Born in Honolulu in 1961, Barack Obama was the son of a Kenyan father “black as pitch” and a mother from Kansas “white as milk,” he wrote. He was raised in Hawaii until 1967, when his mother, the anthropologist Stanley Ann Dunham, took her six-year-old son to live on the outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia. She had remarried by then, to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian geographer. On his first day in Jakarta, Obama watched a Soetoro relative decapitate a chicken for dinner. When Dunham wondered if Barry was too young to witness the killing, Soetoro shrugged and said, “The boy should know where his dinner is coming from.”
That night Obama dined on the stewed chicken with rice and a sweet fruit dessert. As he lay in bed, he recalled, “I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed….I could barely believe my good fortune.”
Over the next four years, Obama learned to eat Indonesian staples such as green chili peppers with rice, nasi goreng (fried rice), bakso (meatballs), sambal tempe (fermented soybean cake with chili sauce), and sweet mango and rambutan. He also sampled decidedly non-American fare, such as roasted grasshoppers (“crunchy”), dog meat (“tough”), and snake (“tougher”). In Soetoro’s worldview—informed by “a brand of Islam that could make room for the more ancient animist and Hindu faiths,” Obama wrote—a man took on the powers inherent to the things he ate. “He promised…he would bring home a piece of tiger meat to share. That’s how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life.”
The boy’s Indonesian bounty would have political consequences years later. When he squared off against Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race, Republicans charged that Obama was heartless because he had eaten dog meat. Democrats replied that Romney was even more heartless because he had placed the family dog, Seamus, in a crate on the roof of his car and drove on the highway at speed. Such are the brickbats of American political theater.
More to the point, Obama was an adventurous eater from the start, one who learned that food connects people across time, space, and cultures and contains meaning beyond sustenance. He continued his gastronomic education when he attended Occidental College (freshman and sophomore years) in Los Angeles, Columbia University (junior and senior years) in New York City, and Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Postgraduation, he worked as a community organizer and attorney in Chicago. Each of these places is food mad in its own way, and by the time he entered the White House, at forty-seven, Barack Obama had the most globally informed palate of any president in history (with the possible exception of Herbert Hoover).
In 2008, George W. Bush was clunking toward the end of his war-torn presidency and was tethered to controversial Big Food companies like Monsanto and Cargill at a time when experts were ringing alarms about climate change and the global food crisis. Stumping for the presidency, Obama aligned himself with the opposition. He spoke the language of the food movement—a loose network of health, environmental, social-justice, and animal-welfare champions—who were animated not only by how their meals tasted but by who supplied their ingredients, where, and how their practices impacted health, the community, the environment, and the world. His stance built support and opposition in equal measure.
The Illinois senator was labeled a “foodie” by people on both sides of the aisle. What is a foodie? The term is just a new, slangier word for gourmet—that is, someone who takes eating, drinking, cooking, and knowledge about food seriously—but with overuse the term has become a signifier for a twee, entitled attitude about eating. Obama never applied the label to himself and tried to distance himself from it, emphasizing instead how his single mother relied on food stamps to feed him as a child in Hawaii. But occasionally his innate epicuriosity slipped out, like a cat scooting out the door.
In July 2007, candidate Obama stood between corn and soybean fields in Adel, Iowa, trying to build a connection to rural voters. In Chicago “the main livestock is squirrels,” he joked, before noting that crop prices were falling. “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.” The audience didn’t react. In fact, there were zero Whole Foods in Iowa, and arugula was perceived as an elitist lettuce. The press jumped on Obama’s “gaffe” that “outed him as a foodie.”
Arugula-gate, as the incident was inevitably called, was one of several moments where Obama’s tastes were used to characterize him as an out-of-touch limousine liberal, an “insufferable foodie.” When he ordered a burger with Dijon mustard, the Fox personality Sean Hannity jabbed him as “President Poupon”—a reference to the aristocratic dandy in a 1981 TV ad for Grey Poupon mustard (more bitingly, poupon is French for “little baby”).
As Obama campaigned in the Democratic primary on the themes of “Hope and Change,” he proved himself a gifted politician, but his slogan also opened him to being mocked as a softheaded naïf. “How’s that Hope-y, Change-y thing going?” taunted Sarah Palin, John McCain’s Republican running mate. This duality would extend to Obama’s broader food policies over the next eight years.
