I am trying to articulate some thoughts for a long(er) piece I have in mind about the way organic and whole foods are advertised to women and how these products are always associated with ideas of purity. This purity, in turn, a very gendered notion loaded with puritan ideas of “untainted”, “untouched”, etc. Which in a sense, is another jacket for the same old “women should aspire to be virginal creatures” rhetoric. Adding to this, I am (yet again), thinking of the “buy local” movement as an extension of some tribalist and racist ideas that uncritically sell a product as inherently superior because it comes from one’s “own people”; completely obviating the production of said product, undocumented immigration, farm labor mostly in the hands of immigrants that media promotes as “dangerous and undesirable, etc.
So, in all of this mishmash of (so far) incoherent thoughts, I came across a piece at The Atlantic. It’s not new (from 2010), however, the investigative background that went into it is timeless. Cultivating Failure. How school gardens are cheating our most vulnerable students. I cannot recommend it enough. Just to quote one paragraph:
If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.
The author brings up stats about the academic failures of the Hispanic and Black students enrolled in this program. Failures that, going by the numbers, are quite catastrophic. She emphasizes the racial dynamics created through this program. And yet, I must warn you, DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS. Most of them ignore the figures and, instead, attack the author for not “realizing” how useful it is for these students to spend time growing lettuce.
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