Food service has been a bit (a lot) my hobby horse since I arrived in education. In recent days, we have heard the political elite argue over who first came up with the idea of a universal food service in schools.
We heard all sorts of defenses. Some green and some unripe, like “there is no room in schools to accommodate kitchens.” Questions too. “Schools are overflowing, are we going to put cafeterias in trailers?” “Are we going to be forced to supply ourselves from suppliers who have smelled a good deal on the backs of taxpayers, as is already the case with school supplies?” “What will be on the menu in a world where peanuts are feared like the plague?”
All this childishness that I would not even tolerate in my first grade class does not contribute anything constructive to the debate at hand. Any sensible person knows that children must eat before, during and after school. In The plagueCamus notes that “stupidity always insists.” Am I stupid then to insist that things be done properly so that they can continue and instead of existing until the next election?
Politics may seem like a game to many, but it is anything but child’s play. Here is what I would have liked to read and hear from my leaders if they had known how to put aside their insipid quarrels.
Before adding a new level of decision to manage these meals and doing it in a rushed manner, let’s think about what we want in order to implement a model that will make everyone else jealous, to the point of making them want to mention the Scandinavian countries. Better yet, let’s make sure that it is the Scandinavians who, in the future, will mention us!
In the meantime, let’s remember that there is already a food service (but it doesn’t start at the first bell). It costs $1 to parents, if their family income allows it (as if we could afford to be poor…). Let’s let this service take care of those who need it most and get out of the usual quagmire of adding manure to manure. That’s good for agriculture, not education.
Breaking out of established patterns
Let’s add to the initial curriculum the learning of food concepts and make this food problem instructive. When we see the concept of perimeter in class, let’s do it with a real garden and real vegetables that will be used for snacks. This will put an end to this strange practice of serving six grapes in a plastic container or giving out boxes of small tomatoes that come from elsewhere in the middle of March. Catered meals that were prepared at 10 a.m. and poured into a plastic container are not great for the belly or the planet.
Let’s think outside the box and practice percentages by studying the back of the box. We’ll see that there’s way too much sugar for breakfast. Let’s add greenhouses to the roofs of buildings and chickens to the schoolyard. I’m probably out of touch, but let’s honor our ancestors who cleared our corner of the earth. Without them, we’d still be in the Lascaux caves drawing and afraid of thunder.
Let us ask ourselves the following question: does our bureaucratic and accounting management of our children’s needs really correspond to the peak of our evolution as a species? Let us dare to transmit the taste for cooking and knowledge of the basic principles of agriculture, let us dare to combine business with pleasure by asking farmer and entrepreneur Jean-Martin Fortier to participate in the program.
Let us dare to bring another type of culture into our schools: the cultivation of our soil to feed ourselves, that of replacing the gray asphalt of our schoolyards with gardens. Even the famous Fardoche could give lessons to toddlers on counting carrots.
True, this will make the school’s work even harder, as it has its hands full, but there is a way to do it by making the school the most attractive place in the neighborhood. To do this, we must think long term, as we do when we plant carrots; it is long and so good.
When you pull on a shoot that is not ripe, you know what you get? Weeds. I may be idealistic, but it is a thousand times better than being in the potatoes, as some of our leaders are. I dare to believe that the political class will one day stop treating us like cucumbers by throwing tomatoes at each other for the slightest thing. This kind of talk is as empty as the empty stomachs of our children.
Aren’t we tired of being in the field?
A Chinese proverb says: “When a man is hungry, it is better to teach him to fish than to give him a fish.” When a child is hungry, the best thing we can offer him is to feed him by educating him in the hope of breaking the cycle of poverty and inequality of opportunity.
It is also for all these reasons that we must put forward a real reflection on the role of the school, a reflection which would not only serve to put an end to the shortage, but also to make us “mature” as a society.