He was hailed as “the Food President,” the “First Eater,” and the “First Foodie,” among other snappy sobriquets. He earned his foodie stripes in the 1990s, when he was an Illinois state senator who was just as interested in restaurant menus as he was in his constituents’ issues. In Chicago he would scarf down steak and eggs at Valois Restaurant, soul food at MacArthur’s, or Italian at Spiaggia. When he and his wife, Michelle, were in the mood for something adventurous—lobster and scallops with tomatillo corn sauce and tamales, say—they would schedule a date at Rick Bayless’s fine Mexican restaurant Topolobampo and sit in back, next to the kitchen.
Campaigning for the White House in 2008, Obama pledged to raise federal assistance to organic farms, label genetically modified foods, and regulate pollution from enormous pork and poultry CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) and declared that imported foods would be marked with their country of origin, because, he said—echoing his stepfather—“Americans should know where their food comes from.” In an interview with Time, Obama distilled a New York Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan, the gardener and best-selling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, about the food industry’s large, complex, not always benevolent footprint:
Our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agricultural sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the meantime, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy.
When Obama handily won the election in November, foodies were ecstatic. They envisioned an ecologically conscientious, healthy, profitable, delicious future. A “second food revolution” was nigh, cheered Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet magazine (a venerable title that would fold in 2009). “People are so interested in a massive change in food and agriculture that they are dining out on hope now. That is like the main ingredient,” observed Eddie Gehman Kohan, a Los Angeles pastry chef who, on election night, launched Obama Foodorama, a blog that would catalog every possible connection between the president and what he ate over the next eight years.
But not everyone agreed the American food system was broken, and even before he took office, entrenched “realists” pushed back against the Obama “idealists.” The loose federation of food industrialists that Pollan calls Big Food—a $1.5 trillion industry that encompasses Big Ag (corn and soybean growers), Big Meat (animal growers and processors), supermarkets, and fast-food companies—brusquely reminded the new president that they, not he, held the keys to the kingdom. These companies compete in the marketplace, but when threatened by a common enemy, they join forces, deploy lobbyists, and lean on congressional allies to stall or block limits on their production of cheap, processed foodstuffs.
The first elbow was thrown by Senator Charles “Chuck” Grassley of Iowa—“the Senior Senator from Corn,” Pollan dubbed him—who thundered that an urban Democrat had no business blaming rural farmers for the nation’s pollution and obesity. A spokesman for Obama backpedaled, saying the president had only “paraphrased” Pollan’s Times article.
Grassley’s early jab was a warning that the foodies’ bubbly vision of a gastronomic nirvana was bound to be punctured by Washington’s realpolitik. And it was clear that food was just one front in a broader “culture war” that pitted young progressives against an entrenched Old Guard, personified by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who vowed to make Obama “a one-term president.”
While those troops were massing in the background, a firefight broke out in the foreground. Worried that the Food President–elect had yet to name an administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Alice Waters wrote a letter to Obama in December 2008, imploring him to pick a USDA administrator who would favor sustainable, organic food production over Big Food. “Our nation is at a critical juncture,” she wrote. “Our next Secretary of Agriculture will play [a central role] in revitalizing our rural economies, protecting our food supply and our environment…and creating a sustainable renewable energy future.”
The letter, cosigned by eighty-eight food world celebrities, called for “policies that place conservation, soil health, animal welfare and worker’s rights…near the top of their agenda”—the kind of jeremiad that made Waters famous and occasionally effective. “Alice is a utopian,” one of the signers told me, half admiringly. “I rolled my eyes and signed it. She will decide to do something ‘impossible’—and, well, you can’t turn her down. It doesn’t always work, but we wouldn’t have made so much progress without her.”
The stakes were high. “USDA administrator” is a bland bureaucratic title for one of the most fascinating and contested jobs in Washington. Though most Americans are only vaguely aware of the Agriculture Department, it is an enormous agency that oversees “forestry, farming and food.” Created by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, and granted cabinet status in 1889, it now encompasses a bank with some $220 billion in assets, a staff of 100,000, a squadron of firefighting aircraft, a climate change office, and a headquarters on the National Mall with an experimental farm, a shooting range, a photo archive, and a rooftop apiary to study bee colonies, among other things.
