Culture and cultivation

Okay, Alice Waters makes me tired. She’s domineering, precious and the product of much privilege – privilege she appears incapable of unlearning. In Thomas McNamee’s Alice Waters biography she is quoted regarding the end of her marriage to the effect that she knew her ex was unhappy and felt she made all the big decisions in their lives without his input, but she’d always thought they could work it out. (My paraphrase is probably harsher than her actual words, but the point struck me pretty hard.)

Yet I’m not ready to toss out the Waters' Edible Schoolyard idea like Caitlin Flanagan. And I can not equate gardening with field hand labor, as Flanagan does in her Atlantic article. There is much to learn from the experience of gardening, and it doesn’t necessarily conflict with educational achievements in math and language arts. Flanagan’s piece doesn’t mention that Waters is a trained Montessori teacher when she writes of “her decision in the 1990s to expand her horizons into the field of public-school education.” Regardless of one’s estimation of the Montessori method – I’m agnostic on the subject – Waters is not a dilettante in educational matters.

I know about Waters’ Montessori training because, like Flanagan, I read McNamee’s biography. Presumably Flanagan does, too. And yet she writes that Waters is “someone whose brilliant cookery and laudable goals may not be the best qualifications for designing academic curricula for the public schools.” Cherry pick facts much?

Much of Flanagan’s point revolves around the issue of class. After introducing us to a farm worker’s son who goes to school only to pick lettuce in the hot sun, she writes : “[Waters’] goal is that children might become ‘eco-gastronomes’ and discover ‘how food grows’—a lesson, if ever there was one, that our farm worker’s son might have learned at his father’s knee—leaving the Emerson and Euclid to the professionals over at the schoolhouse." That the farm worker’s son has knowledge on the topic is an interesting point to my mind, and not the least because his knowledge empowers him to own and teach the lesson. He is one sort of expert in the field of study. Leaving geometry and American Transcendentalism to others in favor of lettuce-picking, however, is surely not at issue because there is a garden in the schoolyard. The two are in no way incompatible.

I do not advocate accepting low academic achievement while teaching gardening in schools. That would be just plain stupid. But how much time do the children spend gardening in the project? Ninety minutes a week, according to Flanagan. And then they work in academic classrooms on related projects, which Flanagan believes interferes with mastering the basics of math, science and language arts. I don’t know if this is so, but if it is, it must be improved. Checking the Edible Schoolyard Web site showed me a couple of sample middle school math problems related to the garden and cooking: solving for x and y in a problem that asks the student to double a recipe, and building a model of a garden structure that has these interrelated polygons in these proportions. I’d be interested to see how they stack up against lessons in other 7th and 8th grade math curricula. If they are not up to snuff, then they should be improved. That they refer to the general topic of gardening and food is not itself reason to reject them, however.

I participated in establishing a community garden last year, and the community part of the enterprise amazed me. People who otherwise would never have met collaborated with one another. An artist became the friend of a plumber and a county commissioner. A Glen Beck fan worked along side Obama voters. A Church of the Nazarene preacher assisted non-believers and even a few Hindus make raised beds and plant vegetables. An agricultural science professor and a photographer spread mulch and composted manure.

All these diverse individuals came together because they were inspired by a common project. In one sense any common project – fire house, art gallery, or public restroom – would have done the trick. But that the task involved raising food added meaning to the work beyond a simple common purpose.

Food is important.

Beyond providing mere fuel, food is a part of the external world which has been selected according to custom and tradition, purified by fire and taken into our bodies. What we eat is subject to a symbolic, even spiritual dimension. Not for nothing do Christians profess communion though the symbolic act of eating and drinking. Not for nothing is Passover observed with a meal. Not for nothing is Ramadan a time of fasting. Not for nothing are there dietary laws associated with many great religions.

Alice Waters can be irritatingly foodie-righteous. Anthony Bourdain once compared her to the Khmer Rouge because of her intractability. But I believe she has a point when she asserts out that many of us have lost a meaningful sense of belonging to the earth because of the ways we approach food: industrialized, anonymous, processed beyond recognition. In this she is not alone. We are witnessing a cultural shift in America with respect to food and our relation to it. Alice Waters is only part of the change we are experiencing. Michael Pollan’s books on the subject echo and elaborate on many of her ideas. The connection between processed food and obesity has been researched and documented in physical anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s excellent book “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human.” Michelle Obama’s White House Food Initiative is also part of our changing system of beliefs on the topic.

