First and last appearance
Skeletor told us “At least she’s meeting with local school kids and doing her best to garden with them” – she being Melania Trump.
No, she’s not. The Post this past April:
Thus far, the Trump administration has erred on the side of silence regarding the vegetable garden, mirroring the silence in Congress around the impending farm bill deadline. In February 2017, a news release from the Office of the First Lady confirmed the White House vegetable garden would not be removed. Come April, however, there was no spring planting event such as Michelle Obama had held; instead, the secretary of agriculture announced that he would “Make School Lunches Great Again” by relaxing Obama-era HHFKA nutrition and sourcing regulations. Public tours of the garden continued last summer, but the White House occupants kept their distance both legislatively and physically from local food production and childhood nutrition efforts.
Melania Trump finally made her first appearance in the garden on Sept. 22. (The Internet was quick to note that her ostensibly modest flannel shirt cost $1,380.) While the first lady harvested the turnips and kale she had declined to help plant, she encouraged children to “continue to eat a lot of vegetables and fruits, so you grow up healthy and take care of yourself,” while avoiding calls for structural change. Exactly a week later, however, the Trump administration pushed back deadlines for updating nutrition labels on packaged foods, which would have mandated disclosure of added sugars, the most common of which is high-fructose corn syrup, second only to ethanol and animal feed in importance to the U.S. corn industry.
This spring, planting dates have come and gone; visitors are invited to tour gardens again planted by Park Service staff. But it seems clear that by reducing their involvement, the Trumps are trying to erode the symbolism of the garden to placate their agribusiness allies. If those priorities carry over to a draft of a new farm bill, they will doom us to another round of partisan warfare.
It looks as if that photo-op appearance in the garden last September is the only time Queen Melania has been there, so no, that doesn’t count as an ongoing attempt to meet with local school kids and do her best to garden with them.
Again? When were school lunches ever great? I learned how not to eat from school lunches (but in truth, I often wished I could have the school lunch, because the lunches my mother sent were…worse. Mom didn’t splurge for school lunches, and if we had run out of food in the house, she sent us off with something weird she’d found somewhere).
You know it is an obscene administration when they can’t even pay lip service to healthy lunches for school kids. In our state, they at least pretended it was healthy when they started cramming the school cafeteria with nothing but PBJ.
I missed that was from September. I assumed that it was current. I’ll try to work on my reading comprehension.
I still say it’s slightly better than nothing, and better than ripping the garden out.
I fondly recall my own very first venture into gardening, when I was about 3 years old, and the old bloke from next door showed me how to sow bean seeds. He was a keen gardener.
That was the start of my lifelong interest in growing things.
So on the outside chance that Melania Trump’s horticultural exercise is what she is trying to make it appear to be, and not just some clumsy exercise in image-building and propaganda, I say good luck to her.
One high-ranking civil servant I once met said of his own garden “it’s the only thing that keeps me sane.”
Could also be true in Melania’s case. I suggest giving her the benefit of any doubt, which admittedly is there by the truckload.
iknklast, I can rightly say that back when I was in school, the food really was good. It was all made and cooked fresh daily, and each meal was a nutritious – if basic – meat, veg and spuds (with very rare appearances by the new and ‘exotic’ pastas and rices!) followed by a pudding. Even chips (fries) were actually chipped and roasted parsnips, which I adored and still do. All free for us kids from low income households.
Sadly, most if not all British state schools now run fast food cafe services, so it’s mostly junk food.
AoS, clearly you have never eaten in an Oklahoma City school lunchroom, then. To cook like that means they would have to spend some money. So they just ripped open giant bags of “stuff” and dumped it together, opened huge cans of inedible, overcooked veggies, and deep fried something nasty and inedible that locals like to call “chicken-fried steak” and that they will turn out in droves for if there is a special at a restaurant, even though they may have had it eight days a week already.
The ideal of American school cafeterias is cheap, fast, and preferably sold to the school by the friend of some bigwig. Now they have all these fast food things where the kids can cough up chunks of money to swallow some greasy crap they could get cheaper by stopping at the local McDonald’s or Wendy’s, but the school doesn’t let them leave for lunch anymore. My mother’s pickle loaf sandwiches are beginning to sound *almost* edible (but she always doused them with Miracle Whip, so there wasn’t even any mustard to hide the awful taste of the lunch meat).
iknklast, I’ve never had that particular ‘pleasure’, thank the non-existent gods, but I would at least like to visit the States before I shuffle off.
To be fair, my experiences with school lunches were more than 40 years ago, before the education authorities decided to follow the American model of profit before all else. Good job that schools aren’t helping fuel the obesity crisis among the young, eh? Not that one can talk about such a thing nowadays; what with everything being normalised, to do so is no longer seen as concern for the health of our children but as fat-shaming or body-shaming, and that is a very bad thing.