A small percentage of USDA’s budget—about $146 billion in 2021 ($18 billion less than in 2016)—supported farming programs and rural communities. But nearly 80 percent of the agency’s resources are directed to the research, support, and protection of the nation’s food supplies. USDA finances free school lunches and mediates conflicts between animals and humans (“animal welfare”). It inspects the meat Americans eat—including nine billion birds a year—and oversees 193 million acres of national grasslands and forest. It runs the Food Safety and Inspection Service, the Agricultural Research Service, and the Food and Nutrition Service. In short, USDA is in charge of America’s nutrition, and as a result it is a political hot potato.
Liberals have long complained that USDA is too close to conservative politicians and their Big Food donors, such as George W. Bush’s agriculture secretary Edward Schafer, who supported industrial-scale farming in his home state of North Dakota. Alice Waters suggested six candidates for the cabinet post, and others threw their hat in the ring. But Obama ultimately made a pragmatic if not inspiring choice by naming Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa.
The president praised Vilsack for making corn-based ethanol “an agricultural economy of the future that not only grows the food we eat, but the energy we use.” Michael Pollan bristled at this, noting that Vilsack never mentioned the word “food” or “eaters,” but spoke for “farmers, ranchers…[and] agribusiness as usual.” Pollan advocated renaming USDA the “Department of Food” and focusing it on “the catastrophic American diet,” on the needs of eaters, and on the diversification of farming practices to accommodate climate change, energy independence, and health-care reform.
Undeterred, Alice Waters wrote Obama a second letter. This time, she and her cosigners—Ruth Reichl and Danny Meyer, the New York restaurateur and founder of Shake Shack—volunteered as a Kitchen Cabinet, to provide ideas and contacts and serve as a sounding board. They urged the White House to promote healthy eating, elevate the quality of its food, and redefine the role of executive chef: “The purity and wholesomeness of the Obama movement must be accompanied by a parallel effort in food at the most visible and symbolic place in America—the White House.”
Republican skeptics, such as James Thurber of American University, scoffed that the letter writers didn’t “have a central, core message….What policy are they trying to change?” To which Reichl replied, “We want to change it all! Who doesn’t think obesity is a problem or pesticides is a problem and social justice for farm workers is a problem—these are all things that need to be changed and many feel that the opportunity is finally in sight.”
The Kitchen Cabinet letter struck many as well intentioned but tone-deaf. Bloggers scolded Waters for “gastronomical correctness,” and Anthony Bourdain, the bad-boy host of No Reservations, deemed her “Pol Pot in a muumuu.” There’s something “very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic,” he said. “We’re in the middle of a recession…[it’s not] like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food.”
The good news was that there was an argument, one that had progressed a good deal since the Clinton-Bush days and extended far beyond the Beltway. “When I started writing about food in this country, nobody seemed to care,” Reichl said. “It’s very exciting that people now care” to become emotionally invested in food at the White House.
“Nothing is more political than food,” Bourdain asserted. “Who gets to eat, who doesn’t, why we eat, what we eat, where those dishes originated and under what circumstances, what ingredients are acceptable to people….[T]here is nothing more political than food. Nothing.”
To a greater degree than in most administrations, the Obama White House’s food policies were an outgrowth of the First Family’s personal struggles and choices. From a distance, Barack and Michelle appeared to lead charmed lives, yet both had lost a parent, Michelle suffered a miscarriage (their daughters, Malia and Sasha, were conceived with in vitro fertilization), and the strain of their careers had sent them to marriage counseling. Under those circumstances, questions about what they ate, and where, took on an outsized importance.
In Chicago, the Obamas reserved Friday nights for dates at Zinfandel, an eclectic restaurant: Michelle would arrive punctually and settle in with a glass of wine; eventually Barack would thread his way through the crowd, kiss her, and sit down to a plate of comfort food. “We ordered the same thing pretty much every Friday—pot roast, Brussels sprouts, and mashed potatoes—and when it came, we ate every bite,” she recalled. “I remember those nights with a deep fondness now….That was a golden time for us.”
In 2005, Barack was sworn in as a freshman Democratic senator from Illinois and began to commute to Washington, D.C. This left Michelle, a vice president at a hospital, alone with Sasha and Malia. Pressed for time, the girls and their mother ate a lot of sugary cereals, salty snacks, fatty hamburgers, take-out food, soft drinks, and ice cream.
