Michael Pollan "eats the view"

If you haven’t yet made it through Michael Pollan’s 8,000 word opus in last Sunday's New York Times, let us share with you the high point, in our opinion.

Pollan’s makes many important points, but none more insightful than in his concluding proposal to the next president: tear out part of the White House lawn and plant an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

He continues:

“When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement.”

It is rewarding and exciting to read the most well-respected "good food" journalist in the US offering such strong support for KGI's "Eat the View!" campaign. For those who don't know the history of this campaign, the idea was inspired by the White House's long and rich history as an edible landscape and, more recently, by Alice Waters' effort to convince President Clinton to dig the "First Garden" in 1995. "Eat the View! launched in February 2008 when KGI Founder Roger Doiron posted the idea on the website OnDayOne.org where it quickly rose to the number one slot as the "most popular" and "most discussed" proposal for the next president. The campaign received the media equivalent of a thick top dressing of organic compost in the spring of 2008 when it was written up in the New York Times and later by Ellen Goodman in a her syndicated column published across the US and, indeed, the world.

"Eat the View!" launched as its own website in the late spring of 2008 and inspired some other good folks to push for an organic farm on the White House lawn, an effort that sprouted into The Who Farm, a kindred effort, this past summer.

So, where will the idea go next? To 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, of course!