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Eat the View has been working for a Whitehouse Garden. Eat the View is a campaign to plant healthy, edible landscapes in high-impact, high-visibility places. In a recent NY Times column, Michael Pollan supported this idea as an avenue to bring attention to food policy. Please sign their petition.
I hope as part of any Victory Garden, there are recipes and discussion about changing the way we eat. It is winter in most of America and a perfect time to begin planning your own victory garden. You can be part of this even if you don’t have a yard. The community garden movement is alive and well in America and people are finding innovative ways to find a garden spot. The school garden programs are wonderful and children begin a lifelong love of vegetables.
One thing we can all do is change the way we eat.. Pollan points out we have two major reasons for changing the way we eat – health is one: “There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system” Pollan
I challenge you to make at least one change in your diet that is better for your health. Give up white flour, eat more greens, or eat less meat. Baby steps!
I am going to take a personal pledge to eat better. Since I love baloney and hot wings, this is not a minor change. Although since being part of a CSA, I have found eating better easier. Our season is almost over and now I’ll be on my own and I am hoping I will have the patience to continue my seasonal eating ways.
For many people eating out and minimilist cooking is their way of life. I have found Eat This Not That to be a great guide.
4 Comments
Katherine – absolutely – I think they should rip up the lawn at the White House, put it all into raised beds and grow some serious veggies and fruits. A great idea – and undoubtedly would save a lot of money in terms of things like mowing.
eXcellent idea, Katherine
Even if Obama never sees Pollans letter to the Farmer in Chief — I hope his food policy people do and realize there are a lot of groups and people involved in changing the food system and he can capitalize on their existence for support.
Changing food policy is one area we can effect with our own pocketbooks!
Urban farming not only can be done, it can provide more than good food.
Bioremediation, the practice of growing crops on brownfields to leach the poisons from them, is being used to clean up old Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh and Youngstown. In these cases, the crops aren’t used for food, but for biodiesel, which helps provide local jobs and renewable energy sources, as well as helping to ease the transition from imported fossil fuels to the electrically-based transport systems of the future (we can’t go all-electric just yet as our grid needs serious beefing up).
For fields that have already been cleaned or were clean to begin with, community gardens are very popular. Youngstown realized that it could take the empty suburbs it had platted out in the 1950s and turn them back into arable land, thus making Youngstown a more manageable and livable city.