Gardeners in Chief?

After success in the White House, the homegrown-food movement lobbies First Families nationwide.

By KIM PALMER, Star Tribune

Gov. Tim Pawlenty has a lot on his plate these days. But a garden-advocacy group thinks he needs something more: home-grown veggies.

Urging states to plant food-producing gardens at governors' official residences is the next mission for Eat the View (www.eattheview.org), a group that spent most of 2008 lobbying for a presidential veggie plot.

That effort was successful. Last month, Michelle Obama publicly dug up part of the South Lawn to put in a vegetable garden, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden during World War II. The 1,100-square-foot garden will be organic and fertilized with White House compost, and its produce will be used for the Obamas' family meals as well as for formal state dinners.

Eat the View can't take all the credit for the Obamas' new garden, although its "This Lawn Is Your Lawn" campaign played a part, said Roger Doiron, founding director of Kitchen Gardens International, the nonprofit network behind Eat the View. Food scares, the local-food movement and the troubled economy all combined to put vegetable gardening back in the spotlight. "An aligning of the planets made it possible, and we were happy to be one of those planets," he said.

High-profile advocates have been lobbying for a presidential veggie plot for years, Doiron noted. "Michael Pollan [author of 'The Omnivore's Dilemma'] deserves more credit than he's gotten. He wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in 1991 suggesting that we remove some of the White House lawn and put in a garden. Alice Waters [the chef who founded California's famed Chez Panisse restaurant] made some headlines in the mid-'90s during the Clinton administration" with a similar plea.

Eat the View used today's technology, including social-networking tools, viral video and an online petition, to create a complete online campaign. "What made this effort successful was that there were 100,000 Americans asking for it," Doiron said. "We need to get closer to our food, for our physical health and the health of the planet. We're trying to get this rippling across the country. We will be reaching out to governors next, to encourage First Families at the state level to follow the Obamas' example."

The Minnesota Governor's Mansion on Summit Avenue in St. Paul has gardens, but grows no veggies, said a woman who answered the phone there. "We have discussed it," said the woman, who declined to give her name, saying she wasn't an official spokesperson for Pawlenty. "But we don't know where we would put it. It's kind of a shady spot."