Picking Food for Thought
Just what is going on in Orange County, anyway?
Here is a place that has propagated one of the liveliest stereotypes in a whole state of overwrought stereotypes. That is, Orange County was the rock-ribbed redoubt that stood up to the wackiness elsewhere, even to the point of being wacky doing so. Orange County was where reactionaries came from. If something happened beyond the county line, it was presumed bad until proved otherwise and there was almost certainly a fire-eating politician in Orange County to say so.
For a long while, the changing truth of Orange County has lagged behind this Neolithic image. Today, it is a magnet for immigrants as well as the wealthy, and parts of it are as diverse as anywhere in the world. Yes, conservatism flourishes in this sprawling space between Los Angeles and San Diego. But something else is happening. I dare to call it progressive. I’m referring to education, not politics.
Recently, Times reporter Dennis McLellan followed 68 Orange County fourth-graders into the bean fields. Hardly anything shocks me these days, but this story did. In the best of ways.
Usually when I see young people stooped in the farm fields, I want to sob. The pain and the shame of our migrant work force. But I found myself looking at my newspaper and wanting to whoop. There were accompanying photographs of 9-year-old city kids--potential mall rats, all of them--bent over, picking string beans.
Why were these youngsters on a field trip to work in the fields? Well, they had been studying Cesar Chavez and the history of migrant farm labor in the West. Then, thanks to a state grant and efforts of the county Department of Education and the Orange County Volunteer Center, the school took these young people to the scene to give them a taste of the backbreaking toil that brings our food to the table. The program, which runs until the end of the year, is dubbed the Orange County Cesar Chavez Day Initiative.
Let me say it again: This is Orange County, California, home of Richard Nixon, the John Birch Society, B-1 Bob Dornan. And it’s sending not just these 68 kids but 2,000 total into the fields to understand the turbulent history of migrant farm workers and what it takes to feed a country.
What did these kids do with the beans they picked? Donated them to the Second Harvest Food Bank in Orange. Enough beans for 2,800 needy people.
“They worked hard and they wanted to help,” Linda Rader, the principal at Raymond Temple Elementary in Buena Park, told me. “They never had, nor would they ever have had, an experience like this.”
Coordinators from the volunteer center began with fourth-graders in predominately working-class Latino schools of Santa Ana. They’ve moved on to the wealthier schools of Newport Beach and Irvine. Farmers in the outlying region, after making their harvests of beans, radishes, cabbages and other crops, allow these students a second picking for the food bank.
This is history and this is heart, taught hands-on for the right ends. This is not dabbling or drilling for standardized tests. This is cabbage-and-beans education.
The Raymond Temple Elementary fourth-graders went on to a “reflective” discussion with a half-dozen students at Cesar Chavez High School to talk about what they had learned. The elementary school then invited a farm worker to come talk with the children, in Spanish, about her life, her work and her family’s aspirations.
I have long believed that urban dwellers are too removed from the source of their food, and thus from our place in the natural world. Last month, I wrote in praise of another Orange County school, a private institution, which arranged for students to see the slaughter of a steer. As you might expect, vegetarians found the image unsettling. I’m pretty sure, though, they will agree with me this time on beans, farm labor and good deeds.
From now on when I read of politicians in Washington debating their oversold ideas for enriching public schools with standardized tests, I’ll think of the contrasting image of Orange County kids stooped over in the fields under the furnace of the sun, picking string beans with the ghost of Cesar Chavez.
America wants its schools to produce kids who know more. We hope, too, that the schools will give us better citizens.
Well, these young people will be far more knowing for getting their hands dirty in the real-life history of the West, and how we feed ourselves, and who to thank. And I’ll give them an “A” in citizenship for their labors of charity.
Like I said, Orange County is the wackiest place.