MAGAZINE REVIEWS

On the need for Home-Ec classes as opposed to genetically altered food and plutonium

by Seth Rogovoy

WILLIAMSTOWN - Is it a reflection of our skewed cultural priorities that you can learn all about sex and drugs (and rock 'n' roll, for that matter) in school these days but nothing about how to bake a cake from scratch?

The Washington Monthly

Elizabeth Austin thinks so. In "Saving the Home from Martha Stewart," in the December issue of the Washington Monthly, Austin calls for the reintroduction of home economics classes to the high school curriculum.

"Everywhere you look, you see American families desperately in need of help with the basics of daily life," writes Austin. While Austin might overstate things slightly when she says that home-ec class is the cure for excessive consumerism, divorce, child abuse, cancer, heart disease and marital strife, she does make a convincing argument that something was lost when schools stopped teaching the basics of domestic life.

Ironically, home-ec courses have their turn-of-the-century origins in a proto-feminist movement that viewed "home management" as a profession worth studying in a scientific manner. Contemporary feminism killed off home-ec in the 1970s, around the same time that it was encouraging women to get out of the house and into the workplace.

As a result, a whole generation of young householders has been raised with no clue about how to cook, clean, mend or do basic home repairs. And a whole economy has grown up around this generation to take advantage of its domestic incompetence, offering microwaveable meals, cleaning services, and one-stop shopping centers. In response, schools no longer teach students how to make or fix things. "We just teach them how to buy," says Austin.

The problem is more than just messy homeowners and lousy cooks, and the solution requires more than just remedial education. Rather, this is all sadly symptomatic of a devaluation of the home as a place of meaning, a place from which we can learn and share essential human and spiritual values.

"In every decision we make, we reinforce the notion that home life always runs a distant second, or even third, to other spheres of existence," writes Austin. If the workplace becomes the focal point of one's intellectual life and the shopping mall the key venue for one's social life, what is left for the home, and by implication, the family that lives there?

"We need to do a better job of teaching our children how to live, and we need to start right now," writes Austin. While I'm not sure that home-ec classes, or any school-based solution, for that matter, is the best response to the problem, it's an intriguing notion.

Mother Jones

Last November, the biotechnology industry launched an expensive advertising campaign to counter the increasingly vocal, grassroots opposition to genetically engineered foods. "But polishing the image of biotech foods won't make them any easier to swallow – or any less risky," writes Jon R. Luoma in "Pandora's Pantry" in the January/February issue of Mother Jones.

Luoma documents the curious blind eye the Food and Drug Administration has turned to GE products (so long, General Electric, welcome, Genetically Engineered), ignoring warnings even from some of its own top scientists about the potential dangers of GE food.

Instead, the FDA so far has bought the industry line, pushed by politically-influential giants like Monsanto, that genetically engineered food is no different from or no more dangerous than the sort of traditional plant breeding farmers have been practicing for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Luoma knocks that argument right out of the ballpark. There is an obvious qualitative difference between using natural techniques to mix varietal characteristics of the same species of plant and using high-tech gene-splicing techniques to directly inject genetic material into a plant of an entirely different species.

What's worse, one never knows what unintended characteristics might result from such a Frankensteinian experiment: among those that scientists warn of are the creation of new allergens and chemicals that can disrupt human hormonal functions, as well as various unintended ecological consequences.

So far the U.S. government and the FDA have pretty much rolled over and given Monsanto free reign. But the consistent buzz of consumer protests against GE, first from abroad but more recently on the domestic front, have apparently finally led to a reconsideration of government policy vis-à-vis GE foods. At the very least, opponents hope to see a labeling system in place before not too long.

In the meantime, be forewarned: 60 percent of processed foods, including candy bars, tortilla chips, tofu dogs and infant formula, contain at least one genetically engineered element. The only way you can be certain to avoid GE foods is to buy from an organic grower you trust or to purchase only products with a widely recognized organic certification.

The New Yorker

Alben W. Barkley is all but forgotten to history, except for those who live in the late politician's hometown of Paducah, Ky. A congressman and then vice president under Harry S. Truman, Barkley bestowed in 1952 what he and many at the time thought to be a great gift to Paducah: a nuclear fuel processing plant. In a short period of time, the citizenry of Paducah proudly heralded their town's new moniker, "the atomic city."

In "Fallout" in the January 10 issue of the New Yorker, author Bobbie Ann Mason, who grew up on a farm just over 25 miles from Paducah, tells the sad story of Paducah's poisonous nuclear legacy.

It turns out that for years radioactive material at the Paducah uranium plant, where Mason's sister once worked, was tossed around like so much dust: thrown over a fence into a neighboring wildlife preserve, handled sloppily by bare-handed workers, even sprinkled on cafeteria food (just to prove that it was harmless).

Unbeknownst to workers, the uranium at the plant was laced with plutonium, which is a hundred thousand times more deadly than uranium, and which was so widespread in the vicinity that it turns up today in the organs of area deer.

Word got out about the plutonium last summer, when articles began appearing in the Washington Post (the story was not picked up by the local press). Last fall, Mason visited Paducah, where she found the citizenry in a state of mass denial. "If I get cancer, I don't even want to know," one plant worker told her.

Mason brings to her descriptions of the town, the uranium processing plant and the people an inordinate degree of sympathy, which will be recognizable to those familiar with her portrayals of working-class Southerners in her fiction.

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Jan. 15, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]