PETA Sucks Yet Again

(Flickr/Antoon's Foobar)

People who have read feminist blogs are aware that PETA sucks. Like, really sucks. Every so often, they release another marketing campaign that does some combination of the following:

• objectifies women,
• somehow suggests animals are more valuable than people (specifically women), and/or
  
• lacks any substantive discussion of what good food policy might be.

This year's PETA ad they're trying to air during the Superbowl is no different. As Jill at Feministe pointed out, women are more likely to be vegetarian than men, so it's unclear why PETA is working so hard to alienate women.

It's no secret that PETA engages in these tactics because they hope to generate free press -- i.e. news articles about the controversy -- to get their name out because they, like other nonprofits have a limited budget. They probably pat themselves on the back when an ad campaign generates an enraged post on Feministing or Feministe. Still, I honestly tire of this debate. Maybe if they offered up reasonable alternatives to meat -- or approached adults as, well, adults, they'd have better traction to their message.

Honestly, ads like this make me want to help myself to a pork chop.

The (Not So) Secret Garden

Today over at TAPPED Phoebe Connelly professes her love for vegetable gardening. Liberals like gardens for obvious reasons: you don't have to burn carbon transporting the vegetables from your garden to your kitchen, they're more natural, and they encourage you to eat better.

But here's the problem. I live in a city. I live in a narrow row house with no yard. Instead, the area behind my house is covered in cement. By another tenant of liberalism, I'm doing the right thing by living in a city. I can commute to work by walking, biking, or taking public transportation. I don't have to own a car. I'm reducing my carbon footprint just by living where I live. But where I live doesn't let me grow a garden. Here comes the paradox.

How can we promote both cities (good) and gardens (also good!). The answer might not be that each individual grows a garden. It would be difficult to grow enough variety for yourself anyway. Instead something that's gaining more popularity are community lots that are maintained by a group of people who volunteer a little time each week or month. These garden co-ops might be the solution to the paradigm of living in a city and wanting to be pro-garden.

Learning to Cook

Okay, so it took me a couple days, but I just finished Michael Pollan's long essay in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine about food policy. Matt and Ezra have good points, but there is one I want to add. This particular passage about schools seems significant:

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to “edible education” — in Alice Waters’s phrase — by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day — the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.

The components to this proposal are twofold. First, that we are going to extra lengths to feed our children crap instead of delicious, nutritious food. As Eliza Krigman pointed out in her review of School Lunch Politics, what passes for nutritional standards for school-sponsored lunches is a joke. We all remember the scene in Super Size Me where Morgan Spurlock looked at the low-grade quality of meat served in schools. Rather than viewing schools as a dumping ground for bad food, children should be served some of their best in the formative years where they spend the majority of their waking hours.

The second part of that is proposing a shift to including valuable life skills in part of a standard public education. Rather than taking a home ec class where students are asked to make a pan of brownies in one week of a six-week class, why not take a life skill like cooking seriously as part of a comprehensive education? After all, the default has be come that people need to opt in to learning how to cook rather than opting out.

I'd actually like to see schools take on other life skills as part of a required education: learning basic financial skills about how to use a credit card, comprehensive sex education, and learning how to buy for and cook healthy, balanced meals on a budget. After all, these are skills that everyone can use. Rather than assuming everyone pick them up outside of the education system, why don't we make them part of a required education along with math, English, and physical education?

Image courtesy Flickr user Joshua Davis (jdavis.info) used with a CC license.