In March 2009, the news went around the world that First Lady Michelle Obama and two dozen local students had broken ground on a kitchen vegetable garden at the White House. Now almost everyone has heard about this major event in the evolution of sustainable food—but few know how it actually came about.
The story begins with one individual, Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, whose mission is to turn everyone possible into a home kitchen gardener—and who has made enormous strides in doing so.
Doiron came upon the idea while working with an environmental grass-roots organization called Friends of the Earth in Belgium. But it was what Doiron saw in his off time that left a lasting impression. “Over the course of my time working for Friends of the Earth, little by little our organization started to work on food issues,” Doiron told Organic Connections. “That got me really inspired because I just saw the potential and the power of food as a way of bringing new people into the environmental movement. I started spinning some ideas in my own head at that point about the work that I wanted to do down the road, but I didn’t have a very clear picture of exactly what form it would take. Meanwhile I was spending my weekends getting a more intimate acquaintance with these issues by going off to the Belgian countryside and experiencing them in a more personal way via my mother-in-law’s cooking and also via her garden.
“That was kind of an epiphany for me. I had grown up in close proximity to a garden in the United States, but it was very different to see how the Belgians were living so close to the sources of their food. I was seeing food go from the backyard garden into the kitchen and be sort of miraculously transformed into one delicious meal after another. I started to put two and two together and realized that if we could get a lot more people having this hands-on experience with their food—growing it, preparing it and in some cases preserving it—if I could get not just a few hundred people but a few hundred million people doing this, it would really add up, and it would add up to real social change. So that was actually the path that I took.”
Doiron came back to the States in 2001 and initially was working for a few other sustainable food organizations. But he saw the need for a new type of organization that would bring people together, focused on growing their own food and helping others to do the same thing. Hence Kitchen Gardeners International was born.
To the White House
Beginning with essentially no budget and no staff, Doiron turned to the Internet as the most cost-effective way to reach out to people. The Web presence he created fortunately caught the attention of the media, and the concept began to grow.
But one very big idea made Doiron and Kitchen Gardeners headline news and put them over the top.
“It’s a very old idea, and I don’t believe in taking credit for something that isn’t due,” Doiron related. “So I tell people that the first person to come up with the notion of growing a kitchen garden at the White House was in fact John Adams in 1800. If I added any value to the idea, it was really in just recognizing that this had been done before and trying to understand why it had been done before, working to make it into a new idea and to reframe it in a very modern and sustainable way.”
It began in 2008, when the presidential candidates were crisscrossing Iowa. As he watched, Doiron had the thought that perhaps current events could be used to further the cause of sustainability. He started a campaign called “Eat the View” as part of a contest titled “On Day One” being run by the United Nations Foundation. (The name “Eat the View” came from the fact that there was a view from the White House over the South Lawn, and the South Lawn was where Doiron was proposing the garden be planted.) Before long, and with the help of the Kitchen Gardeners International membership, the campaign moved into the number one slot in terms of popularity on the On Day One website.
“When we got to number one, it was starting to get very interesting,” Doiron said. “I thought that the idea of replanting a garden at the White House was, for a lot of people, a very symbolic thing that could actually get other types of social change happening. So at that point there came a really big breakthrough for our campaign: I sent an e-mail to a journalist at the New York Times about our being number one and she decided it was interesting enough to write an article about it.”
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Following the New York Times article, the Associated Press covered the story as well. Doiron created a video to help forward the campaign, which went viral on YouTube and got shown on national television. As the campaign gathered steam, other media heavy-hitters got involved, most notably Michael Pollan, who wrote a now famous article in the New York Times entitled “Farmer in Chief.” In the article, Pollan called for the next president to not only replant a garden at the White House to feed the First Family but also offer surplus produce from the garden to regional food banks—elements that Doiron had included in his own proposal a number of months prior.
In the end, Obama won the election and Michelle Obama’s team solicited opinions from Doiron about the project. When the White House garden was announced, the name “White House Kitchen Garden,” which Doiron had originated, was used.
“The White House Kitchen Garden was a huge success for us, as a small organization, to get our ideas out there,” Doiron said. “We saw our mailing list, which we consider to be our membership, go from 5,000 to 18,000 people in the course of that campaign. So it was absolutely enormous for us.”
To the Future
The Kitchen Gardeners International membership now numbers over 20,000 in more than 100 different countries. Through social media and word of mouth, they continue to grow, using their website as a hub and communication platform. Members interact and ask and answer each other's questions through blogs and forums. The organization works with partners around the world. They organize local, national and global activities and sow high-impact publicity projects.
Not surprisingly, Kitchen Gardeners International is now working on refocusing the Fourth of July. “Now that we and our good friends have reclaimed our nation’s backyard for the good food cause, we’re focusing our next big prize on reclaiming our national holiday,” Doiron explained. “We’re working to reframe July Fourth as Food Independence Day to point out to people that this is about getting back to our roots, so to speak. Over the course of our nation’s history, we have valued the efforts of small-scale food producers and been a nation of gardeners. That’s where we need to go again.
“Our food system currently isn’t in the hands of the people. The types of foods that are the easiest to access unfortunately are not the healthiest ones for us or the healthiest ones for the planet. We’re reclaiming our food independence by looking to the Fourth of July holiday to be what might be considered the biggest, localest food celebration of all.”
The Queen’s Garden
Not long after the announcement of the White House Kitchen Garden, a similar one was announced in the United Kingdom at Buckingham Palace. This garden was brought about through the efforts of a UK organization called Garden Organic, which shares a percentage of its membership with Kitchen Gardeners International. It may have been inspired by the White House Kitchen Garden, but however it got there, it certainly helps forward the vision of food that is local, organic and sustainable.
For more information on, and to become involved with, Kitchen Gardeners International, visit www.kitchengardeners.org.
Join the Fourth of July celebration! Visit www.foodindependenceday.org. Note: This is a Facebook page, but you do not need to be a member of Facebook to access it.
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