Obama's Birthday Gift to Alice Waters
Chez Panisse Owner Inspires White House Vegetable & Herb Garden
Apr 12, 2009
1100 square feet of the south lawn will be turned into a vegetable and herb garden. Twenty-three fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington will help her dig the soil. Sam Kass, assistant White House chef, will oversee the garden. The kitchen staff chose the vegetables and herbs to grow and will help the grounds crew tend the garden.
First Family to Pull Weeds
Michelle Obama says that virtually the entire Obama family, including the president. will pull weeds. “Now Grandma, my mom, I don’t know.” Her mother, she said, will probably sit back and say: “Isn’t that lovely. You missed a spot.”
Bancroft Elementary has had a garden since 2001. The fifth graders will also help plant, harvest and cook the vegetables, berries and herbs.
Alice Waters wrote to Barack Obama after his election last November, forcefully suggesting the garden, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden during World War II.
What’s Growing in the White House Garden?
In a spot visible to passers-by on E Street, 55 varieties of vegetables and herbs will be grown from organic seedlings, including:
- spinach
- chard
- cilantro
- collards
- black kale
- lettuces: romaine, green oak leaf, butterhead, red leaf and “galactic”
- tomatillos
- hot peppers
- various herbs, including Thai basil and anise hyssop
Teaching Garden: Alice Waters’ “Edible Schoolyard”
In 1996 Alice Waters, through her Chez Panisse Foundation, started the Edible Schoolyard program to demonstrate the transformative power of growing, cooking, and sharing food.
The cafeteria at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Junior High School, had long been shut down. Instead, a "snack shack" that served packaged hamburgers, burritos and pizza. Waters’ program added food-based curriculum that allowed the students to plant and harvest their own food, then cook, serve and eat it for lunch.
Fast Food Nation
Waters promotes the slow food movement and was a locavore before the word was coined, advocating buying local organically produced food. “Right now in this country we're being educated by fast food values,” Waters said in a 2002 interview with David Weich of Powell’s Books.
The fast food values message: “…it doesn't matter whether we eat hamburgers and hot dogs every day of the week; it doesn't matter whether you sit at the table by yourself, or if you eat in the car and just throw the stuff in the garbage. Food should be cheap and labor should be cheap and everything should be the same no matter where you go; whether it's a McDonald's in Germany or one in California, it should be the same,” Waters said.
Disconnecting From Nature
Waters provides some historical perspective. “People have always foraged during the seasons for what was close by. They picked it, and they brought it to the marketplaces, and they sold it to people in the neighborhood. People brought it home, cooked it, and ate it with their families. Something happened. We got disconnected through mass transportation, televisions, distractions of every sort. Cooking was thought to be drudgery. Eating non-seasonally...we've changed in twenty years. We lost that connection with nature in a generation.”
In a 2006 piece she wrote for The Nation, Waters said: “When we pledge our dietary allegiance to a fast-food nation, there are also grave consequences to the health of our civil society and our national character. When we eat fast-food meals alone in our cars, we swallow the values and assumptions of the corporations that manufacture them. According to these values, eating is no more important than fueling up, and should be done quickly and anonymously.”
“We eat every day,” Waters told Weich, “and if we do it in a way that doesn't recognize value, it's contributing to the destruction of our culture and of agriculture. But if it's done with a focus and care it can be a wonderful thing. It changes the quality of your life.”
Read a profile of Alice Waters and the beginnings of Chez Panisse.
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