Michelle Obama cultivating food policy: Philadelphia Inquirer

Quoted via Philadelphia Inquirer:

Michelle Obama shells peas with fifth gradersWASHINGTON - It was the ultimate photo op - 36 smiling fifth graders eating a healthful meal they'd cooked themselves at a picnic table in the first lady's garden. The story line was as simple as it was seductive: They came. They planted. They harvested.

In three short months, Michelle Obama had accomplished what other food advocates could only dream about. Good food was no longer just virtuous. It was cool.

That was easy. Now what?

That's the question Obama's food-policy team is working on this summer. The garden was intended "as a jumping-off point for getting to what sometimes can be a complicated conversation about how we eat [and] the food choices we make," Obama policy director Jocelyn Frye said in an interview. But as it moves beyond the symbolic to those meatier matters, the White House is grappling with the very issues that have challenged the so-called good-food movement for decades: How do you simplify and sell a new way of eating? more