CRIKEY

If one visits our Australian CRIKEY website and scrolls down the ENVIRONMENT menu to its current subject listing: 'The case against school veggie gardens'

'The case against school veggie gardens', The Atlantic / Monday, 18 January 2010

Memo, Stephanie Alexander: setting up veggie patches in poor schools may teach kids what organic rocket tastes like, but it won’t teach them to read or help them get a job. More algebra, less arugula says Caitlin Flanagan.

If then one clicks the heading: 'The case against school veggie gardens', one is instantly redirected away from the CRIKEY website to another remote website. In this case away from CRIKEY to 'The Atlantic'

But as a CRIKEY member, I presume CRIKEY content is CRIKEY.
But then I get auto-redirected offshore.

I get:

Cultivating Failure

"Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse
by Thomas McNamee
Penguin
It’s rare for an immigrant experience to go the whole 360 in a single generation—one imagines the novel of assimilation, The White Man Calls It Romaine. The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt). The galvanizing force behind this ideology is Alice Waters, the dowager queen of the grown-locally movement. Her goal is that children might become “eco-gastronomes” and discover “how food grows”—a lesson, if ever there was one, that our farm worker’s son might have learned at his father’s knee—leaving the Emerson and Euclid to the professionals over at the schoolhouse. Waters’s enormous celebrity, combined with her decision in the 1990s to expand her horizons into the field of public-school education, has helped thrust thousands of schoolchildren into the grip of a giant experiment, one that is predicated on a set of assumptions that are largely unproved, even unexamined. That no one is calling foul on this is only one manifestation of the way the new Food Hysteria has come to dominate and diminish our shared cultural life, and to make an educational reformer out of someone whose brilliant cookery and laudable goals may not be the best qualifications for designing academic curricula for the public schools.

Waters, described by her biographer, Thomas McNamee, as “arguably the most famous restaurateur in the United States,” is, of course, the founder of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, an eatery where the right-on, “yes we can,” ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a nice table d’hôte menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a modest 95 clams—wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and relentlessly conversation-busting service not included. (I’ve had major surgeries in which I was less scrupulously informed about what was about to happen to me, what was happening to me, and what had just happened to me than I’ve been during a dinner there.) It was at Chez Panisse that Waters worked out her new American gastronomic credo, which is built on the concept of using ingredients that are “fresh, local, seasonal, and where possible organic.” Fair enough, and perfectly delicious, but the scope of her operation—which is fueled not only by the skill of its founder, but also by the weird, almost erotic power she wields over a certain kind of educated, professional-class, middle-aged woman (the same kind of woman who tends to light, midway through life’s journey, on school voluntarism as a locus of her fathomless energies)—has widened so far beyond the simple cooking and serving of food that it can hardly be quantified. As McNamee rightly observes, Chez Panisse

is a much larger enterprise than a restaurant. It is a standard-bearer for a system of moral values. It is the leader of a style of cooking, of a social movement, and of a comprehensive philosophy of doing good and living well.

This notion—that it is agreeably possible to do good (school gardens!) and live well (guinea hens!)—bears the hallmark of contemporary progressivism, a kind of win-win, “let them eat tarte tatin” approach to the world and one’s place in it that is prompting an improbable alliance of school reformers, volunteers, movie stars, politicians’ wives, and agricultural concerns (the California Fertilizer Foundation is a big friend of school gardens) to insert its values into the schools. "

...etc, etc...

But I cannot comment. I cannot read other comments.
I am no longer on an Australian website that I can trust.
I think what a cop out and exit.

Am I the only one?
What right does CRIKEY have to outsource/redirect content to its audience without disclosure?

Since when did I ask to be redirected from CRIKEY to The Atlantic'?

This is online deception and fobbing off! CRIKEY is fattening its website content with plagarised material from other websites. It's a case of when 'all care and no responsibility' kicks in.

So if a reader of CRIKEY wishes to comment on an article posted on CRIKEY, that reader is redirected in a sequence of outsourced unrelated websites to an unknown website, which is a deadend, pointless and deceptive.

Crikey! What is CRIKEY? Is CRIKEY downgrading its content to blog outsourcing?