On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama stood in front of the state capitol in Springfield—where Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech in 1858—to announce he was running for president. As he stumped across the country, Hillary Rodham Clinton led the Democratic primary by thirty points and Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney vied for the Republican ticket. Mrs. Obama recoiled from the combat and compromise of politics, yet she was an effective proxy for her husband and was sucked into campaigning. This left her with even less time to monitor the girls’ diets. “Convenience had become the single most important factor,” Michelle recalled. “I packed the girls’ lunch boxes with Lunchables and Capri Suns. Weekends usually meant a trip to the McDonald’s drive-through….None of this…was out of the ordinary, or even all that terrible in isolation. Too much of it, though, was a real problem.”
In the spring of 2007, their pediatrician noticed that Malia was at risk for high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. Or, as Barack bluntly put it, “Malia was getting a little chubby.” She was not alone. Childhood obesity was becoming epidemic: nearly a third of American children were overweight or obese, and working-class Blacks were especially prone to poor nutrition. Obesity raises the chance for heart disease, diabetes, joint problems, high cholesterol, and sleep apnea. “Clearly,” Michelle said, “something had to change.”
At that point she met a freelance cook named Sam Kass. He was a white twenty-six-year-old former University of Chicago baseball player with a shaved head and a pocketful of corny jokes. He learned to cook in restaurants and was a convert to the health and taste benefits of fresh vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins. Mrs. Obama was intrigued, but she worried that hiring a personal chef was “a little bougie,” yet, she reasoned, “no one else could run my programs at the hospital. No one else could campaign as Barack Obama’s wife. No one could fill in as Malia and Sasha’s mother at bedtime. But maybe Sam Kass could cook some dinners for us.”
Kass prepared hand-cut fettucine enrobed in a velvety sauce of sweet peas, basil, lemon zest, and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. It was a fresh, tasty spring dinner. But Sasha and Malia thought of “pasta” as spaghetti with meatballs and were unimpressed by the “fancy pea-sauce.” Nonetheless, their mother hired Kass to cook and make dinners she could freeze. There was just one obstacle: Mr. Obama. “It didn’t fit with his…community-organizer frugality, nor the image he wanted to promote as a presidential candidate,” Michelle recalled. When he balked, she gave him a choice: “Either you can hire Sam to make sure the girls are getting good, healthy food and I will campaign for you. Or I will stay home and do the cooking.” Kass was hired.
As he got to know the Obamas, Kass noticed “they both love really good food. Her tastes are quite adventurous. He takes a different kind of joy [in eating]. He really likes good food, but he plays it cool and doesn’t get too exercised. He doesn’t like fancy stuff. But if it’s really good, solid, clean, he’ll take good pleasure from that.”
Kass enlisted the Obama girls to help him root “fake food” out of the pantry, and replace it with fruits, nuts, and vegetables in clear containers. “We eat what we see,” he reasoned. (Big Food knows this, too. One study showed that moving soda from the middle of a supermarket aisle to the end, increased sales by 50 percent.) As Sasha and Malia swept through the kitchen, they grabbed an apple instead of a salty or sugary snack. But, acknowledging that everyone needs a treat, Kass put homemade cookies on the top of the cabinet—accessible, but hard to reach.
While Michelle was a devotee of bacon and French fries, her husband was that rare breed: an ardent gourmet who was a picky, disciplined eater. He did not care for most fried or battered foods, mayonnaise, cake, or sweet muffins. He drank orange juice or green tea in the morning, organic tea during the day, and beer at night. He liked spinach and broccoli, but not asparagus and beets. At times, his food fixation seemed to border on the obsessive. The New York Times reported that he snacked on exactly seven almonds—“not six, not eight, always seven almonds,” Kass told the paper. Soon, “seven almonds” became a meme. “This seems weird,” friends said. But the truth, Obama explained, was that gullible journalists had taken Kass’s joke at face value, adding that he might be willing to eat “ten or eleven” almonds.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008, was the first U.S. presidential election since 1952 in which neither party’s nominee was an incumbent president or vice president. Obama and Joe Biden handily defeated McCain and Palin. The following January, 1.8 million people gathered in Washington—one of the largest crowds in the District’s history—as Chief Justice John Roberts swore in Barack Hussein Obama as the nation’s first mixed-race chief executive.
