Urging the White House to grow its own …

Eating your own home grown food is not only the most local of the local, it helps save money and gives gardeners great access to great food. It can also be a powerful political statement.

From Out of the Yard and Onto the Fork : (but make sure you go read the whole piece from the New York Times, not too long)

Mr. Doiron’s latest cause is challenging the presidential candidates to plant a garden on the White House lawn. He has posted his proposal, “Eat the View,” on www.ondayone.org, a Web site where people record their visions for the next president.

“This would not be a quaint little garden for the White House chef,” he said. “I have something fairly ambitious in mind, that would make a powerful political statement — a garden large enough to cover most of what the White House needs, with an overflow to a local food pantry.”

Mr. Doiron is actually suggesting a return to a tradition as old as the founding fathers. John Adams planted a vegetable garden at the White House to feed his family, “because back then, presidents had to fund their own household,” said Rose Hayden-Smith, a historian and garden educator based at the University of California in Davis.

During World War I, to save fuel and labor, President Woodrow Wilson had sheep grazing on the White House lawn. His wife, Edith, planted vegetables to inspire the Liberty Garden campaign, in which thousands of students, called “Soldiers of the Soil,” grew their own food in their schools and communities, she said. As the Allied powers began to win, the name Liberty Garden was changed to Victory Garden.

Just after Pearl Harbor, Ms. Hayden-Smith said, another Victory Garden campaign was started. Eleanor Roosevelt grew peas and carrots on the White House lawn, and by the end of the war, Ms. Hayden-Smith said, “Americans were producing 40 percent of the country’s produce” in their gardens.

Read Out of the Yard and Onto the Fork >

This entry was posted on April 20, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under eating locally in the media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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