Paper Palate

I think that we are onto something with the idea of healthy hedonism.

It may send our more puritannical anti-pleasure brethren in this country into a tizzy, but, so be it. Bring it on.

This is the kind of culture war I am up for.

I’m armed and ready with a saute pan in one hand and a trowel in the other.

What is the locus of this battle to be?

School lunches.

You know, the kind that contain mystery meat burgers, cardboard pizza, ketchup as a vegetable, and enough fat calories to fuel a small town in Applachia for a week.

Today’s NY Times featured an Op-Ed piece from chef and Slow Food doyenne Alice Waters that states the issue very simply: in order to combat the obesity and type II diabetes epidemic we have among today’s children, we need to do more than ban ads for sugar cereals on cartoons, ditch soda and smack machines in schools and toss the whole milk out of the lunchroom. Bringing back physical education at school is a large help, but we need diet to be part of the equation, and having healthy choices in the lunchroom isn’t enough, because they ignored in favor of tater tots and fried chicken nuggets.

Waters does no less than suggest a revolution: we need to teach kids about food as part of the curriculum of the school.

Not just in health class, with boring lectures about nutrition that would put a food-obsessed blogger to sleep.

Nope.

She proposes that kids have their own gardens on school grounds, where they grow vegetables and fruits that are then harvested and cooked for their lunches. Waters rightly points out that science is beautifully taught in a hands-on way by working in a garden: there before the kid’s eyes and under their fingers is an object lesson in geology, climate, microbiology, botany and zoology.

Mathematics, geometry and algebra can all be taught as garden beds are planned, plotted, measured out, dug and planted.

Chemistry and physics can be taught in the kitchen as children’s eyes are opened to the changes that cookery brings to food.

And of course, when they sit down to eat the food that they have grown, harvested and cooked, they can learn nutrition, not by hearing about it, but by tasting it.

For those who would argue that this is some kind of pie-in-the-sky liberal nattering that would never work, witness the fact that Water’s “Edible Classroom Project” has been ongoing with much success at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley for over a decade. Kids at this school have been seduced by the flavors of such unlikely vegetables as kale, chayote squash, turnips and beets. Educators at the middle school have found that when kids experience food from ground to plate, they are more curious to try it than if it is just set in front of them as a fait acompli.

And once they try it, they like it.

And for those who might claim it would all cost too much money, I ask this: which would you rather pay for–a better education for kids that will lead to better health, or the public costs of health care for these kids as they grow up as lifelong diabetics?

The answer to me is clear: pay for some vegetable seeds, gardening equipment and a classroom kitchen now, because I’d rather do that than watch kids die young from a completely preventable disease later.