Dear Michelle

In a week of such terrible issues confronting this country (and the world), I was so heartened to read that our secretary of agriculture had taken a jack hammer to the concrete in front of the department of agriculture so that a vegetable garden could sprout there. Shortly after this, I read about Michelle Obama turning over ground near the White House for a vegetable garden. Months ago, I read a proposal from Michael Pollen that the new president should do exactly this. I hoped it would come to pass.

And so it has. Doing a garden is so homely. Anyone can grow stuff. You don't need to understand economics as we are now coming to know it. When you grow at least some of your own food you are growing a lot more than just that tasty salad. You are growing health for your family and health for our nation.

I have had a vegetable garden for many years. Andy and I had memories of the last of the "Victory Gardens" after WWII, when we'd toddle after our parents hoeing those weeds, and then canning jar after jar of tomatoes. So when we set up our own household, it seemed natural to try vegetable gardening.

Then, it seemed easy when we were all working full tilt to let the gardening go. It was a land of plenty, fast food, or anything you could possibly want in any season, carbon footprint not an issue. We reveled in knowing you could get Italian chestnuts, Peruvian asparagus, New Zealand kiwi fruit, blueberries from Chile.

We resumed having the vegetable garden. It was a pleasure to work in it after we got home from our jobs. Some years we participated in a community garden plot, my small daughter helping me. I began to notice that our kids were really quite healthy: no cavities, perfect eyesight, and hardly any colds. I like to think it was because of a diet rich in unprocessed food, lots of organic fresh vegetables everyone helped produce.

And now, we are elderly and still slim and healthy. Our vegetable garden provides almost all our meals. We do sometimes have to eat a LOT of broccoli or collards or beans or whatever is currently ripe. Here in Florida, we are blessed to have pretty much a full time array of vegetables. It has taken me years to find out what grows best when, and how to quell the bugs and critters.

Our morning orange juice is from freshly picked fruit off our trees, our toast from bread we make. Perhaps the eggs come from the two little boys in town who have a flock of chickens. I love being self sufficient and I know that many of our neighbors hunt and fish for food.

We have an ongoing compost pile, constantly providing fertilizer for the vegetables.

But we always came back to that garden in the yard. "What have you got today?" asks Andy the cook. Tonight it was Swiss chard and broccoli, a scallion or two and some herbs. For tomorrow it may be the golden beets and the now ripening peapods.

Michelle, you are wonderful. May you turn around the idea that Americans are the fattest people who have ever been on earth. Grow veggies!