White House garden inspires locavores

By KEVIN HORRIGAN

A few weeks ago, some sort of record in White House puffery was achieved when Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, joined First Lady Michelle Obama to “help” her plant vegetables in the new White House garden.

Vilsack was wearing dress shoes, a white shirt and tie, a navy blazer and gray slacks. The man is the former governor of Iowa. Back home, where the farmers are planting corn, they probably laughed their gimme-caps off.

The first lady was wearing some sort of L.L. Bean-ish, Lands’ End-ish pink jacket, the sort of thing that upscale garden catalogs sell as “garden attire” in colors to match their $50 gardening clogs.

As it happens, I know a little bit about gardening and gardening attire. You wear boots, jeans and a T-shirt, all of which you don’t care if they get torn and muddy in your fruitless (also vegetable-less) struggle to persuade the soil in your yard to yield something edible.

There are people who can garden and there are the rest of us. I have always assumed that my great-great-great-great-great grandfather was kicked out of Ireland for starting the potato blight.

In time, the Horrigans migrated to Iowa, where they lost the farm in the Great Depression, probably because they couldn’t afford navy blazers. The family then gave up agriculture, a good thing for the nation.

Passion for gardening

Nonetheless, like President Obama, I married a woman with a passion for gardening. Also, like President Obama, I hate beets. That’s pretty much where the similarities end.

I have a wife who has only me to do the heavy grunt work of gardening, tilling the soil, schlepping the manure, building the beds and digging the holes. He has an entire White House grounds crew, to say nothing of legions of schoolchildren and a nattily attired secretary of Agriculture.

Thus it seems profoundly unfair that the First Lady’s garden is supposed to be an example to the nation of growing your own food and eating organic.

Organic gardening is just like regular gardening, only worse. Instead of using handy and effective nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides, you’re supposed to buy bags of cow poop and pick the bugs off by hand and, for all I know, free them in a bug sanctuary somewhere.

This is easy if you’ve got a lot of help. Otherwise it’s nothing but a lot of backbreaking work, which is why I find it strange that the photographs of Mrs. Obama in her garden always appear to show her dressed in couture leisure wear. Indeed, when she broke ground on the garden she was wearing boots from Jimmy Choo.

When I see her in Red Wing boots and ratty, muddy jeans, sweating like a mule, then I’ll believe she’s serious about gardening.

Still, the Obamas’ garden has been a public relations bonanza. The whole organic gardening, “locavore” (eat locally) movement follows their every move and debates it endlessly on their blogs — yet another reason the Internet devotees are a curse.

As I understand the locavore movement, the idea is that we should eat nothing grown or (if you must eat, ugh, meat) raised any farther than 100 miles from where you live, and if you’re really serious, nothing farther than 100 feet from where you live.

This will save you money, they argue, though this has not been my experience. In all, I figure each of my home-grown tomatoes from last season’s garden cost me $5.

In theory, eating locally is a good idea. It supports local farmers. It cuts down on the carbon cost of, say, strawberries trucked in from Mexico. It results in healthier food, which results in healthier people, etc., etc., etc.

Good farmland

This might work out great here in St. Louis. Within a 100-mile radius of the Arch there are more than 3 million people and lots of good farmland that still hasn’t had a Wal-Mart built on it yet. On the other hand, we might wind up eating a lot of corn and soybeans.

But what about the 20 million people who live in greater New York. Isn’t that food going to get pretty scarce?

Big agriculture, of course, is amused at all of this. A lobbying group called the Mid America CropLife Association, which represents fertilizer and pesticide companies, released a letter to the First Lady in which it was pointed out that the average farmer produces enough food to feed 144 Americans.

“We live in a very different world than that of our grandparents,” the group said. “Americans are juggling jobs with the needs of children and aging parents. The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family’s year-round food needs.”

Still, I will boldly go into the garden again this spring, because I have figured out what I’ve been doing wrong. I’m having my navy blazer pressed.

X Kevin Horrigan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.