Grows on trees

It's now accepted wisdom that modern children's ignorance as to where their food comes from is something in desperate need of a remedy. If your child thinks vegetables come from the supermarket or, god forbid, the freezer, this must be addressed. Leave it to the NYT parenting blog to provide the most extreme example: a boy who, because of his (lactose-tolerant!) Northwest European ancestry, must milk cows as some kind of feats-of-strength bar mitzvah, so that his mother can write about it, which is, of course, what coming-of-age rituals are all about. (There's a video as well.)

Anyway, I'm still not sure why knowing where food comes from is supposed to be necessary. A certain amount of this knowledge might come from a biology class (what a plant is, how plants make babies, and the inevitable sprout-a-seed project), but why do we need to know more about farm life than any other? Why do we need to know how crops are harvested? It's not that farm knowledge is damaging, so much as that there are so many other things kids ought to know more about, things that are actually applicable to their lives, that might be more useful. Farm Studies is fine, but not necessarily pressing.

Counter and counter-counter arguments:

-Everyone eats. But everyone also... you see where this is going. We don't expect kids to have intimate knowledge of the sewage system. Everybody breathes, but we don't insist that kids meet with air-pollution researchers. Everybody wears clothing, but I have yet to hear of school trips to the sweatshops of lower Manhattan.

-It's a good life lesson for children - especially ones from wealthy backgrounds - to realize that hard physical labor makes their lives possible. But is the work that goes into growing organic carrots so much more strenuous than whatever factory-workers who make processed foods go through? Do we need kids to know how their houses were constructed? Roads?

-Kids who've been educated about what it looks like when a tomato's on the vine probably have more sympathy for tomato-pickers. But again, there are plenty of crummy jobs out there, and we don't try to teach empathy by having kids do a day in the life as a home-care aide, a day in the life as a Petsmart janitor. More likely, kids will come to have a romantic, and altogether unrealistic, idea of where the actual food they consume comes from, and will then think it's horrible that any food isn't produced in such charming conditions... and will, in turn, not know how to tell the difference between good and bad large- or mid-scale food-production systems. There's a degree of artisanalness necessary to not be on the Twinkie diet, but it's a great deal less extreme than tiny gardens, backyard goat cheese experiments, and the like. No processing plant, however great it treats its workers, however splendid the food it produces, will have the charm of scampering bunnies and so forth.

-If kids know where their food comes from, better yet, if they've grown it themselves, they'll eat fruits and vegetables. If they eat (super-duper-local) fruits and vegetables, they won't be obese. Childhood obesity is a problem. Gardens are the answer. To this, I'd say that if kids enjoy gardening, it's certainly a whole lot better than a lot of other recreational activities thrown at them (unlike football, little risk of concussion). If I had the space (technically the rights to what is in fact a great deal of outdoor space), I'd go vegetable-garden-crazy. But I'm not sure about this as a nutrition fix for The Youth. Even if it works in the immediate moment, and the home-grown peas are consumed, will this make canned or even frozen peas - or, for that matter, home-grown peas grown by someone else - more appetizing? Where exactly are parents going to be procuring all these garden-fresh vegetables, enough so to account for the greenery on the nightly dinner plate? Meanwhile, to repeat myself for a change, it's incredibly unlikely that the presence of local, seasonal, home-grown vegetables is making the difference for anyone's weight. There's correlation, yes, but causation seems unlikely, when not terribly many garden-growing yuppies are in fact subsistence farmers, or are otherwise managing, via farmers market or CSA, to only eat local/seasonal/organic.

-So let's accept that it's inconsequential if your kid eats tomatoes all his life without ever learning what a tomato plant looks like. But it can't hurt for a kid to learn that ketchup comes from tomatoes, or more specifically, roughly what's done to tomatoes to get them to that state, right? But this is really just a nutrition issue, or more simply, a teaching-your-kid-to-cook issue. It's inefficient for everyone to be a farmer, but everyone does need to know how to cook, at least until the nutrition and quality of readily-accessible prepared foods increases tremendously. This is a basic-survival, be-a-functional-person thing. But it in no way requires agricultural knowledge. If your kid will only eat vegetables he himself has bought and prepared, that's at least sustainable. Only ones he grew himself, less so.