Is the White House’s organic kitchen garden more than just a photo op?
When the White House announced Michelle Obama would be planting an organic vegetable garden on the South Lawn, cynics claimed it was nothing more than a photo opportunity to burnish the new First Lady’s image. They could hardly have imagined how a 20-by-50 plot of snap peas, kale, tomatoes, and squash would have such a profound impact on the politics of food.
Obama’s simple act of connecting the dots between food and health got everyone’s attention, even the attention of those who would never dream of planting a garden. For champions of local and sustainable food and of teaching children about healthy eating habits, the garden has been just the catalyst they needed to get the movement off the ground.
Big Ag Responds
It’s even been a wake-up call for the chemical pesticide industry. The industry is worried that local food and organics are not fads but are here to stay. The Mid America CropLife Association (MACA), an organization that represents companies manufacturing and selling chemical pesticides and fertilizers (such as Monsanto and Dow), was so upset by the garden that it begged Obama not to forget conventional agriculture. In a letter addressed to Mrs. Barack Obama—a form not used since ladies wore white gloves—they euphemistically refer to chemicals as “crop protection products.”
To make sure the message was received, the organization asked its members to start a letter-writing campaign to the First Lady. On the MACA website, the request noted that “Bonnie McCarvel, executive director of the Mid-America CropLife Association and Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador coordinator, ‘shuddered’ at the thought that the White House garden will be organic and asked: ‘What message does that send to the non-farming public about the “crop protection products”?’”
Enough Rope to Hang Themselves
The blogosphere gleefully provided answers that heaped scorn on MACA for even asking the question.
But it was Jon Stewart who offered the pesticide supporters an opportunity to make even greater fools of themselves, inviting them to appear on The Daily Show. A spokesman for the American Council on Science and Health—a group that generally sides with industry in health and environmental matters and that has been funded at one time or another by Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Exxon, and Dow Chemical—agreed to discuss the White House garden in a segment titled “Little Crop of Horrors.”
The narrator set the scene: “This seemingly harmless 20-by-50-foot token gesture has created a firestorm.” Jeffrey Stier, associate director of the council, called the Obamas “organic limousine liberals” and then went on: “I think the Obama garden should come with a warning label. It’s irresponsible to tell people that you have to eat organic and locally grown food.
Not everyone can afford that. That’s a serious public health concern.”
Because? “People are going to eat fewer fruits and vegetables. Cancer rates will go up. Obesity rates will go up. I think if we decide we’re only going to eat locally grown food, we’re going to have starvation.”
Obesity and starvation simultaneously?
A Parent’s Concern
The White House did not respond to the letter-writing campaign, but to clarify, Obama never suggested everyone had to have a garden and eat organic food. In an interview with me in March, she acknowledged that not everyone can plant a garden. “You don’t have to bite off more than you can chew, because sometimes that is also daunting for a working family. You can begin in your own cupboard by making different choices about what you eat, in trying to cook a meal a little more often, trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables. But you can also extend it into shopping at a farmers market, if it’s accessible, or even thinking more broadly about developing a community garden.”
She also said the idea for the garden came out of her experiences as a working mother having a difficult time feeding her daughters healthful foods. “We were eating out three times a week. I could cook one day, then we’re ordering in pizza, then maybe they’d get one sandwich. You’d have a hodgepodge of food. And we were starting to see the effects of some of those decisions, just on our bodies.”
The family pediatrician told Obama to start thinking about diet and nutrition and that her daughters, Malia and Sasha, needed to slim down. “He raised a flag for us,” she said of the doctor’s warning.
“Kids’ approach to food is simple: How does it taste? What I’ve learned is if you buy it fresh, if it’s grown locally, it’s probably going to taste better,” she explained.
“And a really fresh carrot tastes different from a carrot that was bought, picked, and grown weeks ago. And children know the difference.”
Personal Becomes Political
When the White House garden was ready to be harvested in June, Obama invited the fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington, who had helped dig and plant the garden in March, to do the harvesting and use the ingredients to cook a meal.
And, for the first time, she took the opportunity to make the point that a vegetable garden and healthful eating are directly related to politics. They are tied to two important pieces of legislation currently under consideration: health care reform and the reauthorization of school lunch that calls for providing healthier food in schools’ meal programs.
“The President and Congress are going to begin to address health care reform, and these issues of nutrition and wellness and preventative care [are] going to be the focus of a lot of conversation,” she said. She ticked off diet-related diseases—diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure—noting that nearly one-third of American children are either overweight or obese.
These diseases cost the country $120 billion a year. If children ate more nutritious food and exercised more, costs would go down, she said, adding that it would help if there were more school gardens and community gardens, particularly in poor communities in urban settings.
“We need to improve the quality and nutrition of the food served at schools,” she urged. “We’re approaching the first big opportunity to move this to the top of the agenda with the upcoming reauthorization of the child nutrition programs. In doing so, we can go a long way toward creating a healthier generation for our kids.”
So What?
Washington is not the only place the White House garden is having a significant impact. When the Obamas announced their plans for the garden this spring, sales of vegetable seeds rose across the country and nurseries ran out of seedlings. Gardener’s Supply, of Burlington, Vermont, saw a 25 percent increase in unique visits to its online Kitchen Garden Planner.
“People are connecting school gardens and farm-to-school programs with this very tangible, concrete example,” said Abby Nelson, director of Vermont’s Food Education Every Day (FEED). “If the First Lady can do it, our little school can do it. It brought to the attention of parents, teachers, and even legislators that kids want to grow food and want to know where their food comes from.
“It increased the level of importance because it was connected to what the First Lady thought was important. It is not just a cute, faddish effort.”
Now the question is whether Obama can use her high approval ratings to further her agenda: to make healthy eating part of the health care debate and what children are served in school. Jocelyn Frye, Obama’s policy director, and Sam Kass, White House Food Initiative coordinator and an assistant chef, are exploring the next steps.
“The job is not done,” Kass said. “We are finding ways to reinforce and elevate the connection between food and health. We are looking for new approaches, working on practical tools people can use in their daily lives.”
When Obama returns from vacation in September—and her children return to school—food activists and agribusiness executives alike will be watching to see how she advances the crusade she began last March.
Marian Burros was on staff at The New York Times for 27 years and still writes for them. She has lived in the Washington area since 1959 and remembers when there were no farmers markets. At one time or other, she worked for The Washington Post and the late lamented Washington Star and Washington Daily News. She was also a consumer reporter for D.C.’s WRC-TV. The author of 13 cookbooks, she has been writing about small farms and the pleasures of local food since the 1980s.
