Barack Obama and the family plant vegetable garden, promote healthy eating

Légumes cultivés dans un jardin potager.

I think this must be one of the best parts of being President (I'll clarify what I mean by that in a sec):

Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of the South Lawn on Friday to plant a vegetable garden, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets — the president does not like them — but arugula will make the cut.

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at a time when obesity and diabetes have become a national concern.

“My hope,” the first lady said in an interview in her East Wing office, “is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.”

and:

Whether there would be a White House garden had become more than a matter of landscaping. The question had taken on political and environmental symbolism, with the Obamas lobbied for months by advocates who believe that growing more food locally, and organically, can lead to more healthful eating and reduce reliance on huge industrial farms that use more oil for transportation and chemicals for fertilizer.

So what's the best part about being president that I'm talking about? Well, basically the fact that as long as you maintain a certain level of popularity, you have more or less a loudspeaker to the entire country (303 million) that is completely free and can be used more or less without limit.

So let's say the Obama's put a bit of work into this project, and as a result there are now 10,000 (completely random number) more vegetable gardens in the United States than before. Now let's say that each of these gardens produces 10 kg of vegetables per month. Now thanks to your week-long campaign, your country is now producing an extra 1200 tons of vegetables per year, and thus you have just started a process that will result in a total of 9600 tons of organically-grown vegetables over your two terms. Imagine being able to make that happen through nothing more than a quick campaign.

And don't forget that nothing tastes better than a carrot grown in your own garden. Supermarket carrots don't even resemble them in terms of taste.

This applies to much more than vegetables, of course. Remember the tire pressure issue from the election? Proper tire pressure results in a savings equal to the amount that offshore drilling would produce, and this is something else that can easily be accomplished in much the same manner as with this vegetable campaign.

If I were President I would naturally bring up the issue of IALs, and thus create a few thousand users of the language in a few months. Unfortunately, at the moment I have to promote them much more manually and with much less fanfare. Just you wait though.