Broccoli! A local high school girl won a contest by writing an essay in praise of broccoli. I must have been very bored because I read the whole thing, and found it about as inspiring as you would expect. I hate to think what the losing essays were like.

But what struck me about her work was that the praise was almost wholly negative. The poor girl lauded the vegetable for the ingredients it lacked, or had very little of: fat, sugar, salt, cholesterol, and whatever the fashionable nutrition bugaboo was that month. Broccoli is, it seems, as harmless to swallow as water, or air. It won’t make you fat or cause cancer or contribute to global warming. It’s low on the food chain and it won’t cause dangerous greenhouse gases to ascend heavenward from the back ends of cows. The one positive attribute she mentioned was fiber, which is to say, the part of food that goes right through you.

I assume she learned this attitude in public school, which gives you a clue about why I homeschool. I don’t want my children thinking of food as nothing but a sort of health delivery system, supplying chemicals to our bodies so they can survive and grow. To me, this attitude is a particularly American part of the depressing modern view of the whole cosmos and our place in it. If this sounds rather grandiose, let me try to explain:

When my children look at broccoli, I want them to see how green it is, and how like a little tree, how woody the stem and how soft the flower. I want them to think how best it can be cooked-stir-fried perhaps, as the Chinese taught us, rather than boiled into a mush in the American fashion. (Chinese food, you may not know, is St. Thomas Aquinas’s Sixth Proof of the existence of God.) I want them to take time to enjoy the taste in hopes that it will do what all the pleasures of this world ought to do: to lift up our minds and hearts to the Creator of pleasures. I even hope that some day, if they’re so inclined, they might contemplate the metaphysical meanings of the forms of various vegetables, and notice that the fruit and vegetable department of their local supermarket is one of the most beautiful places in town.

My family may not always live up to this ideal-we eat our share of Fast Food and even Junk Food-but we try. I just don’t want my children’s education in the hands of people who look at a bunch of broccoli and see nothing but the lack of fat, sugar, and salt.