A Kitchen Garden Gone International

In March 2009, Michelle Obama picked up a shovel, prepared the soil and planted the seeds to grow produce in her family’s kitchen garden. The significance of this 1,100 sq. ft. plot of land was not lost on the first lady. Her stacked policy team including Jocelyn Frye, former general counsel at the National Partnership for Women & Families, and Trooper Sanders, leader of a Clinton Foundation initiative to highlight childhood obesity, looked on from the lawn or tuned in from offsite.   

The 18-acre White House property has a deeply rooted history of edible gardens. Its original resident, John Adams, added vegetables to the gardens in 1800, not for novelty but for necessity. Eleanor Roosevelt, Obama’s frequently compared forebearer, planted a “victory garden” to promote self-sufficiency and initiative during war time.  

But gardens weren’t always en vogue — they changed with the mood of the country. During the Depression, it would have been political folly for the Hoovers to eat fresh vegetables out of their garden instead of a can, while the country went hungry. The current first family faces similar criticisms today during the global recession. Critics see promoting organic vegetables as elitist while the number of people on food stamps rose to a record 36 million last November.  

For champions of local and organic food, however, Obama’s patch is a major step forward. After years of advocating for a White House kitchen garden, America’s sustainable produce supporters finally turned their goals from Washington to the bigger “What next?” of large-scale, national food reformation.


A GRASS AND ROOTS MOVEMENT
Although recently there had been food grown on the White House rooftop, nothing had been done to satisfy the scale of the White House kitchen demands. Food advocate Michael Pollan was one of the first people to call for a presidential kitchen garden in the ‘90s, and restaurant proprietor and food pundit Alice Waters wrote an open letter to President Clinton in 1995 requesting the same. But it took a serendipitous combination of a first lady with nutrition on her mind and a chorus of engaged voters to actually see the garden grow.

Founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, Roger Doiron was one of the biggest advocates for the Obamas’ kitchen garden. He started the Eat the View campaign, which gathered 100,000 supporters for a petition that urged the Obamas to plant it. “What I think happened, and I’d like to take a little bit of credit for participating in, was there was this greater sense of awareness among more people that this was something that we could legitimately ask for and that there was strength in numbers,” says Doiron.

The garden grew dozens of crops, a wish list from White House kitchen staff, and included lettuce, squash, fennel, rhubarb, cucumbers, and sweet and hot peppers. As of December 2009, right before the garden was winterized, it had supplied 1,000 lbs. of produce. As per Eat the View’s initial request, overflow is sent to Miriam’s Kitchen, a Washington soup kitchen.


A LITTLE HELP FROM MOM-IN-CHIEF
Integral to the movement for a White House kitchen garden has been, of course, the first lady. Obama is taking the idea of family nutrition and food sustainability further than any of her predecessors. While former first ladies Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton insisted on using healthy and organic food, Obama includes this among her main policies, along with gender-based work equality, working family balance and support for military families.

Growing up in Chicago in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Obama was taught respect for eating by her mother, Marian Robinson. “Our lifestyle back then was very different in how families, particularly working-class families, lived,” Obama said in a 2009 interview with Children’s Health magazine. “There was a limit to our resources. We didn’t have snacks and juice boxes. If we were at camp, lunch was a leftover sandwich with a piece of fruit. Dinner was more: You sat around the table and had a conversation, and it wasn’t about eating everything. Those values, even though they were the result of economic circumstances, were still really good traditions and they created some healthy boundaries about food.”

AFTER YEARS OF ADVOCATING FOR A WHITEHOUSE KITCHEN GARDEN, AMERICA'S SUSTAINABLE PRODUCE SUPPORTERS FINALLY TURNED THEIR GOALS FROM WASHINGTON TO THE BIGGER 'WHAT NEXT?' OF LARGE-SCALE, NATIONAL FOOD REFORMATION.

