Michelle Obama has planted a garden at the White House, made speeches on eating healthy and is holding "secret meetings" with her policy team and USDA officials. This sounds like a recipe for a food system reform. While most First Ladies do not attempt to make policy recommendations or fail at doing so (i.e. Hillary Clinton's Health Care Plan of 1993), I think Michelle Obama may have a chance at being successful. Nowadays everyone, regardless of socio-economic status, race and age, is paying attention to the quality of food. As we know it is a hard-hitting issue on college campuses across the nation and most are trying to change where college's get their food from or at least educating the student body about food options on campus (plug for food survey, if you have not taken it, take it NOW!). Her policy team consists of White House Food Initiatives Coordinator Sam Kass and Policy Director Jocelyn Frye, who are compiling a new set of national food and health initiatives. Mrs. Obama is developing her "policy" around former FDA chief David Kessler's new book, The End of Overeating. The book states that sugar, fat and salt are addictive and America is addicted to them. I think it would be amazing if the First Lady rather than the President reformed our food system that affected not only the infrastructure in schools but also in households. It will be interesting to see how this takes form throughout Obama's term and if Michelle is not successful, I hope someone is.
A good place to start is in k-12 schools. Some of my colleagues are active on the one tray campaign to reform the national school meal program: http://onetray.org/
ReplyDelete"As you go about planning and planting the White House garden, we respectfully encourage you to recognize the role conventional agriculture plays in the U.S in feeding the ever-increasing population, contributing to the U.S. economy and providing a safe and economical food supply. America's farmers understand crop protection technologies are supported by sound scientific research and innovation."
ReplyDeleteBy "crop protection technologies" they mean pesticides.
You can see the letter here that was sent by the MACA in response to Mrs. Obama's announcement that she was planting the garden.
They basically hate-on organics.
http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/1309/