nosh nook #81 - monday, july 6, 2009

the obamas' first harvest (link)
07.06.09 - salon.com - by mike madden

these days, they don't let just anybody be first lady. nope. it's not only important that our country's first lady is married to the president, but she also has to have some sort of pet project, some issue that she can really run with & make her own. nancy reagan had her drugs. hillary had her health care reform. laura bush totally championed children's literacy & women's rights. our current first lady, michelle obama, is devoting much of her precious first lady time to improving our food system, as symbolized by the white house garden she's planted with the aid of plucky child labor.

the garden's designed to get people thinking about where our food comes from & as a result, get them to eat healthier. as salon's mike madden reports, it's harvest time for that garden, so michelle & her child labor went a-harvestin'. the garden's bounty--"73 pounds of lettuce, 12 pounds of peas & one cucumber (which had originally been white but was yellow by the time the kids got to it)." that cucumber sounds shitty, but i'd eat the rest of it. overall, the garden's "yielded more than 225 pounds of food--right now, beans, tomatoes, eggplant and cucumbers are in season."

on the campaign trail, president obama appeared to support the independent farmer, but he's yet to do much to improve our nation's food system, leaving michelle obama's white house garden as the administration's crowning achievement in that arena. salon notes that later this summer, congress will deal with school lunch program legislation, but they made "a half-hearted attempt to cut federal payments to big corporate farms (that) fizzled earlier this year" & the farm bill isn't going to be reopened for five years. until then, we can all rest easy knowing that there's a garden at the white house and, as folks learned at the lunch coinciding with the garden harvest, chicken at the white house is baked, not fried.  take that, unhealthy racist stereotype.