|
Books by James
Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs
Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century
/
The
American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's
Notebook
Living for Change: An Autobiography
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Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nation's Future
Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party
/
Racism and the Class Struggle
* * * *
* Food
Future Past
By Grace Lee Bogg
In her article titled
“Eating for
Credit” on the Op-Ed page of the February 24 New York
Times, Alice Waters provides an inspiring example of
how to engage schools and schoolchildren in solving some
of our most challenging problems, including how to
change our values.
Waters is the owner of Chez Panisse, a restaurant in
Berkeley, California, which uses only fresh ingredients
grown in accordance with the principles of sustainable
agriculture. Opened in 1971, it has been described by
Gourmet Magazine as the “best restaurant in the U.S.”
Ten years ago Waters helped establish a gardening and
cooking project called the Edible Schoolyard in the
local public schools because she believes that “every
child in this world needs to have a relationship with
the land...to know how to nourish themselves...and to
know how to connect with the community around them."
The program began at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle
School with a kitchen classroom and garden full of
fruits, vegetables and herbs.
Today 1000 King School children are involved in growing,
preparing and sharing fresh food, and food-related
activities are woven into the entire curriculum. Math
classes measure garden beds. Science classes study
drainage and soil erosion. History classes learn about
pre-Columbian civilizations while grinding corn.
The food program has not only become a model for a
district-wide school lunch initiative. It is helping to
combat the epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes which
currently threatens millions of American children
addicted to a fast-food diet of fries and burgers.
“Not only are our children eating
this unhealthy food,” writes Waters, “they're digesting
the values that go with it: the idea that food has to be
fast, cheap and easy; that abundance is permanent and
effortless; that it doesn't matter where food actually
comes from. As a nation, we need to take back
responsibility for the health of not just our children,
but also our culture.”
Another innovative food-centered school program that I
have described in earlier columns is the Urban Nutrition
Initiative created by the University of Pennsylvania in
collaboration with the West Philadelphia Partnership and
Philadelphia Public Schools.
This “interdisciplinary program uses college students
learning horticulture and nutrition to teach high
school students, to teach middle school students, to
teach elementary school students about health, nutrition
and business development,” according to University of
Maryland Professor in African American Studies Jessica
Gordon Nembhard. It is a Œdynamic educational process
based on experiential learning and community
problem-solving integrated with public service. The
program combines a
community health curriculum, school-based urban gardens
and entrepreneurial
and business development
“Students (mostly African American) combine learning
about nutrition, teaching it to others, growing healthy
food and creating businesses to sell and market the
food. The young participants develop entrepreneurship
and many related skills (math, science, marketing,
communications).”
What will it take to get more people thinking in these
holistic and nurturing ways about education? Why are
Michigan Governor Granholm state legislators, school
board and other officials so locked “inside the box”
that they can only come up with punitive proposals
like tougher graduation standards ?
In a 2-hour televised town meeting nearly three years
ago Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick declared “We have to talk
about how to educate our children. Our entire city needs
to be engaged. We are losing the battle. We are not
radical enough. We are still trying to protect this
system. We cannot protect it. We have to break it up.”
Why hasn¹t the Mayor initiated this discussion? If he
won¹t or can’t lead it, who will?
* * *
* *
To help get the discussion going, the Boggs Center has
recently published a 5th printing of my columns on
education. FREEDOM SCHOOLING: BRINGING THE NEIGHBOR BACK
INTO THE HOOD can be ordered from
http://www.boggscenter.org or purchased at the
Michigan Citizen office, 2669 Bagley. 79 pp. $10
+ SH$2.
Source:
Michigan Citizen, March 12-18, 2006
*
* * * *
Eating for Credit
By Alice
Waters
Berkeley, Calif.
Excerpts--
Universal physical education is a
start, and it's a shame that schools have been cutting
back on recess and gym. But in a country where nine
million children over 6 are obese we need the diet part
of the equation, too. It's time for students to start
getting credit for eating a good lunch.
I know from experience that teaching
children about food changes their lives. I helped
establish a gardening and cooking project in the public
schools here in Berkeley called the Edible Schoolyard,
and I've come to believe that lunch should be at the
center of every school's curriculum.
Schools should not just serve food;
they should teach it in an interactive, hands-on way, as
an academic subject. Children's eating habits stay with
them for the rest of their lives. The best way to defeat
the obesity epidemic is to teach children about food —
and thereby prevent them from ever becoming obese. . . .
But when a healthy lunch is a part of
a class that all children have to take, for credit — and
when they can follow food from the garden to the kitchen
to the table, doing much of the work themselves —
something amazing happens. The students want to taste
everything. They get lured in by foods that are
beautiful, that taste and smell good, that appeal to
their senses. When children grow and prepare good,
healthy food themselves, they want to eat it, and,
what's more, they like this way of learning.
We need a revolution, a delicious
revolution, that will induce children — in a pleasurable
way — to think critically about what they eat. The study
of food, and school lunch, should become part of the
core curriculum for all students from kindergarten
through high school. Such a move will take significant
investment and the kind of resolve that this country
showed a half-century ago. It will be costly, but if we
don't pay now, the health care bill later will be
astronomical.
Alice Waters is the owner of
Chez Panisse Restaurant and Cafe and the founder of the
Chez Panisse Foundation.
