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HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
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JUNE 2012
81
HEMISPHERES:
Let me just start by
saying that every attempt I’ve made to
grow anything has yielded disastrous
results. You never grew a garden in your
whole life before this one, and yours
turned out great. So you give me hope.
OBAMA:
[Laughs.] You need the
National Park Service.
HEMISPHERES:
That was actually going
to be my next question. Can you lend
them to me for a few days?
OBAMA:
I’d love to! I cannot take
credit for the success of this garden.
This truly has become a community
effort. There are people who work
in the White House, in all areas,
who volunteer a couple of times a
week to go down there and weed.
It’s a great way to just let off steam.
And of course we have all these
wonderful schoolkids who help me
too. Yesterday was our spring plant-
ing, and we planted the garden in 15
minutes because we had 34 kids.
You knowwhat? That’s what you
need: 34 kids. You need 34 kids to
help you plant.
HEMISPHERES:
Noted. You’re the first
person since Eleanor Roosevelt to grow
food on the White House grounds—
where did the idea come from?
OBAMA:
It really started in my
kitchen in Chicago. As a working
mom, I came to the issue of child-
hood health because I was falling
into the same rut as many other
parents around the country. We were
eating out way too much, not paying
a ention to portion sizes, drinking
lots of sugary drinks. My pediatri-
cian pulled me aside and suggested
I check out our diet, because the
numbers weren’t going the way they
should. I thought I was doing the best
I could for Sasha and Malia, so it was
kind of a shock to me. We made some
very basic changes in our household.
I tried to cook maybe one more time
during the week, and bake more than
fry. We got rid of all our sugary drinks
and started drinking more water. We
looked at portion sizes. By the next
visit, our doctor said the kids were
back on track in terms of what he
wanted to see. It took so li le to make
these changes.
HEMISPHERES:
Did the kids push back?
OBAMA:
Oh yeah. You start reading
labels and throwing out the juice
boxes, and they’re looking sad over
the garbage pail. But one of the
things we did was to make a habit
of going to farmers’ markets more
and involving the kids in the process.
What I found was that my kids were
more willing to try things that they
had a hand in picking out. Then I
started thinking that if
I
didn’t know
these things, what’s everybody else
doing? What about parents who
don’t have access to farmers’ markets
and don’t have this information? I
thought it would be cool to plant a
garden at the White House and use
it as an educational tool. This was
during the campaign, long before we
even knew Barack had a chance. But
that’s when the idea was hatched.
HEMISPHERES:
You got a great
platform to spread your message, but at
the same time you ended up with what
had to be the most scrutinized kitchen
garden in the history of the world.
OBAMA:
Absolutely. It’s right before
planting day and you start thinking,
“What if nothing grows? What if a er
all this work the tomatoes taste hor-
rible and it’s just a complete failure?”
HEMISPHERES:
Then you have op-ed
writers turning it into a metaphor.
OBAMA:
Exactly.
HEMISPHERES:
But you’ve done very
well. Your first harvest yielded 1,600
pounds of produce. That’s serious.
OBAMA:
I stopped keeping track a er
a while. We get thousands of pounds
of food from that garden each year,
and we eat from it every day. We
incorporate greens into salads for
state dinners, for luncheons, and we
give hundreds of pounds of food to
The garden project involved building
a beehive that would eventually host
some 70,000 honeybees, an idea that
gave the president pause. Was it hard
to convince him? “You know,” the first
lady says, “he really didn’t have a say.”
CONTINUED ON PAGE 146
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GROWTH PLANS
American Grown
has advice for even the most black-thumbed aspiring gardener, including these tips on
ideal daytime growing temperatures from National Park Service horticulturist Jim Adams:
55 º– 75 º
Garlic, leeks,
onions,
shallots
60 º– 65 º
Beets, broccoli,
cabbage, carrots,
cauliflower,
kale, potatoes,
spinach
65 º– 75 º
Beans, black-eyed
peas, cucumbers,
melons, squash,
sweet corn
70 º– 85 º
Eggplant, hot
peppers, okra,
sweet potatoes,
tomatoes,
watermelon
PREVIOUS SPREAD: MR PHOTO/CORBIS OUTLINE. THIS SPREAD: AP PHOTO/MANUEL BALCE CENETA (FARMERS’ MARKET); JASON REED/REUTERS/CORBIS (GARDEN)