The night before the inauguration, Dan Barber, the chef at New York’s Blue Hill restaurants, cooked a meal for the soon-to-be First Couple and a few friends in Washington. They debated which food issues Obama should prioritize, how to sell his agenda to the public, and what he could accomplish in four years. When the conversation turned to reforming the food system, the president challenged the table, saying, “Show me a movement.”
He meant that given his limited political capital, he would not pursue ambitious change unless he had the votes. Mindful of the nation’s fatigue with Beltway gridlock and the mistakes of Clinton’s first term, Obama did not believe he could overhaul the production and distribution of food, but, he noted, incremental changes could eventually shift the balance of power.
At the end of the night, Barack looked at Michelle and said maybe “you can talk about these issues. It’ll be a hell of a lot more effective than me.” He wasn’t entirely wrong about that.
The following day, Obama celebrated his inauguration with a lunch inspired by the bicentenary of Lincoln’s birth: a seafood stew (sourced from Maine) topped by puff pastry; duck breast (from Indiana) with cherry chutney; roast pheasant (from Wisconsin) with wild rice stuffing; molasses whipped sweet potatoes; and a medley of winter vegetables. Dessert was apple cinnamon sponge cake and sweet cream glacé, made by Bill Yosses. The lunch was paired with American wines and served on replicas of Lincoln’s White House china.
After lunch, the First Family moved into the White House. It was a routine but momentous occasion, due to their race.
While Barack was held up as a shining example of American multiculturalism, Michelle Obama’s ancestry reflected a more typical African American experience—from slavery in the South to the Great Migration north and middle-class life in Chicago. She and her brother were raised in a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment “with no privacy,” largely by their mother, Marian Robinson, a former executive secretary. (Her father, Fraser Robinson III, died of multiple sclerosis in 1991, when Michelle was twenty-seven.) The Robinsons had an extended family, and someone was always cooking. They ate well, but it wasn’t fancy—iceberg lettuce, broccoli, peas, spaghetti and meatballs, lemon chicken, and the like. “We had to eat all of it,” or go without, Michelle recalled. The family ate together at the kitchen table, a tradition the Obamas continued at the White House—including Mrs. Robinson, who moved in to help raise her granddaughters.
Being married to the president of the United States is a challenge in ordinary circumstances, but to be the first Black First Lady was a mind-blowing experience. Slaves had helped build the President’s House, and Michelle Robinson Obama’s great-great-grandfather Jim Robinson was a slave at Friendfield, a South Carolina rice plantation, where he is buried in an unmarked grave. Her parents had never discussed him, and she only learned of him while campaigning nearby.
As known foodies, it was rumored that the Obamas would anoint a new executive chef. The usually gastro-oblivious tabloids hollered an announcement was “hotly awaited.” Alice Waters said the ideal candidate would be “a person with integrity and devotion” who would champion “seasonal, ripe, delicious food.” Though she didn’t mention Cristeta Comerford by name, Waters said she wanted to “redefine” the position, and seemed to question the chef’s “devotion” to “seasonal, delicious food.” Ruth Reichl added that a “name” chef would have a bigger impact on American food than a cabinet appointment like Tom Vilsack.
Some interpreted this as a call to replace Comerford with a celebrity TV chef who could reach the masses and raise the profile of White House cookery. Three candidates who fit that description—Art Smith, Oprah Winfrey’s personal chef; Daniel Young, the basketball star Carmelo Anthony’s cook; and Rick Bayless, the Obamas’ favorite Mexican chef in Chicago—were floated.
But Michelle kept her own counsel and decided Comerford would remain: “She brings such incredible talent…and came very highly regarded from the Bush family. She is also the mom of a young daughter, and I appreciate our shared perspective on the importance of healthy eating and healthy families.”
Mrs. Obama was just getting started. Two months to the day after the inauguration, on March 20, 2009—the first day of spring—she announced she would turn an eleven-hundred-square-foot plot on the South Lawn into a vegetable garden. It would be the first proper White House garden since Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden during World War II. As the cameras clicked, Tom Vilsack, Sam Kass, the pastry chef Bill Yosses, and a White House horticulturist helped Michelle break ground on an L-shaped bed near the tennis courts.
