Digging in

"Kernel-industrial complex: Examining a landscape where crops only feed food." By Chrsitopher Gray.

GROW YOUR OWN
A Mainer wants the next president to “eat the view”
You may think you’re clever, you with your anticipatory 1.20.09 sticker (we know it’s Bush’s Last Day — way to ruin the subtlety), but Roger Doiron’s gone a step further. The Scarborough resident, who founded and runs Kitchen Gardeners International, an organization that promotes home gardening and provides resources for backyard farmers, came up with a suggestion for what our new president should do on his or her first day in office: start a vegetable garden on the White House lawn.

The idea has proved so wildly popular that it shot to the top of the list at OnDayOne.com, a Web site filled with advice for our next commander-in-chief.

“It involves no new spending, but rather redirects underutilized natural and human resources towards a more productive and more socially-responsible end,” Doiron said in a press release last week. What’s more, “if this can happen at the state level, there’s no reason it can’t happen on the federal level,” he said in a phone interview, referring to Maine first lady Karen Baldacci’s installation of a vegetable garden and greenhouse at the Blaine House in Augusta.

There have been gardens on White House grounds before: sheep grazed the lawn in the early 1900s; Eleanor Roosevelt tended to a “Victory Garden” during World War II in an effort to set an example for American citizens; local-food guru Alice Waters tried to get the Clintons to plant one in the 90s, but the idea fell through. Hey, if nothing else, a garden would provide a discontented electorate with convenient access to tomatoes (for throwing purposes) right?
_DF