The Goat Came Back… Sorry I had to!!!
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This is one of the best observations in this thread. lol
So true, as individuals we know what we know, based on our own life experience.
Example of who would even be interested, or not. 2 1/2 weeks ago a momentous landmark event occurred with one of the members of the current global biggest-selling pop music group. It was reported all over the world and by major American news organizations’ entertainment reporting, including the New York Times (which regularly does stories on this group). Who on this board knows what it is – without looking it up ??? (If you don’t know it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to look for it.)
I’m guessing very few on this board know! Although millions and millions of other demographics absolutely know. If you don’t know, you don’t have to know, knowing makes no difference in your life. Honestly it is like thrush in horses - you either know what it is, or you don’t, and if you don’t know you probably don’t need to know.
We just need to be open to learning more about the things that impact our life. We don’t have to know everything. 
Food origins and processing – does everyone need to know the details? Most people don’t and are still surviving. Most are not going to become activists for improvement. And they could be experts in health and nutrition without knowing much about how the food got to the plate. (I know some would argue that.)
But in the OP’s case something she didn’t know came into her field of vision – and she reacted entirely emotionally from her own personal narrow band of context. Thinking that everyone would have the same viewpoint. Well, we all tend to be mystified that other people don’t understand things the way we do ourselves.
Oh well, another learning experience on both sides that not everyone has the same outlook on their world.
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Oh well he has enough to let one other person into his bunker. 75 years for each of them. Depending on their age at entry. More & more of us will be able to live well into our 80’s and 90’s. That’s a factor for a survivalist to think about. (And retirement planners.)
I do find that the young adults I teach have been brought up to “respect difference” in a very multicultural part of the world. So while they have big gaps in their worldly knowledge, they tend to also believe its polite to let other people have their own traditions and cultures. That mitigates these snap reactions.
It’s also a farming/ subdivision exurb with lots of egg barns. And a big South Asian and South East Asian population that cook from scratch and also some farm. And a local foodie culture. Also lots of vegans.
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They won’t be living into their 90s after the apocalypse wipes out modern medical practice.
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Ooh! Pick me!
Member of BTS joined the Army
I may be Old, but I is Au Courant
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I would argue yes. Because in reality, food is the most important thing to know about. Period.
Widespread ignorance gives rise to cruel, short-sighted, and downright stupid decision-making on a national scale. If you knew how incredibly cruel, and destructive of land, water, genetic diversity, and farm communities and culture, industrial farming is, would you still eat meat? Would you educate yourself about what humane and sustainable farming could look like? Would you vote for change?
If for example, there were food gardens and food education in most elementary schools, community food gardens in most neighborhoods, our world views would change, maybe only subtly, but change they would, and entirely positively. If there were government policies that supported sustainable farming practices instead of mega-global farm industrialists, we would have far more of a chance of surviving as a species.
I am PASSIONATE about this and have been for fifty years. I firmly believe that the separation between human beings and the real world of dirt, water, plants, and animals is the worst thing that we’ve ever done to ourselves. More than wars, more than genocides. It will destroy us. It is already doing so.
The OP’s emotional response is a common reaction to being confronted with real-life meat production without any cultural context to hold it in. I am not saying it is “wrong”. I’m saying it is a symptom of how ignorant almost everyone is now of how things get into our mouths.
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Do you find that gardens at elementary schools really help teach the kids much about growing stuff?
I have seen many a school garden, during the summer, that though started with loving hands, now looks like no one has touched it since the last day of school. Which means the kids experienced seeds growing into tiny plants but nothing past that. No weeding, no watching their plants mature and grow something.
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On the other hand, if humans had not developed the technology to feed us as we have, questionable some practices may be, all together we still do a better job and better as we learn more, no one in agriculture is not super aware of what is right and wrong and is doing it’s best all along to do better, without what we have we would have even more people starving today.
Today we have enough for everyone, a veritable horn of plenty.
The reason not everyone has all the food they need is not in the hands of farmers, but in other sections of our society.
The old, “don’t blame farmers for the ills of the world with a mouth full” applies here.