The White House Kitchen Garden—better known as “Michelle’s Garden”—was planted on a highly visible site in a historic landscape, and it played at least two important roles. Though she had never gardened before, Mrs. Obama said it would provide fresh, homegrown ingredients for her family and official entertainments. The message to the public was clear: the self-described “mom in chief” ate healthy foods, and you should too. Further, she was going to share her bounty with food banks and educate children about obesity, diet, and exercise. Kids “will begin to educate their families, and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities,” she said.
The garden would also be seen as an extension of Obama’s food policies, which were proving controversial. That made Michelle nervous. But getting attention was the point, she realized. “I wanted this garden to be more than just a plot of land growing vegetables on the White House lawn,” she wrote. “I wanted it to…begin a conversation about the food we eat, the lives we lead, and how all of that affects our children.”
Planting the White House garden was a modestly revolutionary act, and it had a long history. In 1800, John Adams seeded the mansion’s scrubby lawn with vegetables. Thomas Jefferson added fruit trees and flowers. John Quincy Adams planted ornamental trees in 1825, and a decade later Andrew Jackson built an orangery for tropical fruit. A large greenhouse was added (later replaced by the West Wing). During the Progressive Era of 1890–1920, the school garden movement lured children out of tenements and taught them to grow their own food.
During the world wars, Wilson and Roosevelt encouraged millions of Americans to turn their yards, porches, and window boxes into vegetable plots. Originally called “War Gardens,” they were renamed more optimistically “Victory Gardens” and were a roaring success. Franklin Roosevelt, however, opposed his wife’s plan for a garden and told Eleanor, “The yard is full of rocks.” She ignored him and used eleven-year-old Diana Hopkins—the cute daughter of FDR’s adviser Harry Hopkins—as the poster child for her project. Noting that “children can grow things…in a very small space,” she gave Diana a two-foot-by-two-foot plot in the lawn to tend carrots, beans, tomatoes, and cabbage.
By May 1943, Victory Gardens were producing 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables, and Eleanor’s charm offensive was so effective that FDR had to eat his words. “I hope that every American who possibly can will grow a victory garden this year,” he told the public. “We found…that even the small gardens helped. The total harvest…made the difference between scarcity and abundance.”
Though the farm-raised presidents Truman and Eisenhower did not plant White House gardens, the chef René Verdon grew tomatoes on the Kennedys’ and Johnsons’ roof in the 1960s. But for those who were serious about farming, the White House’s 18.7-acre lawn beckoned. Activists believe that gardening has both physical and psychological benefits and wondered, what better way to inspire a conversation about taste and nutrition than for the First Family to grow vegetables on land owned by the people?
In 1991, Michael Pollan called on George H. W. Bush—who deemed himself “the environmental president”—to abolish the South Lawn and replant it. Observing that lawns unite the nation in an unending carpet of green turfgrass, Pollan cautioned that they require intensive use of water, energy, fertilizers, pesticides, and mowing—an “unsupportable environmental price tag.” His opposition was less chemical than metaphysical. “The lawn is a symbol of everything that is wrong with our relationship to the land,” he wrote, and a better use of the presidential greens would be as a meadow, wetland, orchard, or vegetable garden. “The White House has enough land to become self-sufficient in food—a model of Jeffersonian independence and thrift….[It could] supply food [to the] poor. Depending on which party is in power, a few elephants or donkeys should be maintained for…fertilization.”
Pollan’s suggestion fell on deaf ears. But Walter Scheib grew veggies on the roof during the Clinton and Bush 43 years. And in 2008, Alice Waters—who had been pushing for a White House garden since the Clinton era—and other gardeners urged the Obamas to plant a much bigger and more visible plot.
When Mrs. Obama and a group of fifth graders dug their spades into the South Lawn in March 2009, cameras clicked as they sowed seeds from fifty-five vegetable varieties in raised beds fertilized by compost, Chesapeake crab meal, lime, and greensand. The plantings included lettuces—arugula (naturally), red leaf, butterhead, galactic, green oak leaf, red romaine—radishes, peas, carrots, spinach, kale, chard, collard greens, and rhubarb. There were no beets, in deference to the president’s taste, but there were ten kinds of herbs, from Thai basil to anise hyssop. For spice, hot peppers, tomatillos, cilantro, and fish peppers—an African American heirloom from the mid-nineteenth century used in fish dishes. Two beds were planted with seeds from Monticello, including sea kale, Savoy cabbage, prickly-seeded spinach, and tennis ball lettuce. Berries were planted for Yosses’s desserts, and two beehives were built to provide honey. Pest control was managed by ladybugs and praying mantises.
