Kurt Michael Friese

One of the advantages we enjoy here in Iowa is that we get to see our presidential candidates and their families up close and personal during our caucus process.  While I had seen then-Senator Obama give that stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, it was really a speech here in Iowa by his wife Michelle that made me a fan of his.  I figured if a lady this smart and classy married him he must be worth a look.

Many of us foodie-activist types were excited when Barack Obama was elected because we believed that maybe finally something could be accomplished for our agenda of “Good, Clean, and Fair” food for everyone.  Sure enough, that first spring there was the First Lady out there planting an organic garden on the White House grounds.  Say what you will about their former opponents, no one could imagine Cindy McCain doing anything even remotely similar.

So now a year has gone by and Mrs. Obama is launching a childhood obesity initiative the way such things get launched these days, on NBC’s Today Show.  It’s tradition for FLOTUS to have a cause such as this, and these causes are almost always worthwhile: literacy, homelessness, “Just Say ‘NO!’” etc.

Ms. Obama’s initiative is no exception.  The statistics are alarming – 1 in 3 American children born in 2000 or after will develop diabetes before they are old enough to vote.  Among minorities that ratio rises to 1 in 2.  There is no health system that can hope to cope with the implications of that no matter what her husband and Congress manage to accomplish.

Whole post an video clips @ Civileats.org

Tags: Articles, Barack Obama, CivilEats, Health Reform, Michelle Obama, President Obama, School Lunch, Slow Food, food politics, hunger, school gardens, time for lunch by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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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)

Ms. 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.

Read the whole post @ CivilEats.com

Tags: Articles, CivilEats, Health Reform, food politics, food security, hunger, school gardens by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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