Source:
New York Times (24 February 2006)
* *
* * *
Responses
Thanks, Grace, for bringing this
story to my attention. I was raised in the countryside
on a small farm. I did not really appreciate it however
until I had lived in the city and saw what urban
children missed out on--digging one hands in plowed
ground and the smell of the earth, walking barefoot, of
seeing beans and watermelons grow. Planting radishes in
the red hills of eastern Zaire was one of the most
wonderful experiences I had while I was there.
I think it is indeed important to engage urban
kids—bring to them new hands on, enlivening
experiences— who are isolated along mean, barren
streets. Can you believe there are people who think
peanuts grow above ground? – Rudy
Rudy, This is an overlooked aspect of
Alex Haley's "Roots" and connecting with our
ancestry. The most overlooked ingredient in Black
culture is passing along values from generation to
generation, visiting with relatives, going to the home
place of our parents and homecoming at the churches that
link us to our past struggles and achievements. We lost
that in the integration movement and civil rights era
when all the things that we had were no longer good
enough and abandoned...
The greatest advancements for Black
People in America occurred in the short 10 year period
after the end of the Civil War when the illiterate
learned to read and write, land was purchased and
families were reunited and legally established land and
property ownership. And then came Jim Crow laws which
were in direct violation of the 13th, 14th and 15th
Amendments of the American Constitution and are grounds
for extensive reparations.
They need to be read and digested by
everyone to understand the magnanimity of this injustice
to Black People. Too many of our children know NOTHING
of their grandparents and very little about their
parents. --Charles H. Atkinson (Decatur,
GA)
* *
* * *
Charles, advancing technologies
disrupted the agrarian life and the transmission of the
culture of which you speak. That includes the widespread
use of radio and tv during our childhood. The
mechanization of agriculture and the ensuing
urbanization changed that life entirely which you harken.
Additional social policies which were intended to
improve our lives nailed the coffin on that way of
life. The building of senior citizen multi-floor
residences was among the reforms that also separated the
generations. Every blessing challenges us.
Almost every aspect of our social and
political development disrupted the traditional
transmission of culture (folktales, folksongs, folkways,
etc., in short, old family and family values) by our
Christian slave ancestors. The building of churches,
schools, acquisition of land all had their impact on
that traditional way of life, in which we, so to speak,
were all in the same barrel, in the same briar patch.
That is, this reorganization of traditional life had
negative aspects, divisive and corrosive effects.
As in all "progress," there is uneven
development, which generates conflict and changes that
are not altogether best for the whole community. All,
individually, did not acquire land. My immediate family,
headed by William Norman Lewis (1905-1970) did not come
into land ownership until 1948, the year of the birth of
his first two grandsons. His mother Mary, born in the
1870s and who raised him and his seven male siblings
alone without a husband or a father, was never a
landowner. She, under the thumb of a local white
farmer, lived into her 90s.
Our family church, which laid its
foundation soon after the War in 1870, owned about 30
acres. It promoted land acquisition and education. But
that church, in becoming a part of a network of
churches, itself undermined the traditional religion,
which was basically congregational and democratic. The
black landowners ran the church and generated new social
and religious values that divided the community into
those who had power (land) and those who didn't. Such
unchecked power always leads to perversions. William's
mother Mary, black as a Guinea woman, called these new
church leaders sons of bitches. Most of these church
leaders, including William's father who was a
deacon, were yella and damn near white. Many frowned on
the spirituals in favor of Methodist hymnals.
Even without integration, public
education and the growing literacy after the Civil
War also disrupted the old manner of the transmission of
culture. The book and magazine culture that came into
the community from white publishers and white writers
challenged the folk tales and the folk songs and the
folk dances and the folk worship and eventually
displaced them.
Schools, William was fond of saying,
created "educated fools." My first African was seen in a
National Geographic magazine. Public education is a
white collar middle-class education, usually deriding
peasant and working class cultures. Such was the Dick
and Jane readers. William boasted he had only gone to
school one day. Yet he could read, write, and figure.
Maybe that was a gift of God. His readings, however,
were restricted to the Bible and almanacs. Though
religious, he restricted his involvement in church
activities. He, however, could plant and he could build
houses.
In short, the traditional culture
created by our Christian slave ancestors in the
antebellum South was not supplanted solely by the
social, political, and cultural revolutions of the 1960s
and the 1970s. Our liberation itself began changes not
altogether in the best interests of all of the
community. Recall the dilemma of Moses and the Hebrews
children in the Sinai after their liberation. At least,
they had forty years to collect themselves. We were
tossed into the terrorist pot and told to swim as we
might, like Shine.
The emphasis on book literacy, land
acquisition, and church construction, in a sense, opened
the door wider to "satanic" influences.
Still we are not altogether forlorn,
without resources. We discovered that when we first
stepped off the boat and have not forgotten
that. Inwardly we still retain some of the spiritual
values handed down by our slave ancestors. We adapt. We
create. We have a love for life. We have our victories.
We have a faith that we still can overcome life
obstacles. . . .
It's important to study our
histories. Some of it is useful. Too much romance of it,
however, is dangerous. Romance can blind us to the
realities of our histories and struggles, and our
present obstacles. Our life in America has never been
static but rather always dynamic and forward. We should
shun those who now worship the past and hierarchy and
argue for a static universe, and other escapist
fantasies. Those structured mindsets will not serve us
all. -- Rudy posted 15 March 2006 * * * *
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* updated 26 December
2007 |
