Today, Michelle Obama is digging up the South Lawn at the White House, planting a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden in WWII.   The Slow Food people had set up a steady chant since last Fall and the White House is responding.

On Fast Company's web site, Michael Cannell provides some context from the forthcoming book, Dream House, by Ulysses Grant Dietz and Sam Watters, that "charts how the White House reflects the preoccupations of the time. George Washington used it as a country estate. For Teddy Roosevelt it was a mansion in the style of the robber barons. At the onset of suburbia, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower barbequed on the roof of the south portico. So it's entirely fitting that the White House expresses subsistence and sustainability since they may be the defining issues of our culture."

Cannell also nominates Fritz Haeg to be the White House's farmer-in-chief. 

"Over the last four years Fritz has conducted a project called Edible Estates in which he persuades a series of suburban families to rip up their lawns and replace them with fruit and vegetable plantings. The eighth Edible Estate will be planted this spring at a housing project in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan."

Originally posted @ Ann Oliveri