Published on Friday, September 4, 2009 by the San Jose Mercury News (California) & Disseminated by The Erie Wire A National Movement of Foodies, Farmers, Parents and Educators Is Pushing for Better School Foodby Dana HullThere’s unusual lunchtime chatter at ACE Charter School in East San Jose: Students are actually raving about lunch. School lunch. [...]

This new video of Inside the White House features a follow-up story on the White House garden, the first garden of its kind on the grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt's minimalistic yet symbolic "Victory Garden". The first Lady describes why this attention to food production is meaningful. "The garden is really an important introduction to what I hope will be a new way to how the country thinks about food...and I also want to encourage people to think about doing more family meals," Mrs. Obama says. "We've found that we've been able to do that, and part of the message is that if the President of the United States can sit down with his family and have dinner, hopefully more families find the time to do the same thing." Back in April, when the First Lady announced that she was going to break ground on an organic garden, big-Ag shovelled considerable criticism her way for highlighting the local and pesticide-free choice rather than celebrating "conventional" farming practices. In a letter sent by Mid-America CropLife Association (MACA), an organization that represents producers of fertilizers and pesticides, Obama and, by extension, we are asked to consider, amongst other things, the great value of getting California strawberries to the mid-West a few months earlier than would otherwise be possible; a miracle of conventional farming, not local. While it is wonderful that we have plentiful crops in America and still have a capacity to ship around the nation (unlike Kenya and Afghanistan this year for example), all is not well with our conventional use of chemicals nor our dependence on their transport for sustainable living, particularly during a crisis. With her first White House summer literally under her belt, Michelle Obama still takes heat from trolls in the comment sections of articles such as this Huffington Post one. One commenter even takes a crack at Van Jones, who appears nowhere in the article and has been recently called out as a "Communist" by right-wing drummer Glenn Beck. I'm sure tha...

“Inside the White House: The Garden”This is great.