President Bush didn’t accept Pollan’s challenge, and it took almost two decades for the White House turfgrass to be turfed—1,100 square feet of it anyway. We can only speculate about what role Roger Doiron played in the Obamas’ decision to install a White House food garden, but there’s no doubt that his persuasive efforts captured the public’s imagination. Doiron is the person behind the Maine-based network Kitchen Gardeners International’s Eat the View campaign. Promoting “high-impact food gardens in high-profile places,” his campaign was launched in February 2008 to encourage the planting of a White House Victory Garden (for the “Eaters in Chief”). More than 110,000 people signed the petition. Without a doubt, the garden has been an inspiration to hundreds of thousands more—an example of a leader pointing people in the direction of positive, personal solutions in tough times. But it’s also a rousing example of the people leading the chief.
Cynics might suggest that the White House garden is all optics without much traction, despite the flurry of interest that accompanied its planting. But the follow-through has been impressive. Michelle Obama, who said at the September 2009 opening of a Washington, D.C., farmers’ market that the White House food garden was “one of the greatest things I’ve done in my life so far,” has put food issues in the spotlight. According to the website Obama Foodorama, which tracks matters food-related, Michelle Obama is “the only First Lady to ever have a food policy agenda, a food policy team, and a Food Initiative Coordinator.” Indeed, she has been a food garden ambassador of sorts well beyond Washington. When the Obamas went to the U.K. in April 2009, the First Lady encouraged Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s wife to plant a food garden at Number 10 Downing Street. And on her second international trip, to Russia, Obama was greeted by a Moscow media obsessed with her gardening activity—a refreshing change, a substantive change, from the focus on her fashion sense. Gardens as an instrument of international diplomacy . . . now that’s an idea with growing power.
Closer to home, all across North America, what might be called politically symbolic food gardens are sprouting up at a great rate in landscapes of power and governance. In the spring of 2009 alone, Maria Shriver, wife of California governor Arnold Schwarzeneg-ger, announced plans to plant a vegetable garden at Capitol Park in Sacramento; Maryland’s First Lady, Judge Katie O’Malley, planted a food garden at the governor’s mansion in Annapolis; Portland mayor Sam Adams inaugurated one at his city hall, replacing two small lawns with vegetables, while the Portland headquarters of Multnomah County installed the Hope Garden; Baltimore mayor Shiela Dixon proclaimed that a food garden would be planted on the plaza outside city hall, and Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson converted a portion of the city hall lawn into a community garden that includes wheelchair-accessible plots. The governors of Maine, Pennsylvania, and New York all have food gardens at their official residences, according to Eat the View’s Roger Doiron.
It’s a brave politician indeed who risks the jokes and humorous digs that such gardening activity might provoke. As one wag on the Society of Environmental Journalists listserv, Mark Neuzil, put it, “Allow me to be the first to say that these [politicians] will have no shortage of manure with which to fertilize their vegetables.” And it’s a brave activist who takes food matters into his or her own hands by planting symbolic food gardens in public, political places. Matthew Behrens was arrested for the garden he and other members of the group Toronto Action for Social Change planted at Queen’s Park, on the grounds of the Ontario Legislature, in the mid-1990s. About forty people showed up with bags of topsoil, seed packets, and small transplants in front of the imposing Romanesque building and proceeded to plant zucchinis, peas, and tomatoes under the premier’s window. They also put in some marigolds, not as a concession to aesthetics but for pest control. As a seventy-five-year-old nun watered seedlings, security guards swooped in, demanding to know how long the gardeners intended to be there. Presumably the guards were not amused when one of the protesters looked at the back of the zucchini seed pack and said, “fifty-two days.” Behrens and a few others were arrested, fingerprinted, and held overnight in jail—all for adding topsoil to the heavily compacted ground and sprinkling some seeds.
The group returned to Queen’s Park the following autumn to plant winter wheat and Jerusalem artichokes. Ten people were arrested, but acquitted at trial. There was no evidence that they’d damaged public property; indeed, common sense and the evidence both suggested that the gardeners had instead improved the health of the soil. Unsuccessful in official attempts to punish this wanton act of gardening, one exasperated police sergeant was quoted in NOW, Toronto’s alternative magazine, as saying: “It’s not like we’re upset that they’re planting seeds, but there’s got to be a line. Otherwise, everyone and their uncle would be there growing things.”
Now that’s a scary thought. And also a thought blind to historical precedence. Everyone and their uncle did in fact grow things—lots of things in lots of places, including on the legislature grounds—during at least three notable periods in North American history: during World War I, the Depression, and World War II. Variously labeled as war gardens, relief gardens, and Victory Gardens, these massive efforts at domestic, home-based food production were hugely successful by any measure. Fruit and vegetable gardens sprang up everywhere there was space: in backyards and front yards, parks, utility corridors, vacant lots, school grounds, church grounds, playing fields, community centers, corporate grounds, railway corridors . . . Name a type of private or public space and it was planted. Likewise, the commitment to food production cut across all social classes, from the poorest to the richest, from the powerful to the disenfranchised. Picture this: millionaire socialite Helena Rubinstein had a penthouse Victory Garden (she called it her “Farm in the Sky”) at her Park Avenue apartment in New York City. Along with growing cauliflower, cabbage, and celery, she kept two chickens and two rabbits. At a 1943 Victory Garden party she hosted in honor of the United States Crop Corps, an organization of auxiliary farm workers recruited by the War Manpower Commission to grow food, surrealist painter Salvador Dali mingled with the assembled crowd.
The North American public enthusiastically embraced domestic food production during both world wars, proving that a staggering amount of food could be grown, particularly in cities, if people set their minds to it. During World War I, an estimated 5 million gardeners in America produced $520 million worth of food in 1918, cultivated in backyards, vacant lots, and previously untilled land; the National War Garden Commission in the U.S. (just the fact that such a commission existed speaks volumes) called them “patriotic gifts . . . to the nation.”
What is perhaps most striking—particularly for today’s audience— is the earnest urgency of the government’s language around the need for domestic food production. During WWI, the Ontario Department of Agriculture steeped its garden promotion in military metaphors intended to galvanize the populace. “Have You Enlisted in The Greater Production Battalion?” asked a full-page advertisement the department published in the April 1918 edition of The Canadian Horticulturist. Likewise, a department circular, titled “A Vegetable Garden for Every Home,” stated that “every backyard is fighting ground for the empire.” Noting that the government planned to ban the sale of canned goods (in order to preserve supplies for the war effort), the department warned that “if we don’t grow them [vegetables], we won’t have them.” Rarely does a government entity summarize a situation with such bracing clarity.
Nor did the end of the hostilities in Europe bring an end to North American food production campaigns. In 1919, the National War Garden Commission stated, “As a result of emergency created by war the home garden of America has become an institution of world-wide importance.” Characterizing home food