verdict on the event was that this was a class act by a down-to-earth woman in touch with the people. In a few brief hours, Obama achieved what food activists and nutrition advocates could only dream of: she made the planting of a vegetable garden front page news around the world. It was a good news day indeed for urban agriculture.
As is appropriate for a place on which the spotlight of symbolism shines so brightly, the White House front yard has been the focus of many food-related campaigns over the years, some started by individuals or groups with a message to promote, others initiated by the inhabitants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue themselves. Surely the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt was hovering over the White House lawn to cheer Obama on. It was Roosevelt who last channeled her energies in the direction of food production, planting a Victory Garden at the White House during World War II. Interestingly, Roosevelt’s efforts, while embraced by the people, were somewhat less than enthusiastically supported by officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who were concerned about the effects that a populace committed to growing their own food in backyards across the nation would have on the agricultural sector and the food industry. How times have changed. When Obama planted her garden, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack had just recently announced that an organic food garden, “The People’s Garden,” would be planted at USDA headquarters, across from the Smithsonian Mall, in honor of President Lincoln. For the photo op accompanying the announcement, Vilsack chipped away at the pavement—a reversal of fortune for the parking lot, which was brought back to some semblance of paradise. As he put it to the assembled media: “Our goal is for USDA facilities worldwide to install community gardens in their local offices.”
Other presidential precedents can be found for Obama’s agricultural act. The first presidential inhabitant of the White House, John Adams, planted vegetables there. Thomas Jefferson planted fruit trees. President William Taft is said to have kept a cow at the White House from 1910 to 1913—a Holstein-Friesian gifted by a senator from Wisconsin. During Woodrow Wilson’s tenure, sheep grazed the lawn. In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter tended an herb garden.
The symbolic power carried by food production at this most symbolic of households had been noted and promoted by many people and organizations before Obama picked up her trowel. In a slyly subversive gesture, Euell Gibbons, the father of modern food foraging whose classic 1962 book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, is still in print, stuck his hand through the White House fence and plucked four edible “weeds” from the lawn. Clearly the standards of care have become more stringent since then, and the small army of groundskeepers who maintain the place wouldn’t let any weeds—edible or not—get past them.
It was precisely this small army that writer Michael Pollan, the author of many bestselling books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma, suggested in 1991 be enlisted for a different kind of effort. His New York Times opinion piece “Abolish the White House Lawn” proposed that President Bush issue an executive order to rip out the grass—“an act of environmental shock therapy” that, Pollan imagined, “could conceivably set off a revolution in consciousness.” Just where that revolution could lead included four different possible destinations, usefully provided by Pollan. One option was to replace the lawn with a meadow, the mown path of which could form a spur of the Appalachian Trail. Another was to restore a portion of the White House landscape to its original condition—as wetland. (Pollan acknowledged that the swamp symbolism might be troubling to some.) A third proposal was to plant a vegetable garden—an 18-acre Victory Garden. “The White House has enough land to become self-sufficient in food—a model of Jeffersonian independence and thrift!” Pollan noted. The fourth suggestion, preferred by Pollan, was to plant an orchard with that most American of fruits, the apple. (Pollan remained silent on the subject of apple pie.)
President Bush didn’t accept Pollan’s challenge, and it took almost two decades for the White House turfgrass to be turfed—1,100 square feet of it anyway. We can only speculate about what role Roger Doiron played in the Obamas’ decision to install a White House food garden, but there’s no doubt that his persuasive efforts captured the public’s imagination. Doiron is the person behind the Maine-based network Kitchen Gardeners International’s Eat the View campaign. Promoting “high-impact food gardens in high-profile places,” his campaign was launched in February 2008 to encourage the planting of a White House Victory Garden (for the “Eaters in Chief”). More than 110,000 people signed the petition. Without a doubt, the garden has been an inspiration to hundreds of thousands more—an example of a leader pointing people in the direction of positive, personal solutions in tough times. But it’s also a rousing example of the people leading the chief.
Cynics might suggest that the White House garden is all optics without much traction, despite the flurry of interest that accompanied its planting. But the follow-through has been impressive. Michelle Obama, who said at the September 2009 opening of a Washington, D.C., farmers’ market that the White House food garden was “one of the greatest things I’ve done in my life so far,” has put food issues in the spotlight. According to the website Obama Foodorama, which tracks matters food-related, Michelle Obama is “the only First Lady to ever have a food policy agenda, a food policy team, and a Food Initiative Coordinator.” Indeed, she has been a food garden ambassador of sorts well beyond Washington. When the Obamas went to the U.K. in April 2009, the First Lady encouraged Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s wife to plant a food garden at Number 10 Downing Street. And on her second international trip, to Russia, Obama was greeted by a Moscow media obsessed with her gardening activity—a refreshing change, a substantive change, from the focus on her fashion sense. Gardens as an instrument of international diplomacy . . . now that’s an idea with growing power.
Closer to home, all across North America, what might be called politically symbolic food gardens are sprouting up at a great rate in landscapes of power and governance. In the spring of 2009 alone, Maria Shriver, wife of California governor Arnold Schwarzeneg-ger, announced plans to plant a vegetable garden at Capitol Park in Sacramento; Maryland’s First Lady, Judge Katie O’Malley, planted a food garden at the governor’s mansion in Annapolis; Portland mayor Sam Adams inaugurated one at his city hall, replacing two small lawns with vegetables, while the Portland headquarters of Multnomah County installed the Hope Garden; Baltimore mayor Shiela Dixon proclaimed that a food garden would be planted on the plaza outside city hall, and Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson converted a portion of the city hall lawn into a community garden that includes wheelchair-accessible plots. The governors of Maine, Pennsylvania, and New York all have food gardens at their official residences, according to Eat the View’s Roger Doiron.
It’s a brave politician indeed who risks the jokes and humorous digs that such gardening activity might provoke. As one wag on the Society of Environmental Journalists listserv, Mark Neuzil, put it, “Allow me to be the first to say that these [politicians] will have no shortage of manure with which to fertilize their vegetables.” And it’s a brave activist who takes food matters into his or her own hands by planting symbolic food gardens in public, political places. Matthew Behrens was arrested for the garden he and other members of the group Toronto Action for Social Change planted at Queen’s Park, on the grounds of the Ontario Legislature, in the mid-1990s. About forty people showed up with bags of topsoil, seed packets, and small transplants in front of the imposing Romanesque building and proceeded to plant zucchinis, peas, and tomatoes under the premier’s window. They also put in some marigolds, not as a concession to aesthetics but for pest control. As a seventy-five-year-old nun watered seedlings, security guards swooped in, demanding to know how long the gardeners intended to be there. Presumably the guards were not amused when one of the protesters looked at the back of the zucchini seed pack and said, “fifty-two days.” Behrens and a few others were arrested, fingerprinted, and held overnight in jail—all for adding topsoil to the heavily compacted ground and sprinkling some seeds.
The group returned to Queen’s Park the following autumn to plant winter wheat and Jerusalem artichokes. Ten people were arrested, but acquitted at trial. There was no evidence that they’d damaged public property; indeed, common sense and the evidence both suggested that the gardeners had instead improved the health of the soil. Unsuccessful in official attempts