But the ‘60s and ‘70s also witnessed an onslaught of convenience foods. Frozen dinners were seen as modern along with The Jetsons and the microwave oven. The role of gardening was changing, too. “Gardening became something else over the years, which was this harmless activity and quaint and pleasant enough and it wasn’t seen as something that was actually essential,” says Doiron.

Obama was not immune to society’s collective attitude shift towards food. She told Children’s Health that the genesis of the kitchen garden came from recognizing that the busy lifestyles she and husband Barack were leading made it difficult to do the best for their kids. “Everybody is working, the kids have activities, we were eating out too much, we weren’t eating together enough,” she said. “We were relying on fast food, packing the sugary drinks into a lunch here or there. It just slowly gets out of control.”

One of Obama’s first official appearances as first lady was at the Department of Agriculture, where she told staff she was a “big believer” in community gardens. In February 2009, she invited local culinary students to the White House kitchen, where she talked about her own challenges trying to persuade her children to eat vegetables. Those public statements are very important to Doiron. “I think it’s a very strategic decision on her part because she announced early on that she was interested in taking on the role of mother-in-chief or the mom-in-chief and I sincerely believe she wants the best for her family,” he says. “I also believe she is looking to do the right thing for America’s families and saw [nutrition policy] as something that really could have an enormous impact if it was done in the proper way.”

Obama made an unprecedented move by including 29-year-old White House assistant chef Sam Kass in her inner circle of policy advisors. His appointment as food initiative coordinator made it very clear that Obama’s intentions were not just to plant a garden as a cross-your-fingers act of inspiration, but to actually develop a plan that would last the presidency.  

So far, Kass’s role has included visiting schools to promote healthy lunches, meeting with victims of food-borne illnesses and speaking at the D.C. Central Kitchen. Former White House executive chef Walter Scheib says Kass’s appointment is proof of Obama’s dedication to nutrition. “Food initiatives should be shared by a number of people but I think clearly a member of the circle should be somebody who wears a white jacket and a chef hat,” he says. “It’s great and very progressive of Mrs. Obama that she has brought somebody into her inner circle and not just in the execution end of it, in the actual cooking, but in the development of policies and practices.”


THE INFLUENCE FACTOR
Not long after the White House kitchen garden reveal, the Queen of England showcased her own organic garden at Buckingham Palace, the first garden on the property since the Victory Garden during the Second World War. That same month, Sarah Brown, the wife of British prime minister Gordon Brown, oversaw the debut of a new vegetable garden at 10 Downing Street. Replicas of the White House kitchen garden were grown at the Bloom in the Park horticultural festival in Dublin and the W. Atlee Burpee & Co. seed company in Warminster, Pennsylvania. Obama has been credited as giving a boost to seed sales and kick-starting a new home canning movement. It’s an influence that advocates don’t underestimate.

But both Dorion and Scheib agree a total overhaul of American food habits isn’t accomplished by seeing Obama with a garden spade. “Beyond that we’re going to really need to be thinking, ‘What do people need in order to plant gardens at their houses, behind schools, vacant lots in the city, retirement homes… you name it?’” Dorion says.

Once the food policy proponents have, to borrow a White House phrase, won the hearts and minds of American eaters, Scheib says there needs to be food ready to feed the converts. “If right now as little as 10% of the population said, ‘Okay, I buy it. I get what you’re saying. I’m suddenly not going to eat anything but local produce and going to be eating stuff that’s grown in a certain way,’ right now there aren’t enough people growing it that way that you could do it,” he says. “So [we must continue] to build the awareness and build the infrastructure to actually support that awareness as people buy into it and start doing it.”

On May 4, 2009 Obama made one of her frequent school visits to a Mexican heritage event at the Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School. She was asked by eight-year-old Amelia what had surprised her most about moving into the White House. The first lady responded, “I can plant a garden, something as small as planting a garden, and the whole world will pay attention.” •

Obama & Kass in White House Kitchen Photo by JONATHAN ERNST/Reuters/Corbis (above)