• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 986 0

was. A local nonprofit helps support it, the school system has been cooperative, but our Learning Landscapes curriculum is the dream and full-time project of a green-thumbed angel named Deni. She helps the kindergartners grow popcorn and plant a rainbow of flowers to learn their colors. Second-graders make a special garden for hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies, while learning about pollination. Third-graders grow a pizza garden that covers the plant kingdom. Lily’s class was starting seeds they planned to set out in a colonial herb garden, giving some life to their Virginia history lessons. Each grade’s program is tied to concrete objectives the kids must know in order to pass their state-mandated testing.

Virtually everyone I know in the school system feels oppressed by these testing regimes hanging over everything. Teachers sense them as huge black clouds on the horizon of April. For the kids it’s more like a permanent threat of air attack. In our state—no kidding—they are called Standards of Learning, or “SOLs.” (I don’t think anyone intended the joke.) But Learning Landscapes works because it gets kids outdoors studying for tests while believing they are just playing in dirt.

Deni knows how to get the approval of a school board, but she has a larger game plan for these kids than just passing the next exam. “One of the key things gardens can teach students is respect: for themselves, for others, and the environment,” she says. “It helps future generations gain an understanding of our food system, our forests, our water and air, and how these things are all connected.”

From a biological perspective, the ultimate act of failure is to raise helpless kids. Not a parent I know who’s worth the title wants to do that. But our operating system values Advanced Placement Comparative Politics, for example, way, way ahead of Knowing How to Make Your Own Lunch. Kids who can explain how supernovas are formed may not be allowed to get dirty in play group, and many teenagers who could construct and manage a Web site would starve if left alone on a working food farm. That’s hardly their fault. We all may have some hungry months ahead of us, even hungry years, when a warmed-up globe changes the rules of a game we smugly thought we’d already aced. We might live to regret some of our SOL priorities. But the alumni of at least one Appalachian county’s elementary schools will know how to grow their own pizzas, and I’m proud of them. If I could fit that on a bumper sticker, I would.

Legislating Local

* * *

The epidemic of childhood obesity in the United States has incited parents, communities, and even legislators to improve kids’ nutrition in one place they invariably eat: schools. Junk foods have been legally banned from many lunchrooms and school vending machines. But what will our nation’s youth eat instead—fresh local produce? As if!

Dude, it’s going down. In 2004, in a National School Lunch Act amendment, Congress authorized a seed grant for the Farm to Cafeteria Program, promoting school garden projects and acquisition of local foods from small farms. The Local Produce Business Unit of the Department of Defense actually procures produce. Benefits of these programs, above and beyond the food, include agricultural education through gardening, farm visits, presentations by local farmers, and modest economic gains for the community. More than one-third of our states now have active farm-to-school programs; farm-to-college alliances are also growing.

The USDA Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has a Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program for purchasing local food. It provides coupons good for fresh produce purchased from farms, farmers’ markets, and roadside stands. In 2006, some $20 million in government funds provided these benefits to more than 2.5 million people.

In a strong legislative move, Woodbury County, Iowa, mandated in 2006 that the county (subject to availability) “shall purchase…locally produced organic food when a department of Woodbury County serves food in the usual course