What I have called a cultural shift Flanagan terms “Food Hysteria.” I assume the difference boils down to duration as much as anything. If my cultural shift jumps the shark next year, it’s Flanagan’s “Hysteria.” It is entirely likely that I am wrong and that I'm merely a faddist, but I am glad we built our community garden. And I’d like to see an edible schoolyard in my little town.

Judge and jury

I spent today jurying a high school art competition at UT-Dallas. Sponsored by the Texas Visual Art Association, it's an annual event in the UT-D gallery. I've done it before, but this year the competition had grown quite a lot over past years' numbers. Over 1400 pieces were submitted. We jurors (Brian Gibb, director of Public Trust Gallery and publisher of Art Prostitute; Liliana Bloch, director of the McKinney Ave. Contemporary; and Margaret Meehan, an active artist currently living in Dallas; and me) whittled the show down to a manageable 170 or so works after hours of viewing and muttering amongst ourselves.

Coincidentally, yesterday I had lunch with a group of artists including Robyn O'Neil who was in my tiny town to jury the student show at her alma mater. I had the pleasure of being her teacher some years back, though I really can't claim to have taught her anything. Robyn is an amazing artist. Here's a picture of one of her drawings:


(click on it to see the full image)

Lunch was wonderful -- great companionship and good conversation that ranged from schemes for financing a trip to Berlin to a YouTube video of Paula Deen losing her pants during a cooking demonstration.

A bit of a legacy

I used to teach art.

A group show at 500X (a non-profit, emerging-artists space in Dallas) features the work of a number of my former students. Artists in the show with whom I've have a pedagogical relationship include Tia Petering, Michael Winegarden, Liz Elsberg, and Pati Dye. It's gratifying to see the kids doing so well.

A former colleague and estimable ceramic artist, Katherine Taylor, is also part of the show.

Thanks to Michael Miller, another former colleague, for the heads up.

Prof. Joe Barnhardt, an interview

WBIR, Knoxville has an extensive and unedited interview with Joe Barhnardt here. The video is a little over 27 minutes long, but it's worth it.

It's obvious he's on the mend. It's obvious he's heartbroken over the loss of his dear friend Linda Kraeger. She and her husband lived in a two-story house they shared with the Barnhardts -- separate living quarters upstairs and down. They had moved to Knoxville last year to help care for his two granddaughters.

Over the course of the interview, Joe talks about capital punishment, about thinking he was dying, about religious tolerance, about civil society, about the injuries sustained by other members of his family, and about the daily routines of their lives. Quoting Roger Williams, he says people of different beliefs can live together "so long as you keep the civil peace."

He speaks of having the common sense to know that you can learn from people whose beliefs you do not share. Common sense is what he embodies throughout. That and love for his family.

Students of History

In the spring of 2003, I was teaching a 2-D design class in Dallas. The noise from the Bush war machine was at its highest as the administration worked us and itself up to the level of madness necessary for a preemptive attack on Saddam’s Iraq. A few days before the first air strikes on Baghdad, one of my students asked me for permission to miss class so she could participate in an anti-war rally that evening. I have a strict attendance policy in my studio classes, but I also missed a lot of classes myself in the spring of 1970 (unbelievably naïve!) walking door to door asking for signatures on a petition to end the war in Vietnam.

Sure, kid, rally and demonstrate against this stupid idea.

Next week she was back in class, defeated. The war was on. She’d raised her voice in earnest and she’d had no effect. None. I’ve lost many political contests, but it was her first. I tried to console her, but my words sounded empty even to me. Somehow “you let them know what you think” doesn’t really work in the face of smart bombs and cruise missiles.

The previous fall, a student in my painting class told me he was leaving college at the end of the term. He planned to enlist in the army.

“Why? “

“It just seems like the right thing to do at this time in my life.”

It was an honorable decision, one that he’d arrived at reasonably. He would do his duty. His country needed him, and we answered the call like thousands before him. I never saw him again. I hope he’s alright. He was a good painter.

Last night, I saw part of a documentary about a young man horribly wounded in this idiotic war, and the sense of responsibility overwhelmed me. How could I have let this thing happen? How could any of us have let this thing happen? Was it inconvenient to stop the idiocy? Was it somehow a threat to our careers or our comfort? We have shirked our duty as Americans, and our debts to patriotic, idealistic young Americans like those students are beyond repayment.