School-Garden Controversy Continues

We've spent a few pixels on this site discussing Caitlin Flanagan's diatribe against school gardens. Her inflammatory article laying waste to the Edible Schoolyards program and others like it has predictably agitated the blogosphere, sending many a foodie website raving about her wickedness.

Now I can direct you to an in-depth refutation of Flanagan's article, a thoughtful piece by Corby Kummer in the Atlantic, the same outlet, incidentally, where Flanagan's piece appeared. He slices to the center of "Flanagan's fairly indefensible argument, which is in its way as elitist and dismissive as she calls Waters" by identifying its "incendiary heart." He quotes Flanagan:

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.

While some of Flanagan's concerns about the programs are worth considering, her insistence on imputing such evil machinations to people who, based on everything one can learn about them, have nothing but good intentions, makes it all too easy to discount everything else she writes.

She herself doesn't even seem entirely clear on whether she finds these programs to be misguided, liberal hogwash or ominous, racist conspiracy. As Kummer quotes Marsha Guerrero, executive director of the Berkeley Edible Schoolyard, as saying, "There are a lot of crackpots who don't understand what we do."

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