With these words I begin to stray far afield from any realm to which I can pretend any depth of knowledge. And yet I am in the grip of a notion which will yield to sleep, nor the workday, because it keeps insisting that it is both simple, and right, and a prescription for change.
And so, with the caveats that I am neither an educator nor an expert in any of the myriad theories surrounding our long battle against poverty, well, let me do the thing I am trained to do. Let me tell you a story. And then we'll come to the suggestion.
Fold, spindle, mutilate...
Months ago, now, when the garden grew hot peppers and onions and garlic, but not cilantro, I was in line at Kroger's buying that most essential herb, the one that turns salsa into something worth bragging about.
I live in a small town in the foothills of Appalachia, and one gets a nodding acquaintance with most of the people who work at the grocery, but this time my money was being taken by a women I did not recognize. She paused at the cilantro, as often happens, and I explained to her that it wasn't parsley and that it was going to be cut up and added to our salsa.
From her response I learned several things: that she was old enough to have a daughter in high school, and that she did not know how to cook. In fairness, she may have meant that her present living situation did not allow her to cook, because it's quite possible she couldn't afford gas or electricity. But more likely she simply didn't know how to cook. I rattled off an easy can-opening recipe for salsa that she acted like interested her, paid, and drifted back to my life.
In another part of my life, I've been asked onto the board which oversees a small free clinic in town. And so I am slowly coming to a more personal understanding of the costs associated with our present national diet, with the epidemic of obesity, the still unexplained spread of diabetes, all that.
Yesterday I sat around a table talking with a group of women, one of whom is about to take work as a social worker. And we were talking about how the people we do not see and rarely interact with live, the people in trailer out in the hollers, those for whom even our small town is a scary place to visit.
What I came away with was this: absent government programs, they lack the basic skills to survive. Not only have generations forgotten how to grow and hunt their own food, they have forgotten how to cook it. So they buy and fry the cheapest hot dogs, stock up on Arby's sandwiches at five for five bucks, frequent the golden arches when their car runs...I could draw the caricature on, but it's pointless and cruel to do so.
This is a poverty tax. If one understands basic nutrition, unit pricing, and can afford a small handful of staples, one can cook and live both inexpensively and healthily. Which I know both because I've been an ill-paid but tolerably well-fed writer for these many years, and because my endlessly curious wife has lots of cookbooks around the house. Otherwise one becomes a prisoner of the bottom end of the fast food industry, drawn inexorably into obesity and ill health, unable to work even if the skills to do so (or the jobs) were present.
And so we come to my modest proposal, which I humbly suggest could do as much to alleviate poverty as it might to mitigate our health care crisis. Perhaps too bold a promise, but...
Every sophomore in high school should be obliged to take a year-long life skills class. That class should include basic nutrition (and, yes, I know enough to know that there is not basic agreement on nutrition, but surely something sensible can be agreed to), it should include shopping skills, teach the uses of unit pricing, and it should teach basic, fundamental, healthy cooking practices.
(Digression: I helped a friend woo his wife with a five-ingredient recipe for garlic chicken, based on something a Puerto Rican singer made for my dinner three decades ago, now. Maybe six ingredients.)
And they should be taught to do simple enough math to manage a checkbook or debit card or whatever it takes to keep them out of those bloody payday loan sharks.
Now, I realize that this steps social policy far into the classroom, that the more academically oriented students will resent giving up an AP class to learn how to cook. (Except that they will want to date, later, and cooking is a fine strategy to meet and keep friends.) My wife's first comment was that we'd have to change school lunchrooms where kids are given cocoa-puffs and chocolate milk for breakfast (I do not make these things up), and doubtless she's right. The legacy of the Reagan years arguing that ketsup is a vegetable.
But we digress.
If we could begin teaching new generations of kids, of all ages and economic gifts, how to function as a healthy member of society, surely that would enable them better to manage their money, to eat better, to live better. Which saves on health costs, frees up more money in their pockets to improve their lives in other ways, all kinds of stuff.
Now I type all this knowing this diary will disappear in a few minutes, that we'll all go on to our lives and to the far more interesting questions of who might populate Obama's cabinet and how best to prop up GM. Fair enough.
Fair enough. If it's a good idea, it'll catch on. If it's not, I'll have another one to trouble you with tomorrow or the next day.