Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Trolling the White House Garden

This new video segment of Inside the White House features a follow-up story on the White House garden, the first garden of its kind on the grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt's minimalistic yet symbolic "Victory Garden."

The first Lady describes why this attention to food production is meaningful. "The garden is really an important introduction to what I hope will be a new way to how the country thinks about food...and I also want to encourage people to think about doing more family meals," Mrs. Obama says. "We've found that we've been able to do that, and part of the message is that if the President of the United States can sit down with his family and have dinner, hopefully more families find the time to do the same thing."

Back in April, when the First Lady announced that she was going to break ground on an organic garden, big-Ag shovelled considerable criticism her way for highlighting the local and pesticide-free choice rather than celebrating "conventional" farming practices which utilizes crop protection technologies, allowing us to prosper.

In a letter sent by Mid-America CropLife Association (MACA), an organization that represents producers of crop protection technologies, to Mrs. Obama and, by extension, to us, we are asked to consider, amongst other things, the great value modern agriculatural practices like the March delivery of California strawberries to the mid-West. While it is wonderful that we have plentiful crops in America and still have a capacity to ship around the nation (unlike Kenya and Afghanistan this year for example), all is not well with our conventional use of chemicals nor our dependence on their transport for sustainable living, particularly during a regional, state or national catastrophe.

With her first White House summer literally under her belt, Michelle Obama still takes heat for her organic choice from trolls in the comment sections of articles such as this Huffington Post one. One commenter even takes a crack at Van Jones, who appears nowhere in the article but has been recently called out as a "Communist" by right-wing drummer Glenn Beck. I'm sure that we will see something coming from Big-Ag soon in response to this latest episode of "Life at the Whitehouse."

references:
Times Online: Big Agriculture takes umbrage at Mrs Obama's organic garden, April 22, 2009
Solve Climate: Solving Kenya's Food Crisis One Indigenous Crop at a Time, Sept. 2, 2009
World Focus: One third of Afghans at Risk of Hunger, Malnutrition
Organic Consumers: USDA says Biotech Compatible with Organic

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