First Lady Michelle Obama “planted a garden, waged snappy social media campaigns, and worked behind the scenes with researchers, lawmakers, heads of government departments, schools, and food giants to quietly change what Americans eat,” says Vox. Former critics regard her advocacy as “brilliant” and a “godsend,” writes Julia Belluz in the story, which coincides with the final harvest by the Obama administration of the kitchen garden on the South Lawn of the White House.
The First Lady is scheduled to deliver her own retrospective on the Let’s Move initiative against child obesity and to make an announcement on the future of the kitchen garden on Wednesday, and to host the fall harvest on Thursday. Mrs. Obama has said she hopes the new occupants of the White House in 2017 will keep the project going. “It’s been really a fun tradition for us here at the White House, because I think we’ve really been able to change the conversation about what you guys eat,” she told students in April.
To nudge the next president toward keeping the garden, aides to Mrs. Obama have said they’ll plant cold-tolerant crops for winter harvest. And on Wednesday, the White House says it “will unveil updates that have been made to the White House Kitchen Garden in an effort to make it even more accessible to young students and world leaders alike.”
Belluz says she spoke to a dozen people who worked with the First Lady on the campaign for healthier food and more physical activity as well as health and food policy researchers. “I learned that some of the very things that made Michelle Obama sometimes appear soft — the industry collaborations, the emphasis on exercise — were part of the shrewd strategy that made her effective.”
Food policy author Marion Nestle is quoted by Vox as saying, ” “We’re going to look back in 10, 20 years and wish she were still around.”
Mrs. Obama encouraged the reforms in the 2010 child nutrition bill — more whole grains, fruit and vegetables in school meals and less salt, sugar and fat — and spoke against rollbacks in the child nutrition bill that is stalled in Congress this fall.
The new assessment modifies earlier views of the First Lady’s campaign by food advocates. In 2012, “many of those who’d had high hopes say the First Lady has logged only modest successes,” wrote Bridget Huber in The Nation in a story produced in partnership with FERN. “Observers put the blame less on a lack of goodwill than on the political realities of taking on the multibillion-dollar food industry, which has lots of lobbying money and friends in Congress and no qualms about fanning the fears of government overreach when it perceives a threat to its interests.”