Grow, pick, eat

A story in the paper the other day told about a 6-year-old eating cockroaches. I've nothing in particular against eating cockroaches provided they, like pigs, chickens and anything else we eat, are humanely farmed and killed.
However, eating cockroaches because you're starving, as opposed to because you like the taste, is unacceptable. That there are kids in New Zealand picking up insects and eating them because there's nothing else to eat is shocking in the extreme, and even more so in a country where we have a moderate climate, relatively good soil, plenty of space and, I estimate, hundreds of thousands of people who know how to grow food and are more than willing to share that knowledge.
When I was at primary school we had a vegetable garden, which we planted inexpertly and tended sporadically. Despite our inattention, it delivered an alarming crop of radishes which, although most of us hated the taste, we ate simply because we had grown them.
We had a vegetable garden at home, too, which yielded somewhat more appealing offerings than radishes. I wasn't involved in the planting or tending, but we all loved harvesting peas, beans, carrots and especially potatoes.
At the bottom of our long, sloping section was an orchard of pears, apples and plums. It was the target of regular scrumping by local kids who were probably disappointed that nobody minded enough to chase them off and add a little excitement to their otherwise pedestrian lives.
Home-grown food was handed around the neighbourhood whenever there was a surplus so you never got tired of eating your own stuff. I was always being sent to school with bags of apples and pears to hand out to anyone who wanted them, and was given walnuts, apricots and greengages in return.
The same happens where I live now. I hand out bags of limes and tangelos and get feijoas. This is fortuitous, since my own feijoa trees have failed miserably, with only five fruit the size of marbles to be seen.
Despite this embarrassing failure, I am spearheading a campaign to teach people how to grow food.
In a country where there is enough poverty that kids eat cockroaches and adults eat cat food, and where the future of the world looks dodgy enough that we will not be able to rely on the regular supply of food from outside sources, being able to carry out this most fundamental of tasks is surely essential.
So I'm on a mission to have vegetable gardening taught in schools And not as some added extra, but included as part of the curriculum so kids actually learn how to grow food, how to harvest it, how to preserve it and how to eat it.
Elementary, you might say, but a visit to a local school today revealed that most of the kids of primary school age didn't even know that to plant something, you needed to dig a hole. Nonetheless, the teacher at that school had forged ahead and planted vegetables in raised beds created by an equally passionate caretaker, and the two had added worm farms, hens and a beehive to the mix. (Yes, the kids who help out with the beehive have little bee-keepers' suits - dead cute.)
A selection of eggs had been turned into chickens (a miracle that never fails to engage children), the beehive had produced 20 litres of honey, the eggs were made into egg sandwiches for school lunches, and by the smell of the compost, the worms were doing all the things that worms are supposed to do.
This, however, was a labour of love, and at this school and many others, the involvement of the kids is limited.
I don't have much idea of what kids learn in school these days but I know that when I was at school, some lessons in gardening would have served me far better than the grinding boredom of an hour of Latin three times a week, during which time I perfected the art of drawing show-jumpers in the back of my exercise book.
The art world may have suffered from the loss, but lessons in how to grow feijoas bigger than marbles would have been far more useful.