When the famously fit first lady asked the school kids if they would begin to eat healthy, they gave their high-decibel approval in unison, “Yessss!”
Flanked by nationally renowned Chicago chef Sam Kass, Obama used her garden as a pulpit to sermonize healthy eating to the 30 or so young charges. For the most part, Obama was totally oblivious to the 60 members of the international media who jostled endlessly for prime viewing spots on the other side of the rope.
“We are harvesting today. Because we have all this food and it’s ready to be picked. We had Bancroft students who were fourth graders then. Many of them have gone on to the fifth grade. But they helped till the soil, get the soil ready. So we had to pull up all the grass and make sure that the soil was ready and healthy, and then they came back and planted,” Obama began, as she traced the short history of her fruitful garden. “I remember we planted all these herbs and lettuces. Some of them were seeds and some of them were little plants. And then they grew, and then in the spring and the summer, we harvested. So there was food just like this ready to be picked.”
Now that the summer is over, Obama said, “… it’s fall and there’s a whole new crop of food here that’s ready to be harvested. And actually we have a couple of sweet potatoes. And a couple of them are huge! They’re huge! So that’s why we invited you here. You’re going to help us with our fall harvest.”
One of the highlights of Obama’s 10-minute talk with the students was when she asked the students how much they believed the 740 pounds of food cost to grow. Laughing as they forwarded answers ranging from $300 to as high as $6,000, Obama shocked the students and the media with her answer:
“More than 740 pounds of food have come out of this little piece of land — and it cost about $180,” Obama revealed. After the talk Obama rounded up the students into small groups, and they gleefully got dirty digging up potatoes, lettuce and other vegetables. The first lady said the massive collection of food would be donated to Miriam’s Kitchen, a soup kitchen in Washington, D.C. –terry shropshire
