Did you know that Michelle Obama is working with a local elementary school in Washington, DC to plant an organic garden on the lawn of the White House?  It's been in the news a bit over the last month or so, you may have seen it.

The First Lady, White House Horticulturist Dale Haney, and students from Bancroft Elementary School broke ground on the garden on March 20, 2009, and on April 9, 2009 the students returned and worked with the First Lady and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak to plant the garden.  The students will be back again to help with the harvest as well, and they also tend to a garden at their own school, which is host to both a both a school garden and a community garden for the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood.

The White House garden is exciting news, and even more exciting is that Michelle Obama is using the garden to help promote healthy eating at a national level, and to support the role of youth taking on leadership and ownership of these efforts.

The food grown in the garden will be cooked in the White House Kitchen and given to Miriam's Kitchen, which serves the homeless in Washington, DC. 

Here are some of the First Lady's comments, featured on the White House blog, and in  Washington Post and New York Times articles about the garden:

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at a time when obesity and diabetes have become a national concern.

“My hope,” the first lady said in an interview in her East Wing office, “is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.”

"I've been able to have my kids eat so many different things that they would have never touched if we bought it at a store," Obama said before picking up a shovel and digging in. "Because they met the farmer that grew it or they saw how it was grown, they were curious about it and they tried it. And usually they liked it, and they'd eat more and more of it."

“I wanted to be able to bring what I learned to a broader base of people. And what better way to do it than to plant a vegetable garden in the South Lawn of the White House?”

For urban dwellers who have no backyards, the country’s one million community gardens can also play an important role, Mrs. Obama said. But the first lady emphasized that she did not want people to feel guilty if they did not have the time for a garden: there are still many changes they can make. “You can begin in your own cupboard,” she said, “by eliminating processed food, trying to cook a meal a little more often, trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables.”

 

 

 

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