Caitlin Flanagan, Cultivating Controversy

Earlier this week, a friend sent me a link to Caitlin Flanagan’s screed against Alice Waters and the Edible Schoolyard movement in the Atlantic Monthly. Purportedly a review of the biography of Alice Waters (“Alice Waters and Chez Panisse” by Thomas McNamee), the piece barely mentions the book but instead takes Ms. Waters to task for “indoctrinating” our students by forcing them to toil in gardens when they should be reading Shakespeare (or apparently, Arthur Miller).

I was going to write a long-winded rebuttal to Ms. Flanagan but I see now that I don’t have to. Many bloggers have beat me to it, so I will just quote from a few of the best.

• Ed Levine over at Serious Eats says Caitlin Flanagan’s “hatchet job” on Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard project is belligerent, fueled by animus, and wrong, wrong, wrong.  “It’s one thing to employ a healthy, thoughtful skepticism when it comes to Alice Waters. That, I think, comes with the Saint Alice territory. It’s another to engage in character and policy assassination, as Flanagan does in this piece,” writes Levine. “To support Alice Waters, she says, is to be ‘complicit…in an act of theft that will…contribute to the creation of a permanent, uneducated underclass….’ Shame on her and shame on the Atlantic for giving credence to her ridiculously far-fetched arguments. This isn’t thought-provoking journalism. It’s poorly reasoned mud-slinging.”

• Kurt Michael Friese at Civil Eats writes:

“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% 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 Ms. Flanagan’s ideas of education as merely a means to create consumers, rather than citizens.”

• Jill Richardson at La Vida Locavore simply says, “I am baffled by the utter stupidity of this snotty Atlantic article criticizing school gardens and Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard specifically.” Richardson goes on to list all the math, science, and history her boyfriend’s kids are learning via their adventures in the garden: the nitrogen cycle, taxonomy, reproduction, and charting the growth of pea plants on graphs, etc. Richardson concludes with something that any teacher knows to be true: “These are all things I remember learning in school, but you almost need to see them to really understand them. And it’s much more fun to do your learning in a hands-on way than at a desk.”

• Finally, Andrew Leonard’s takedown of “Cultivating Failure” on Salon.com is perhaps the most impassioned and the most thorough. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here are some of the best bits:

“But there are some problems with the construct, not least of which is that reference to the ‘hot sun,’ which suggests that even though Caitlin Flanagan was born and raised in Berkeley, she doesn’t recall the East Bay’s climate all that well. But more to the point is that initial word: ‘imagine.’ Flanagan’s concoction is just that; a fantasy made up out of thin air. In her entire 3,500-word article, there is no indication that she talked to a single Latino in Berkeley who might have misgivings as to the merits of elementary and middle school kids spending a mere hour-and-a-half a week tending a garden.”

and

“Her entire case is circumstantial. If the kids are out in the garden, then they are not reading ‘Emerson and Euclid’ or learning ‘hard math.’ The hole in this argument is so large that you could drive a herd of grass-fed cows right through it. If that time is so precious, then why not do away with art and music and physical education classes too?!

You don’t have to be a Berkeley parent to value art and music education, or understand that regular exercise is critical for raising healthy kids. But in Berkeley, and increasingly elsewhere, we also take seriously the idea that understanding what we eat is an essential ingredient in understanding how to live well, healthily and sustainably, in this world, and that it may be just as important, or more, to the prosperous functioning of society as is the ability to play the flute, paint a picture, run the mile or use the Pythagorean theorem. Flanagan rejects that value system, using the poor performance of California schools as a smoke screen for cultural warfare. Her problem with public school gardens is not their effect on test scores, which she can’t measure anyway, but her cultural animosity against the Alice Waters of the world, the foodies, the organic gardeners and locavores and crusaders against factory farms and monoculture agribusinesses.”

If these early blogs are any indication of the cogent, spirited responses out there, then I can’t wait to see the letters that will no doubt appear in next month’s issue of the Atlantic. (The online version doesn’t accept letters, apparently, or I’m guessing there would be a ton already.)

Feel free to continue the conversation below!