The forces behind Eat My View, which collected more than 100,000 signatures, and other similar campaigns must have been rubbing their eyes at the sight of Michelle Obama armed with a shovel on the White House lawn.

She had come to turn the sill on an organic garden; their dream was becoming a reality.

The White House is giving over a sizeable chunk – 1100 square feet in fact – to plant 55 different vegetables, fruit, berries and herbs year round (in keeping with the seasons, of course).

Most of its produce will cater for the White House and visiting dignitaries but some will also be donated to a soup kitchen down the road.

Launching the project, Mrs Obama said she wanted her daughters to eat healthy food and be reminded of where food comes from.

It’s a message the supporters of Eat My View, including prominent activists Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, have been pushing for years. Everyone needs to look at the source of their food and eat as locally as possible. And who better to lead from the front than the new president and his family?

Strawberry forever: The delights of an organic garden are shared with young and old. Picture: Frankieb

Vegetable patches can be surprisingly social places.  Ours is especially so as it is in our front garden.

These days I spend time in the mornings and evenings pottering about.  It is fun to inspect all the changes taking place.  

While I am out there, I get to wave to neighbours driving by.  It is common for our immediate neighbours to stroll over for a chat.

Even people I don’t know will slow down just to gaze at a thriving vegetable patch and wave at the resident gardener. 

People are interested in organic gardens.  One neighbour told me she loves the smell of our garden as she walks by. “It is so refreshing”, she told me this morning.

I understand what she means.  I find seeing and smelling real food growing is soothing to my soul.  Food is about our basic survival – its very presence reassures.

My favourite garden smell is the aroma of tomato and basil plants after they have been watered or picked.

Every few days over the summer, my one and a half year old neighbour comes over and together we pick and eat the strawberries.  “More strawberries!  More strawberries!” she declares with her cheeky baby grin. 

I have friends who drop by to help harvest and use the incredible silverbeet.  It is a great feeling to send someone off loaded up with fresh produce from your own garden.

It isn’t just people who are drawn to our garden.  If we are out there the cats will join us and play chasey around the garden beds.  I am grateful they are ineffective and disinterested hunters.

The native trees that form a border around the garden attract lots of birds.  I think of them as my gardening partners.  I see them fluttering about feeding on insects.  

It feels good to know there is nothing out there on the plants that will harm any anyone. 

This is especially true as a thriving organic garden, just like serving a home cooked meal, is wonderful way of drawing people together.

They aren’t words you’d expect from the mouth of an organic food devotee but restaurateur Jesse Ziff Cool is no stick-in-the-mud.

She wants people to eat the best they can most of the time, but a little indulgence every now and then is just fine by her. “I call it my 80/20 rule,” she says. “I raised my kids that way and I tell everyone not to beat themselves up for occasionally wandering off the path. We’re only human after all.”

If anyone deserves the occasional “poison” (she favours gin, organic gin), it’s Jesse. An advocate of organic eating long before it became the flavour of the month, she defied those who said it couldn’t be done and operates not one, but three organic and sustainable restaurants in California.

Her approach to food is simplicity itself, a philosophy reflected in her latest cookbook, Simply Organic: A Cookbook for Sustainable, Seasonal and Local Ingredients: Choose the best quality produce you can afford at its peak and marry it with ingredients that let it shine.

Homegrown wisdom: Jesse Ziff Cool knows the value of fresh produce.

The affable cook (she’s not a big fan of the word chef) was born into an Italian-Jewish family whose lives revolved around good food.

Her parents and grandparents lovingly tended their backyard produce without resorting to pesticides, they raised and ate their own chickens, her father presided over a small supermarket in Pennsylvania where locally grown produce reigned, and home was always awash with the smell of something delicious brewing.

Not that she knew it then, but Jesse was already getting an education in the organic way.

At 27, she opened her first organic restaurant with her then husband Bob. To say it was a challenge was an understatement; they were repeatedly told a restaurant offering organic and sustainable produce was not viable, assuming they could even get hold of such fare to begin with. But Jesse persisted, even when she and Bob parted. More than 30 years on, she still has to pinch herself to think how far the organic movement has come – out of the fringes and into the mainstream.

“The local movement has been very important for organic too; it’s important to start with where you are, eat food that grows near you,” she says. “Of course if you live in upstate Maine that message from someone in California with its abundance of fresh produce can sound a bit mean. But we need to change the notion of what people think of fresh food.”

Jesse believes fresh produce canned and frozen at its peak is just as “real”, tasty and nutritious. “I still dry my own tomatoes and make pickles,” she says. “There are so many ways to make use of food in season for later in the year when it’s not available.”

