s will turn our children into illiterate sharecroppers.
Right from the start, though, she gets it wrong.
She has the reader picture the son of undocumented migrant workers
entering his first day at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley,
home of the well-known Edible Schoolyard project, “where he stoops
under the hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.” Her callous disrespect
for labor only begins there, but the real problem with her argument
lies in her stubborn refusal to accept that a good idea may have
sprouted from an ideology other than her own. She goes so far as to
describe it as:
…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).
Flanagan has chosen to ignore the core purposes of these
gardens, only one of which happens to be cultivating a respect for hard
work, and only one other of which is a healthy respect for real food.
While she notes that the work of the garden has migrated into each of
the classrooms, she ignores the obvious point that this demonstrates:
There is nothing taught in schools that cannot be learned in a garden.
Math and science to be sure, but also history, civics, logic, art,
literature, music, and the birds and the bees both literally and
figuratively. Beyond that though, in a garden a student learns
responsibility, teamwork, citizenship, sustainability, and respect for
nature, for others, and for themselves.
The disdain for the left-of-center viewpoints of those who started
the Edible Schoolyard is evidenced in her description of Chez Panisse,
the restaurant of Edible Schoolyard’s founder Alice Waters, as “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.” Flanagan’s
attempt at snob-bashing populism and appeal toward the sensitivities of
those on the right is misplaced, however, because these school garden
ideas, while begun in this particular case by those with left-leaning
tendencies, actually hold appeal across the political spectrum. They
not only encompass a love of nature and the kind of touchy-feely
sensitivities that give conservatives the willies, but also the bedrock
principles of tradition and ownership and self-reliance that would be
equally at home at a hippie commune or a tea party rally.
While it is rightly noted that the grades at the school quickly
improved, the contention that “a recipe is much easier to write than a
coherent paragraph on The Crucible” is not only insulting to
professional chefs and food writers (like, well, me), but also
is patently false. There is a world of difference between writing a
recipe and writing one well, as anyone who as ever come across the
words “but first” in a recipe will attest. The more important point
though is the one that Flanagan glosses over: that the passion for
learning developed in a garden, driven home by the lightening-bolt of
awareness when a kid bites into a vine-ripened tomato she grew herself,
is worth essays on ten plays even if Arthur Miller or Shakespeare
wrote them all.
Where the argument really goes off the rails though is when Ms
Flanagan posits:
Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to
enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it? What is
the goal of an education, of what we once called “book learning”? These
are questions best left unasked when it comes to the gardens.
Not “enjoy,” Ms, Flanagan, respect. This, as I mentioned,
is where her disdain for manual labor, something that everyone on the
planet (beneath the upper 2 percent or so of income earners) contends with
every day, becomes instructive. It is predicated on the idea that
labor is something to be freed from, ostensibly through strict
adherence to “book learning.” Worse, it perpetuates the misguided
dogma of the last several decades that distances us from our food and
insists that cooking is a chore, like washing laundry or windows, which
should be avoided at all costs as if it were beneath us. This in turn
not only makes her seem elitist herself, but also leaves
Flanagan’s ideas of education as merely a means to create consumers,
rather than citizens.
What follows in the essay is a misuse of statistics that boggles the
mind, where she blames a decline in math and English among Latinos at
MLK on the gardens. In legal-ese (and Latin) this is referred to as a Post
hoc ergo propter hoc argument, “It follows therefore was caused
by.” Another example of this would be that since all addicts were once
babies, then mother’s milk leads to heroin addiction.
This is followed up by an argument that the rampant increase in
childhood obesity and early-onset diabetes is not caused by a lack of
access to healthy food nor the prevalence of sugary, fat laden food in
schools. Rather she cites, ironically, George Orwell, to argue that
it’s because poor people prefer that food. Please. And for
the record, her research into two grocery stores in Compton as proof
that poverty and food deserts do not go hand-in-hand is blindingly
shortsighted.
There are more errors of reason, but let me cut to the chase. Flanagan sums up by saying this:
(W)e become complicit— through our best intentions—in an act of
theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent,
uneducated underclass but will rob that group of the very force
necessary to change its fate. The state, which failed these students as
children and adolescents, will have to shoulder them in adulthood, for
it will have created not a generation of gentleman farmers but one of
intellectual sharecroppers, whose fortunes depend on the largesse or
political whim of their educated peers.
The belief that we will create better citizens by teaching to the
test (an idea she advocates for repeatedly and vociferously) is one
that will lead to a generation of closed-minded automatons incapable of
learning, thinking, or fending for themselves. We are far better off
with a generation of citizens who understand that sustenance comes not
from factories or laboratories but from the soil and from hard working
hands, both of which deserve the respect garnered from experience. We
need citizens who are healthier than the generation before them;
throughout most of human history the rich were fat and the poor were
skinny, yet today in America it is quite the opposite. Fixing that
requires direct experience and interaction with our food, something no
schoolroom lecture can provide.
This is not advocacy for some weird Maoist Great Leap Forward where
everyone must leave the cities and go farm. It is knowledge of one of
the truest clichés known: You are what you eat. And as one of
Flanagan’s carefully-book-taught computer programmers would point out,
Garbage In—Garbage Out.
Related Links:
Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: What does ‘fresh-cooked’ really mean?
Michelle Obama vows to “move the ball” on kids’ diets
The moral equivalent of slavery
Researchers at 
The U.S. Department of Labor has sued the owners of bankrupt Mid-States Express Inc. of