Fall Festivities, Jersey Style

While we had a lovely time in Vermont two weeks ago, there was one important step that we missed: the buying of a pumpkin. Since this is one of Carrie's favorite fall activities, pumpkin purchases must occur in some sort of autumn-ish environment; a grocery store pumpkin is unacceptable.

Therefore, we went on a trek to less-urban New Jersey today in search of a pumpkin patch and other fall goodness. Sadly, I have still not come across anything outside the FDL area that remotely mirrors the awesomeness of The Little Farmer (if anyone from FDL is reading this, please send me a pumpkin cream cheese muffin!), but that has not stopped my quest for the closest imitation I can find. We set out today for two places (DePiero's Country Farm and Demarest Farms) that promised pumpkins, apples, hayrides, and a bakery.

Here are the things I would expect/hope for in such an establishment:

• Pumpkin patch (check)
  
• Apple orchard (check)
  
• Hayride (check)
  
• Fall baked goods (check)
  
• Caramel apples (sort of...see below)
  
• Corn maze (sort of)
  

Things that I am indifferent toward but was not surprised by:

• Refreshment stand/brat fry
• Petting zoo
• Face painting

Things that I would NOT expect to see but encountered today:

• European import grocery store
• Salad bar
  
• Butcher shop
• Seafood counter
  
• Potato pancakes (right next to the cider donuts!)
  
• Children's amusement park (including a dragon roller coaster)
  

I also was wholly unprepared for the crowds we encountered. New Jersey is just waaay too densely populated for its own good. The bakery at DePiero's had a "take-a-number" system in order to buy cider donuts; the trickiest part was getting through the crowd of people to get to the number dispenser on the counter. And an interesting observation: DePiero's had probably the whitest crowd of people I have ever seen anywhere in New Jersey, both customers and employees. While the area immediately around there is quite affluent and predominantly white, it's still only about a half-hour drive from the city, so the lack of racial/ethnic diversity surprised me a bit.

Back to food...I have discovered by observation here and in Vermont that caramel apples are not nearly so popular here as in Wisconsin, which I think is very, very sad. One of the places we went today had them, but they were A. in a cooler and B. wrapped in cellophane. Hell no. Caramel apples need to be stabbed in front of you and dipped in a vat of creamy, warm caramel, then rolled in delicious toppings and eaten as soon as possible. At worst they should be eaten when after the caramel reaches room temperature. But definitely not cold, and there definitely should be no cellophane wrapper involved. The northeast seems to be much more interested in candy apples, but I can't for the life of me figure out why someone would prefer a hard sugar coating over creamy caramel.

Sadly, there are no pictures from today's outing because I realized after we were already out and about that the camera was out of batteries. And that's really a shame because I would have liked a picture of us walking over the Garden State Parkway to get to a farmstand to contrast with the pictures of walking over Quechee Gorge in Vermont. Oh well.

Man, I want a caramel apple...

Old MacDonald had a standardized test

I read an interesting article in the New York Times today: A Moo-Moo Here, and Better Test Scores Later. It's a really interesting (and relatively short) article, so definitely check it out if you have a couple minutes to spare. But if you're too busy, here's my one sentence summary: A school in Harlem takes their kindergarten class to the Queens County Farm Museum (it's a working historical farm, not a museum of farm stuff) to teach them about farms so that they'll do better on standardized tests later in elementary school.

For anyone who wasn't raised in an urban setting (which I think includes the vast majority of people who read this blog), the kids' reactions are a little surprising (for example, 5-year-olds who didn't know that eggs come from chickens). But the whole article kinda makes me go "Huh?", not to mention "....huh."

For starters, it's astounding to me that these kids have no idea where their food comes from. But then I think about the environment that they live in and the fact that it's not so easy to make a connection between a Chicken McNugget and the bird it was named after. And these kids are just starting school, which means that most of their education up to this point was left to their parents, who were probably less inclined than their more affluent, white, suburban/rural counterparts to read books at home that included farms or farm animals.

But it's also astounding to me that the reason for this field trip was not to introduce kids to an important aspect of life or expose them to a new environment; the point was to help them do better on the standardized tests that they'll take in a few years. What does this say about the state of our education system? Why does everything have to be about the test? Why can't we focus on educating kids for life instead of prepping them for individual tests?

From a test prep standpoint, I can see why the teachers think it's important for kids to see a farm in person; most children in elementary school can't think abstractly enough to gloss over the units in a math problem (sheep, cornstalks, etc.) and just find the answer. But the fact that there are so many of these questions on a statewide test, in a state where half of the students are raised in an urban environment, makes me question those who wrote the test. There are certainly some serious class/geographical/race issues to be explored there.

I'm glad that these kids got to spend some time on a farm and learn about farm animals, but I'm saddened that this trip had to be justified as test prep. A current look at urban health issues shows that these same kids who don't understand where food comes from are also more likely to spend their lives eating junk food. Maybe a trip to the farm to learn about sheep and cows and chickens will plant a seed that will make them think more later? Or maybe the fact that I'm currently reading The Omnivore's Dilemma is making me overly optimistic on this point? Hard to say.