Healthy Eating at White House

MANILA, Philippines — American First Ladies usually have their special projects. Eleanor Roosevelt travelled around the country, substituting for her wheel-chair-bound husband, talking to the electorate. Mrs. Lyndon Johnson worked to improve the looks of public highways by encouraging the planting of flowers on the sides of the roads.

The current First Lady, Michelle Obama, a tall (five foot eleven inch) slender woman with a trim, athletic figure, promotes healthy eating. Her idea of a press interview is to show a reporter her vegetable gardens on the White House back lawn. She also encourages her two daughters to help with the weeding and harvesting.

There’s an American folk myth that men and boys just don’t like vegetables. But I will wager that if they grew up where they planted fresh vegetables and had them for dinner, fresh-picked from the garden, this theory wouldn’t prove true.

There is something about healthy fresh picked vegetables that sets them oceans apart, certainly from the canned variety but also from the frozen product and even from the so-called fresh healthy vegetables that are sold in most grocery stores, which had to be picked days earlier and then transported long distances, and even with the refrigerated trucks that are now available, they simply don’t taste the same as those plucked fresh from the garden.

Today fresh garden vegetables are back in vogue, along with the health fad which sends people to gymnasiums to work out, and to diet books to count calories.

My grandmother was the provider of vegetables in our family. Even though we did not live on a farm, she managed to plow up a likely patch of ground back of the house and plant beans and peas and tomatoes and potatoes and sweet corn. When I think of her, I visualize a sturdy little soul, with her hoe or spade, or basket in her hands busy with her garden, planting it and harvesting from it.

My grandmother was never fat. She wasn’t skinny either. She was simply sturdy, as women who worked in their yards and garden were in those days. And I assume still are, although more families are using professional gardeners now.

It’s a pity, too. Because planting your own vegetables and having the satisfaction of picking them when they are mature, affords a pleasing sense of being in tune with nature and the natural world, and the plants that thrive on it.

As Michelle Obama has demonstrated, you don’t have to live on a farm to have a backyard garden and grow healthy food.

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Healthy Lifestyle – with Bill & Sheila