Rage Against the Vegetable Garden: Factory Farming Manifesto Sets Sights on the Edible Schoolyard Program
Submitted by meg on Fri, 01/15/2010 - 2:18pm.
BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White
by Meg White
My father often tells a story of a chicken dinner he once prepared that involved a "whole fryer." I toddled into the kitchen, perhaps curious as to what Da-da was doing in there. He held the bird that would become our dinner up for to his little daughter to see: pimply skin, strange flipper-looking things and all.
"It looks like a little person!" I cried.
My father was taken aback. Looking down at this shocked little person standing in his kitchen, he wondered how it could be that for every time he had served his little girl fowl, she never realized that it came from the same type of entity depicted as Chicken Little and Foghorn Leghorn.
The thing was, we lived in the city. And though my father's parents had experience farming, my own knowledge of such a place was limited to books and the occasional public school field trip. Sure, trips to historic Gibbs Museum of Pioneer and Dakotah Life in St. Paul, MN were cool, but the experience gave us kids the impression that a "farm" was a relic of the past, an inefficient, hardscrabble life we were all happy to abandon.
That was true, for the most part. Farms in the traditional sense, the ones I saw depicted on the fronts of margarine packages growing up, didn't exist anymore outside of museums. The factory farm that took over was certainly no place for children. Of course, we got the offal from such places. I still remember the taste of the greasy rectangles of pizza and tater tots from the "hot lunch" line. And in recent years, school lunchrooms have been a place to dump contaminated meat from abused and sickly cows.