It would be easy to tell when the produce was ready, Kass said, because the Obamas “will be able to taste it.” (In addition to cooking and gardening for the First Family, Kass took on an increasingly active political role: in 2010 he was named senior policy adviser for healthy food initiatives, and three years later was promoted to senior policy adviser for nutrition policy.)
Photos of the First Lady flashing her toned biceps while harvesting greens went viral, and the garden was praised by Windsor Castle. It produced a thousand pounds of food annually and inspired families, schools, communities, businesses, houses of worship, and even military bases to seed their own plots.
Such efforts had “phenomenal symbolic value,” observed Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University. “It sends the message, without anybody having to make speeches about it, that growing gardens is a fun and useful thing to do.”
But not to everyone. Big Ag saw Michelle’s garden as a threat. Though her vegetables were not certified organic (a process that takes three years), and she did not refer to them as such, the press erroneously did. That antagonized the American Council on Science and Health—a euphemistically named chemical industry group—which warned that organic farming would result in “famine.”
In the meantime, President Obama was focused on the big issues of American food policy, a notoriously difficult and highly partisan arena. The administration scored a few early wins—banning the sale of junk food in schools, mandating that fast-food restaurants include nutritional details on their menus, and replacing the confusing “food pyramid” diet guideline with MyPlate, a simple circle divided into quarters of protein, vegetables, grains, and fruits. But these were mere skirmishes in a preamble to the Battle with Big Food.
By 2010 the four biggest meatpacking companies controlled 84 percent of the market, and small ranchers and farmers complained they were little more than modern sharecroppers. In response, Obama initiated an antitrust investigation of cattle, dairy, poultry, and seed companies, in the most comprehensive prosecution of the food industry since Teddy Roosevelt curbed the Beef Trust in 1905. Secretary Vilsack promised to “make sure the playing field is level,” and ordered GIPSA (the Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration)—a USDA agency with antitrust oversight—to draft new rules on anticompetitive behavior.
Furious, Big Meat responded with a $9 million lobbying juggernaut, a figure that did not include political contributions to congressmen on agriculture committees. Conagra and Tyson raised such a stink over the new GIPSA rules that Vilsack was forced to postpone them. Then Big Food claimed Obama wanted to raise food prices and kill jobs, while the Republican-controlled House cut GIPSA’s funding. Once the dust settled, agribusiness had won and the president’s antitrust initiatives were dead.
Obama was labeled risk averse and ineffectual by friend and foe. Though his $956 billion farm bill in 2014 broke partisan gridlock, he was attacked by the left for cutting $8 billion from the SNAP food stamp program and for allowing companies like Monsanto to hide the details of their GMOs (genetically modified organisms). The most stinging rebuke of the Food President was that his victories were more symbolic than tangible, and his defeats broke the movement’s spirit. “Barack Obama sold out the kale crowd,” The New Republic charged. He “overpromised reforms, underestimated the strength of his opposition, and flinched from real fights.”
The First Lady, meanwhile, was making better progress. She chose issues that appealed to everyday Americans, such as the 2010 “Let’s Move!” campaign to combat childhood obesity. Worried about “the crisis of inactivity” among kids, Mrs. Obama enlisted celebrities like Beyoncé Knowles and Ellen DeGeneres to sing, dance, and spread the word that working out was healthy and fun. Michelle also spearheaded the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which raised nutritional standards for school lunches. She urged Walmart to lower fruit and vegetable costs by $1 billion a year and persuaded soda makers to list calories on their cans.
In a tough speech to the Grocery Manufacturers Association—a trade group that represents brands such as General Mills, Nestlé, and Pepsi—the Harvard Law School grad said, “We need you all to step it up…not just to tweak around the edges, but to entirely rethink the products you are offering….While decreasing fat is certainly a good thing, replacing it with sugar and salt isn’t….This isn’t about finding creative ways to market products as healthy. As you know, it’s about producing products that actually are healthy.”