Think, what farming does for us is why we can sit full, here in the first world, complaining on computers and feeling so smugly about our well fed selves and demanding we do better.
As if we didn’t have a world full of people already doing better all along and only hearing continuously complains from those benefitting from their work.
Remember, farmers live in that same world everyone does, eat the same, raise their families the same, they know very well how systems work and where they come short and have, all along, worked to do better, knowing it will never be good enough for those that have the luxury to just sit there and grumble about everything. 
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There has been a fair amount of research on school gardens, and the results are positive. They include hands on knowledge, community-building, and an increased willingness of children to try novel foods.
( I researched the topic for a paper in my sustainable ag program.)
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We aren’t doing a “better and better job as we learn more.” We’re doing horribly worse in every single metric EXCEPT at producing a huge amount of a very few foods which profit a very few people. But food production has many many other dimensions, all of which are being destroyed by industrial farming. Moreover, most of these vast quantities are wasted. The majority of the calories we grow are “lost” through most of it being animal feed and a great deal of what gets to the consumer is thrown out, because people no longer know how to conserve. They don’t value their food because they don’t know anything about it.
Farmers live with a gossamer-thin safety net, most of them, except corporate heads with clean fingernails. Farmers are not only at the mercy of the weather and other natural constraints that they’ve always been, they are also under the thumb of the global commodity conglomerates, who dictate everything to what seed they can buy to what pesticides they must use, all at enormous profit to themselves. Farmers are obliged to incur enormous debt to capitalize the ever-larger and more complex machinery that is required to service the global economy. As in other businesses, they must go bigger and bigger to survive at all, as small farms are swallowed by international entities. Is this “better”? I for one strenuously disagree.
In Zen Buddhist monasteries there is a daily before-meal chant that includes a phrase commonly translated as "“Let us reflect on the effort that brought us this food and consider how it comes to us.”
When what you must consider is “this pork comes from a pig that never saw the sun, who lived and died in a concrete building with thousands of other genetically identical pigs, in unbelievable stench and filth, whose mother lived and died in a pen only big enough to stand up in”, maybe it is time to consider more deeply.
I agree that starvation is a political problem. Although now climate change is altering all equations.
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I am glad that they do more than it appears they would do.
Or maybe it is just the districts I have been in are just not following thru with the whole community side of this garden once school is out.
I truly can not imagine what I have seen would encourage a kid to do much of anything. (I am not saying I do not agree with your research, I am saying it is most likely my second sentence is happening.)
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I remember growing seeds in milk cartons, having plant sales, and while we didn’t have a community garden and I’m not a gardener today, I do think these were very valuable educational lessons for me.
I think community gardens, farmer’s markets, and school gardens can be educational and healing and provide some small-scale, individual solutions. But they aren’t enough to address really systemic problems of poverty, factory farming abuses, supply chain issues, and nutritional deficiencies. (I think most people on this thread know this, just as a general response to the occasional posts I see elsewhere along the lines of, “if only everyone grew their own food in their neighborhoods and became vegan we wouldn’t have any more problems.”)
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Yes, if there is a knowledgeable adult teaching them.
Of course in summer they go to weeds, there is no one to take care of them then.
Some are neglected, some are amazing. It’s like anything, it depends.
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That must be it.
I have only ever seen the totally neglected version, in more than one school district.
It is great to know that other districts do it differently.
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This is a great example of doing it well in a city that makes the news for murder and gunshots more than anything else. Oh, and good food. These aren’t “nice schools in good neighborhoods.” It’s been great to see their programs grow and thrive.
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In our town the two elementary schools, and the high school FFA grow seedlings and cuttings and hold huge plant sales in the spring. The sales support the gardening programs. They are very very successful.
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Spoken like a true zealot. You do grasp that this is just an opinion, right?
Do you understand that it is possible for a person to be very knowledgeable about modern agricultural practices and about what you would call “humane and sustainable” practices and not share your opinion? Not vote for the change you advocate?
Do you consider well informed people who don’t share your opinion to be evil? Awful people?
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