The White House Kitchen Garden in 2012

The White House Kitchen Garden today looks a lot like American kitchen gardens - by design. It's filled with lettuces, tomatoes, beets, rhubarb, broccoli and other delicious, nutritious growing things. But if the White House Kitchen Garden, and American kitchen gardens across the country, reflected U.S. farm subsidies that are likely to be continued in the 2012 U.S. Farm Bill, our gardens would change dramatically. We'd be eating corn, wheat, cotton (can be a little dry in the mouth) and soybeans, with a little tobacco sprinkled in for good measure (and straight cash!).

Roger Doiron, founder and “weeder-in-chief” of Kitchen Gardeners, thinks we should take a hard look at the lack of federal funding for fruits and vegetables. He writes:

As a nation, we’re saying one thing and doing another and need to bring our words and actions in line with one another. We’re saying we should be eating 5–7 portions of fruits and vegetables a day (depending on who you ask) but we’re not supporting the food, farm, and garden infrastructure needed to deliver that diet to 307 million Americans. In fact, we’d need to grow another 13 million acres of produce in the United States if we we’re to meet the minimum daily requirements of fruits and vegetables set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Read more by Margret Aldrich in the Utne Reader.

Let's make the 2012 Farm Bill reflect our kitchen gardens, not what's been traditionally subsidized on large-scale farms.