By now, most of us have read, attempted to digest, or at minimum, skimmed the numerous retorts to Caitlin Flanagan’s anti-school-garden rant in Atlantic Monthly. The allocation of Monsanto’s, and other agribusinesses’, annual ad spends with the magazine, might automatically allow us to dismiss Flanagan or any other Atlantic writer’s credibility on the topic of growing food sustainably – but then, the majority of subscribers are not us. And this is what troubles me.
I grew up reading Atlantic Monthly. It was, indeed, the publication with which I credit a great deal of my love of words. My father encouraged me to read its lengthy and often obtuse articles, and my rhetoric and writing skills grew as a result. Just over two years ago, he canceled his subscription – and last year, I, mine. I cannot read articles on “feeding the world” facing opposite ads by the chemical and seed companies seeking to dominate not only our own country’s market and food sovereignty, but that of the world.
Certainly, I am aware of positive ideologies disseminated by Atlantic, such as our friend Carol Ann Sayle’s food blog and in general, much of the writing of Corby Kummer. I am, myself, consistently faced with the quandry of whether conventional agricultural entities might be brought around to the light by participating in public dialogue with us – such as conferences to which we find ourselves invited, branded by certain meat trade groups. The square I find myself landing on, however, is most often doubt. These organizations and media outlets are enriching themselves and benefiting in the public eye by association with us – those entrenched in the true sustainable agriculture.
While I’ve enjoyed the sea of rebuttals to Flanagan’s vitriol, from Tom Philpott to Kurt Michael Friese, my favorite has been the “renegade lunch lady”, Ann Cooper’s. She cites the great Satan, unregulated marketing to children, a point among they myriad missing from Flanagan’s article which I consider to be the most obvious and yet, challenging, to address in the court of American public opinion, particularly given our government’s love of appointing ex-Monsanto executives to positions regulating our food.
“From the union of government and science…The Mad Farmer walks quietly away,” proffers Wendell Berry.
“Come all ye conservatives and liberals/ who want to conserve the good things and be free,/ come away from the merchants of big answers, whose hands are metalled with power…by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price/ and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price.”
Our children are being fed, in school cafeterias, with our tax dollars, everything from everybody at the lowest price. Will you stand for it? Will you stand with us?
Ugh, that was the most painful article to read. It was so prejudiced and poorly researched… really changed the way I view the Atlantic.