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On Eating Where I Teach
Posted by Matt Love, May 25, 2011 2:30 pm
6 Comments
Filed under: On Oregon.
I rate food at about the top of my list as far as important political and moral issues go. It always depresses me to learn how a well-meaning person who cares about the world, volunteers, works for positive change, and tries to raise consciousness of the ignorant around him never gives a thought to the food he consumes or what the modern industrial production of that food costs this planet and its creatures.
Eating is a moral act in America. In other places, it's about survival, but that's an issue altogether outside the scope of this blog. Most Americans, from those dependent on food stamps to the President of the United States, have clear and sensible — moral — choices about what they decide to consume.
Just take a look around Newport High School on the Central Oregon Coast where I teach and you will see that a vast majority of food decisions made by students are routinely terrible.
Start with breakfast. Foamy Starbucks drinks and huge bottles of soda pop. A Rockstar to my left, a Redbull to my right. Monsters everywhere. A muffin from a gas station. Satan's handiwork, Lunchables rear their ugly yellow heads.Foamy Starbucks drinks and huge bottles of soda pop. A Rockstar to my left, a Redbull to my right. Monsters everywhere. A muffin from a gas station. Satan's handiwork, Lunchables rear their ugly yellow heads.
Lunch is far worse. The clock strikes noon and student race to their cars and invade the 15 or so fast food outlets within a mile of campus. They return 15 minutes later with oceans of melted cheese and greasy animal flesh produced in a holocaust of industrialized food production characterized by genetic modification, steroids, chemicals, antibiotics, barbaric confinement, torture, animal experimentation, pollution, and environmental degradation.
But it sure tastes good, and it sure is convenient. I know some teachers don't allow students to bring food into their classrooms, but I consider that one of the worst and shortsighted pedagogical decisions imaginable. I want them to eat their terrible fast food in front of me, so I can comment on it right there. It's the curriculum that never stops teaching.
Yes, we have a cafeteria at school, but around 90 percent of the students with driver's licenses leave campus for lunch. Many of those 90 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch. The food in the cafeteria isn't great, but at least it meets federal nutrition standards, and it does include salad.
I can't just criticize the kids. Before arriving at Newport High School, I had never taught at a school with an open campus. Thus it came as a total shock to me to witness some of the adults (usually seriously overweight) employed here eating worse than the kids, meaning they regularly left campus at lunch, returned with terrible fast food, and pretty much ate this garbage in plain view of their students. Is there a more irresponsible personal health image for a teacher to model daily for their students? I can't think of one outside of smoking a cigarette and swigging from a bottle of vodka while making a presentation. It totally contradicts everything I hear coming across the hall from health class and, I would also pray, PE.
Virtually no one can eat right all the time. I know I can't. Good choices exist though. Some of them cost more money and take more thought and preparation. If more Americans made them on a daily basis, it would quickly foment a cultural revolution and, with it, significant moral change.
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Matt Love won the Oregon Literary Arts Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award in 2009 for his contributions to Oregon history and literature. He lives on the Oregon Coast and teaches English and journalism at Newport High School. His latest book is Love and the Green Lady: Meditations on the Yaquina Bay Bridge.
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When I was in high school, the two health teachers were a husband/wife pair. They both used to smoke in the teacher's lounge (this was back in 1989, mind you), and the woman health teacher routinely told her students that she kept her weight down by skipping breakfast.
Kids do grow out of these tastes. My son (21) now tells me the virtues of vegetables - he who was a 'meat and potatoes man - hold the potatoes'!! even as a toddler. We have closed campus here (the only fast food is 20 miles away anyway), and soda pop has disappeared from the vending machines at school. The school lunch is cardboardy - almost everything is highly processed - breaded and injected and stratified in a freezer somewhere. But, as you say, it does include a salad option.
I just read "On Eating Where I Teach" and I am happy to report that The Evergreen State College in Olympia WA (where I teach) has a first class restaurant that serves a healthy, creative, mostly organic, delicious menu, and it's run by students! When Matt Love's high schoolers mature to "sustainability," they might just change their food preferences.
I guess all I can say is Yes, I agree. I too work in a school and have for the past 16 years. I cannot believe that people who work in schools are so oblivious that they have no idea what is being said about American eating habits, but all the evidence points to everyone living in caves deprived of all forms of media, armed only with a cookbook entitled "Eat it All, Eat it Big."
You're the Rock Star, Matt Love - great essay. May I share it with my classes on research and argumentation and ethics? Each time I teach it, eyes roll when I tell students their papers will have to focus on "food issues", but every time, after actually doing research on food controversies (and there are many), some students become vegetarians, some switch to grass-fed beef, some give up bottled water (because of the bottles), others decide organic is cheaper in the long run than "normal." Changing food habits requires knowledge, but once the knowledge is there, change can come, perhaps not in a "revolution" but in small defiant acts.
"I consider that one of the worst and shortsighted pedagogical decisions imaginable. " The message in this blog is an important one, but the effectiveness is diminished with the absolutism in such statements as the one quoted above. The history of education is replete with those who have found THE way to enlighten the "ignorant". Since we are all "ignorant" about many things a little humility and leading by example seems to work best.