From the ArcaMax Publishing, Politics Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/politics/s-371968-549431
SCARBOROUGH, Maine -- It's been decades since that famous forager
Euell Gibbons reached through the White House fence and picked four
edible weeds out of the president's garden. This is not something that
the Secret Service would recommend you try today.
But Roger Doiron has a better plan for eating the view of 1600
Pennsylvania Ave. He's started a campaign to get a kitchen garden
growing on the White House lawn.
Doiron works out of his small cape house in Maine, where I find him
one summer day. A wasp-thin 41-year-old, he's part of the fastest
growing -- I used the word literally -- movement in the country. His
organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, is one link in a loose
chain of partisans who are neither conservatives nor liberals but
locavores. They want to think global, eat local. Very local. As in
their front and back yard.
He shows me the lawn sign that expresses his politics: "1,500 Miles,
400 Gallons, Say What?" It's a reference to the average miles food
travels to your plate and the gallons of fuel used in its migration.
It's not the sexiest slogan, but kitchen gardeners are probably as
passionate about vegetables as Republicans are about tax cuts.
Doiron spent a decade with a grass-roots environmental group in
Europe. Weekdays he worried about mad cow disease and weekends he ate
happily out of his Belgian mother-in-law's garden.
After returning to his homeland and hometown the week before 9/11, he
became a lettuce-roots environmentalist. As head of KGI, he also walks
the walk, showing me 50 varieties of vegetables he grows for his
family of five on about a sixth of an acre. Memo to other amateurs:
You will be pleased to know that Doiron's garden also has weeds.
The appeal of kitchen gardens -- food you grow for the table -- has
been increasing pretty steadily. Taste bud by taste bud. But this
year, a harmonic or maybe disharmonic convergence of factors led to a
giant leap in the number of grow-it-yourselfers.
For one thing, there's the rising cost of food -- 45 percent worldwide
in two years. There's also the rising consciousness about the carbon
footprint on your dinner plate. There is, as well, recognition of an
international food shortage and moral queasiness about biofuels,
growing corn to feed cars while people are going hungry.
Meanwhile, we've had more uncertainty about food safety, whether it
was spinach in 2006 or this year's tomatoes. And the floods that
ruined millions of acres in the Midwest have undermined our easy sense
of plenty.
"When people feel they are living in uncertain times, they turn to
things that give them a sense of security," says Doiron. "There are
not many sure things but if you put a few seeds in the ground and you
don't muck it up too much you'll get a crop." As proof he stands
beside a neat patch of potatoes.
He adds, "Don't do it because it's the cheap thing to do or because Al
Gore said it's the right thing to do. Do it to make a small yet
concrete step. You may not be able to single-handedly take on Exxon
and Chevron but you can take on your backyard."
In that spirit, Doiron is pushing for edible landscapes everywhere
from schoolyards to governor's mansions to empty urban plots. But
Doiron set his eyes on everybody's house, the White House.
He wants the candidates to pledge they'll turn a piece of the 18-acre
White House terrain into an edible garden. Or rather, return it
into an edible garden.
After all, John Adams, the first president to ever live in the White
House, had a garden to feed his family. Woodrow Wilson had a Liberty
Garden and sheep grazing during the First World War. And, of course,
the Roosevelts famously had their Victory Garden during World War II,
a time when 40 percent of the nation's produce came from citizen
gardeners.
It's way too late for a Bush harvest, but the campaign to get the next
president to model a bit of homeland food security has sprouted on
Doiron's Internet site called EatTheView.Org.
Eat the View doesn't have the marching sound of John Philip Sousa. It
doesn't have the patriotic salience of a flag. But in dicey times, the
idea of growing just a bit of your own food carries the real flavor of
July 4th. It smacks a lot of independence.
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Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com