Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I generally love the self check-out, but it depends on what I'm buying. For small to medium shopping trips, if one is free, it's usually the faster and easier option. But with bigger orders, there's a good chance of some product causing issues for the machine. At my grocery store, meats, in particular can be a headache using self-check. And if it's something like a BOGO sale on meat, forget it. I'd rather just go through a normal check-out than stand around waiting for an employee to notice the blinking light and come over and get the machine to recognize the sale and keep moving.

So, out of 30+ hours of instructional time per week, devoting 1.5 to food knowledge is too much? Eating is one of few things every one of those students will do every day, and making informed choices in food is important, not only for their health, but for the economy and climate.

Ms. Flanagan relates lower test scores for african american and hispanic students at King Middle School, but there is no mention if these percentages are an increase, decrease, or static from before Alice Waters' program began, thereby casually insinuating that the garden program is the cause of lower scores.

There are many problems in our nation's public school systems. Underfunding, outdated books and equipment, overcrowded classrooms, lack of qualified teachers, and on and on. So to waste time and energy to harangue a middle school enrichment program is, at best, misguided.

And what is wrong with a core curriculum class utilizing the enrichment activity as a practical application of lessons? Recipes are essentially short instructional essays, of the sort you'd expect a middle schooler to be learning to write. This just puts it into a real-life context, which is useful in engaging many students. And taking measurements and making calculations based on them is certainly applicable to middle school math.

Further, Ms. Flanagan's implication that Hispanic students, in particular, have no need for this enrichment because many of their parents are farm workers seems naive, if not bigoted. And do all (or even most) of the children in the over 3000 California schools with gardens have farm worker parents, or live in communities with local farm or ethnic markets? Should we cancel art and music programs in communities that have museums or philharmonics?

I'd definitely agree that the local food movement can be a bit elitist, particularly the Californian proponents. Alice Waters certainly doesn't have over a foot of snow currently sitting atop her garden. Local food can't feed the world. But that doesn't mean it's not important in addressing and fixing problems in our agricultural system. And educating our children about food and food systems, especially while they're still young, is a necessary part of finding solutions over the coming generations.

I've always found cilantro to be one of the most offensive smelling/tasting herbs, if not foods in general.

Oddly, though, I am a big fan of the coriander seed. That rank, disgusting herb does produce one amazingly good spice.