Adam Ozimek rants about vegetables:
[Alice] Waters and her organization are touting a new study showing that school gardens get kids to eat more vegetables. This isn’t surprising, but how much does it impact their lives once they graduate? Are future blue collar workers really going to take the time to grow themselves vegetable gardens in window boxes outside their apartments?….From every description of these programs I’ve read
they have an obsession with local, fresh, organic, and growing your own food. The obsession should be on quick, easy, delicious, and inexpensive. These sets of descriptors are damn near antonyms.
If you can get kids to eat and prefer frozen vegetables then you’ve got a sustainable improvement in diet and nutrition. If you get them to like fresh organic vegetables they’ve grown in the garden or bought at the farmers market, then you’ve temporarily instilled in them the tastes of upper middle class people with enough time and money on their hands for such luxuries.
If people like Alice Waters and Jaime Oliver want wider support for heathy schools movements they need to purge them of the wasteful upper-class liberal obsession over local, fresh, and organic foods, and instead focus them on practical and sustainable lessons like how to prepare frozen vegetables cheaply, quickly, and deliciously.
I feel ideally situated to report objectively on this since the only vegetables I like are tomatoes, and they aren’t even really vegetables at all — though the Supreme Court has decreed otherwise. In any case, I figure they’re close enough, and better than eating nothing vegetable-ish at all.
But back to all those upper-class liberal vegetable gardens in local schools. Haven’t they been around long enough for someone to do a serious study of this?1 You know the drill: interview ten thousand 30-year-olds, control for a whole bunch of variables, and then do a regression that plots years of tending vegetable gardens in school vs. current consumption of vegetables. Let’s settle this thing once and for all.
1In fact, longer than you think. My mother says her first grade class had a little garden, and that was back in 1938.