When Big Food companies dragged their feet, and their lobbyists gummed up reform efforts, the First Lady shifted the focus of Let’s Move! from improving nutrition to encouraging exercise. Her supporters were taken aback: it seemed she had retreated from the war against salt, sugar, and fat. But the hard political reality was that the Tea Party revolt of 2010 had labeled the administration “anti-business” and cost the Democrats control of Congress. Even so, Michelle’s ideas remained popular, and she kept working with scientists, legislators, and educators. That doggedness won over some critics, such as Kelly Brownell, a Duke University obesity researcher, who said “attention to the issue has really helped push the [health] discussion forward.”
With the benefit of time, the Obamas deserve credit for highlighting healthy eating as a subject worth talking about and even fighting over. The president managed to earmark $1 billion for regional food projects, almost double the number of farmers markets (from 4,685 to 8,669 nationwide), empower regulators, ban unhealthy trans fats, and modernize nutritional labeling. And a $50 billion alternative economy—what Pollan calls “Little Food”—sprang up. Though small compared with Big Food, these entrepreneurs exemplified a new, fast-moving marketplace that industrial giants were slow to adapt to and unable to limit.
“I’ve seen a shift,” Obama said. “People…are becoming interested in where their food comes from. Towns…that didn’t have regular access to fresh fruits and vegetables are getting them. Farmers and ranchers are tapping new markets and keeping more money in their pockets.” These were the incremental changes he foresaw over dinner with Dan Barber in January 2009, when he correctly predicted that Michelle would have a better chance of success with targeted initiatives than he would with major policy shifts.
In retrospect, the chef Rick Bayless observed, “the importance of Michelle’s garden cannot be overstated. Everyone said she shouldn’t do it, or couldn’t do it, and she did it. She planted it anyway. It had a huge effect, and that spoke louder than pretty much everything else the Obamas did.” Pausing a beat, he added in a wistful tone, “Look, they were trying to change the direction of a huge ship. It was heading in one direction, and they were able to change it, a little bit, in another direction. But just a bit.”
The camera panned down a sleepy, rainy street in Hanoi, Vietnam, when the scene suddenly churned with activity. U.S. Secret Service agents parted a crowd, the soundtrack pumped James Brown’s “Boss,” and out stepped Barack Obama, beaming and loose. As a cheering crowd gathered, the president said, “Hey—how you doin’, guys?”
Anthony Bourdain, dressed in jeans and desert boots, led him to a roadside diner called Bun Cha Huong Lien. It was a warm night in May 2015, and they were there to eat bun cha—noodles and pork—as if they were two regular guys out on the town. Inside, the lanky president and the hipster TV presenter sat on blue plastic stools, loading bowls with rice noodles, strips of grilled pork belly, and juicy pork patties. Demonstrating how to lubricate the noodles with a nuoc mam broth—vinegar, sugar, and fermented fish sauce—Bourdain said, “Slurping is totally acceptable….Get ready to enjoy the awesomeness.”
“This is outstanding,” enthused Obama, unfazed by hot chili peppers.
The White House adviser Ben Rhodes had prepped Bourdain, saying the president’s “philosophy isn’t that different from yours. If people would just sit down and eat together, and understand something about each other, maybe they could figure things out.”
Obama’s bun cha dinner, which cost a grand total of $6 (“I picked up the check,” his host tweeted), would appear in Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown in 2016 and became one of the White House’s most successful bits of social outreach. The Vietnamese ambassador to the United States was more excited by the show than by any of the agreements he had brokered over trade and human rights.
As they swigged beer “like two dads and Southeast Asia enthusiasts,” Obama recalled one of his favorite childhood dinners: grilled carp with bitter rice along a highway in Indonesia. “It was the simplest meal possible,” he reminisced, “and nothing tasted so good.”
Off camera, Bourdain wondered if his friendship with the rocker Ted Nugent—“who has said many, many deeply offensive…things” about Obama—was acceptable. “Of course,” replied the president. Those who “disagree with us” are exactly the kinds of “people we should be talking to.” Noting that John Kerry and John McCain made peace with their former Vietnamese enemies, presumably over food, he added, “You don’t make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemies….Progress is not a straight line. There are going to be moments…where things are terrible. But, having said all that, I think things are gonna work out.”
After Bourdain’s death in 2018, Obama tweeted, “[Tony] taught us about food—but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown.”