Obama Foodorama’s Eddie Gehman Kohan is downright giddy over the first lady’s impact on food:
The White House Kitchen Garden was the start of an unprecedented paradigm shift in our national conversation on children’s nutrition and health, on food and agriculture, on the role of cooking and nutrition education; and it’s a signpost for the Obama administration’s approach to these issues. Never before have we had a First Lady with a food policy agenda, and never before have we had an assistant White House chef–Food Initiative Coordinator Sam Kass–who has assumed a public role in nutrition and health education, and in creating that food policy agenda.
But, says Eddie, the President has Birthers. And the First Lady has leadites:
In the last two weeks, the lead myth has returned with a vengeance, in stories with inflammatory headlines such as Michelle Obama’s Toxic Veggie Nightmare. This, despite the fact that lead as a toxic issue in the garden has been debunked by major soil scientists, in interviews with your intrepid blogger that appeared here and on Huffington Post. We apparently live in a world that’s devoid of fact checkers, because everyone who’s newly writing about the “lead threat” is referencing the non-fact checked June 17 Mother Jones story about “sewage sludge lacing the White House veggie garden,” which started the leadstravaganza (and these stories are appearing internationally, too; for instance in the UK’s The Guardian). Mother Jones didn’t check their facts about what lead levels actually mean in food gardens, and they didn’t check their facts about when sewage sludge–in the form of fertilizer–may have been spread on the White House lawn (their dates are wrong, as is their assertion about the practice). And despite talking to one of the same soil scientists that Ob Fo interviewed to debunk the toxic myth, Mother Jones refused to correct their story. But why bother to correct the record? It’s not as if Mother Jones is engaged in a project of journalism, or interested in facts. The new wave of Leadites are also referencing Andrew Kimbrell’s Huffington Post nonsense, which also referenced the same Mother Jones piece–after the Mother Jones piece had already been debunked. It’s all an extraordinary case of toxic internet telephone.
Jeff Stier is the individual who kicked off this new, latest wave of idiocy, on July 23, with Is the White House Organic Garden Toxic to Kids?, which appeared on the Forbes website. Stier is the same fellow who was very publicly and hilariously smacked down on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show when he tried to claim that the White House Kitchen Garden was a public health hazard, “falling somewhere on the threat scale between five-year-olds who smoke and fourteen-year-olds who have unprotected anal sex” (no, not making that up). Stier emerged from the Daily Show video outing looking like a jerk, but that hasn’t stopped him from getting in on the gardening action some more. In his latest piece in Forbes, Stier points to the fictional lead contamination of the garden to try to make a case for industrial chemicals such as Bisphenol A and pthalates, because the world is already polluted. Nope, not making that one up, either.
The White House has issued a statement and Eddie’s philosophical:
There’s always a period in time as the culture assimilates new information, and gets used to big change, when there’s much opposition. In the first 200 days of the Obama era, we’ve gone through some massive upheavals, and the Birther movement is symbolic of an entrenched opposition that’s looking for anything to undermine forward movement. The same thing is clearly going on with the First Lady’s food agenda, though on a far more smaller scale. But the President’s going to continue to be the President, no matter what the Birthers say, and Mrs. Obama’s going to continue to garden, and to further shift our paradigm on food and nutrition and health consciousness, no matter what the Leadites say.
You’ll want to read Eddie’s full post to fill in any blanks. Me, I am hoping he’s got it exactly right.