And despite the global financial crisis already hitting sales of organic fare, Jesse is optimistic about the future. “Human beings are extremely impatient,” she argues. “But I’m more of a big picture person. When I think of what it was like when I started 35 years ago, I never imagined we would be where we are now. It’s so much more than a fad and in some ways, we’ve moved beyond organic, beyond local… it’s really about cooking and connecting. We’re getting back to thinking about the importance of fresh food, as well as the sense of community it brings.”

A big supporter of local farmers, who she describes as her heroes, Jesse believes this connection with where food comes from is vital. “You know I go to these farming conferences and these people are my real teachers,” she says.

“We need to nurture a real feeling for food and then take it another step further and cook for each other.”

Her two sons might not have been as keen on her homemade style when they were growing up, craving the junk food hits of their peers, but she’s proud to say as grown men they totally get it.

“My youngest, who is doing his PHD at Duke University, spends more money on food than anything else because he knows how important it is… he’s always cooking,” she says. “You know food plays such a vital role in our lives. We sit, we eat and we talk. We can stop doing that for a while but not for long or we start to suffer.”

Now a grandmother, Jesse sees her role as an advocate for the politics of food, for food justice as she calls it, as an ongoing one. She wants to see a fair price for the freshest, most sustainable food available – for farmers and consumers. And she’s in hot demand as a speaker on the topic.

She’s proud of the project she does with student teachers from Stanford University, showing them (and the children they bring along) the joys of growing food from scratch and cooking it in simple and enticing ways. She is also relishing a new assignment to get healthy organic food into the university’s hospital.

“I’m a very present person. I tend to do things and let them go, but my work is very meaningful. I get a lot out of it,” Jesse says.

She has also obviously put a lot into it. “I almost went bankrupt a couple of times… but because I came from humble beginnings I didn’t need a lot of money. You know, I had no clue about being a businesswoman and I’ve learnt a lot with some incredible people along the way,” she says.

“I wasn’t always perfect, my restaurants weren’t always perfect and I didn’t make money for a long time. My success has been in learning to hire people who are different and better than me. I’ve surrounded myself with talented people.”

She’s also refused to let go of a dream that many others thought was hippy-dippy at best, complete madness at worst. “To have something you believe in suddenly not be part of the lunatic fringe is wonderful. For it to be understood and embraced by more people is incredibly satisfying.”

For more on Jesse and her work, click here.

Dining dilemma: Homegrown brings its own challenges. Picture: yourpatchorganic.com

It is a humbling day when you realise you can’t feed yourself. No, I haven’t had a stroke or any health crisis.  I am staring at a vegetable garden and I don’t recognise the plants.  This happened to me earlier this year when an organic vegetable patch was installed – yes, installed in my garden.  Not recognising the plants was just the first shock.

Harvest time was the second moment of awakening.  I would watch the vegetables ripen and look so handsome and I didn’t pick them.  I was proud of them – I admired them – like a little art show in my garden.  I seemed to be missing the pathway in my brain that said, “Pick and eat girl”.

Cam our garden man told me not to feel too bad.  He said that it takes a little while to get into the habit of harvesting.  I felt grateful for his generous comments.  Inside I felt like a child.  My vegetables were like a sign in the front garden saying: “Look everybody this woman is as lost as a human can get.”

I am used to a very different path.  The page in the recipe book tells me what I need from the supermarket.  It might be expensive or out of season but hey, it’s in the supermarket and I need it.  I cook, I enjoy.  I am accomplished at this way of preparing and eating food. Until recently I felt safe and confident in the rhythm of modern eating.

Now the garden is telling me what to eat.  Here are my silverbeet, carrots, beans, and lettuce.  This is where the meal needs to begin.

I have no recipe books like this.  I want my garden to come with a recipe book of its own.  What are the 10 ingredients I need to make this a meal?  That is what I am used to.  In my past, the produce has been an incidental part of a blend called meal.

Now I need to cater for a different type of food – the star performer.  It is fresh, it is tasty and it wants to be the main act.  Over a few months of playing this new game I finally come to understand – it deserves to be.  A wise woman told me, “when you cook with organic produce you don’t have to work as hard to make a great meal”.  I learn that she is so right.

It takes me a little while but I start to gain confidence in this more minimalist form of preparing food.  A splash of that, a pinch of this and there is delicious food.  At the same time I start to hunt down other organic ingredients that are recommended to me by wise elders in this mysterious new world.  My family begins a new way of eating.

One morning I am standing in the kitchen chatting to my teenage daughter.  It is the end of winter and I have lost weight.  I show her that my jeans are falling down.  “I just don’t get it, we are eating real butter and full cream milk and I have lost weight.”  “Well Mum,” she replies, as if I asked her the simplest of questions, “When you eat a whole food you don’t need to eat as much.”  I feel like a beginner in my own life.

It is a humbling day when you realise you can’t feed yourself. Surely there is nothing more basic to survival than knowing how to eat.   Like so many other points of transition it takes a low moment to recognise that something needs to change.  A wrong path has been taken. The road to survival is in a different direction.