Evenson.org.uk

Michelle Obama is putting a 1,100-square-foot organic kitchen garden on the South Lawn of the White House.

Great!  Who could possibly argue against that?

Well, apparently, stupid fucking asshole Anthony Bourdain:

But Obama’s seemingly simple move is seen by many as a political statement akin to Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1943 victory garden. Food activists, led by the California chef and Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters, have been lobbying for an organic White House garden since 1993. Now they are celebrating what they call a new “victory” garden. It sent out a message, Waters said, “that everyone can grow a garden and have free food”.

Others are less sure. Chef and writer Anthony Bourdain, who penned Kitchen Confidential, caused a stir in January when he said: “We’re all in the middle of a recession. Like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic.” The White House said materials for the garden, from seeds to mulch, cost $200 (though that figure doesn’t account for labour provided by the White House staff, who will perform most of the maintenance).

According to Wikipedia,

The Khmer Rouge is remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people or 1/5 of the country’s total population (estimates range from 850,000 to two million) under its regime, through execution, torture, starvation and forced labor.

Apparently someone forgot to add organic gardening to the list of atrocities. Bourdain, shut the fuck up, you piece of shit.

Hat Tip digby.

UPDATE: Here’s the timeline of events as I understand them. First, back in November, Alice Waters writes a letter to President Obama:

Dear President Elect and Michelle Obama,

Congratulations on your victory! It is with great pride and pleasure that I write to you, the President Elect of the United States of America.

For the last 40 years, I have been immersed in a grassroots food revolution that I believe will make a tremendous difference to the health, security, and values of all Americans. Local, affordable, nutritious food should be a right for everyone and not just a privilege for a few. At this moment in time, you have a unique opportunity to set the tone for how our nation should feed itself. The purity and wholesomeness of the Obama movement must be accompanied by a parallel effort in food at the most visible and symbolic place in America—The White House.

Knowing how quickly the most important decisions are made after the election, I would like to immediately offer my help and that of my colleagues and friends, Ruth Reichl and Danny Meyer, who were instrumental in the success of Margo Lion’s Food and Art Fundraiser in New York City. We would be honored to present ourselves as a small advisory group—a “Kitchen Cabinet” if you will—to help with your selection of a White House chef. A person with integrity and devotion to the ideals of environmentalism, health, and conservation would send a powerful message to our country: that food choices matter. Seasonal, ripe, delicious food grown in the United States would inspire your guests and nourish your family.

Of course, I cannot forget the vision I have had since 1993 of a beautiful vegetable garden on the White House lawn. It would demonstrate to the nation and to the world our priority of stewardship of the land—a true victory garden!

Thank you for your consideration. I would like to ask for a conversation with whomever you think could best advance this idea.

With great admiration and hope,

Alice Waters

Bourdain, clearly enraged by Waters’s calls for a Khmer Rouge-style gardening revolution, gives this interview, from January 19, 2009:

The inauguration is tomorrow. Do you have any advice for our soon-to-be president?

I would not presume to advise him on anything. By virtue of being elected, he has made my life as a traveler much much easier. I’ve felt the impact abroad already. I get congratulated by complete strangers walking up to me in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. It’s been a tough eight years to be a traveling American. I don’t think people hated Americans, but there was a look that people gave you. Just by virtue of being an American you were like some well-intentioned, but rabid golden retriever. A look of curiosity, disbelief and horror. And this was in England and Australia. I’m particularly proud and happy about our new president. There will be a tangible difference in the way Americans are treated abroad. It just feels better. Above and beyond all the policy.

Any advice about food?

I’ll tell you. Alice Waters annoys the living shit out of me. We’re all in the middle of a recession, like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic. I mean I’m not crazy about our obsession with corn or ethanol and all that, but I’m a little uncomfortable with legislating good eating habits. I’m suspicious of orthodoxy, the kind of orthodoxy when it comes to what you put in your mouth. I’m a little reluctant to admit that maybe Americans are too stupid to figure out that the food we’re eating is killing us. But I don’t know if it’s time to send out special squads to close all the McDonald’s. My libertarian side is at odds with my revulsion at what we as a country have done to ourselves physically with what we’ve chosen to eat and our fast food culture. I’m really divided on that issue. It’d be great if he [Obama] served better food at the White House than what I suspect the Bushies were serving. It’s gotta be better than Nixon. He liked starting up a roaring fire, turning up the air conditioning, and eating a bowl of cottage cheese with ketchup. Anything above that is a good thing. He’s from Chicago, so he knows what good food is.

And his efforts to backtrack a few days later:

“I don’t have any burning issue with Alice Waters, a restaurateur and visionary whose accomplishments clearly dwarf my own, so I doubt it. In a perfect, candy-colored world, I’d like to eat most of what she’d like to see us eat. I feed my daughter mostly organic food whenever possible—and greatly admire what Dan Barber is doing. My comments were a heartfelt reaction to her wildly hubristic letter to the (then) president-elect, a document whose tone, timing and content I found distasteful—particularly coming from someone who hadn’t even bothered to vote in the four previous elections. True, I am suspicious of wealthy suburbanites who preach “back to the soil” philosophies—as if most—or even many—could start digging subsistence gardens in their back yards or afford expensive organic or locavore lifestyles. But Chez Panisse was inarguably a cradle of the food revolution. I respect Alice Waters’ enormous contribution to changing the way we eat and cook today. No one can take that away from her. No one should try.

I intend to treat her with the respect she rightly deserves. She says some stupid shit sometimes—and she is certainly free to call “bullshit” on me when I do the same. I might, in the spirit of good fun, point out that following even my own not particularly distinguished career in kitchens—most of it in view of the “Choking Victim” sign, I DO, at least, know the Heimlich maneuver.”

…and backtracked a bit more on his Travel Channel blog:

…they started calling me “Vic” - short for “Vic Chanko,” whenever I’d get testy…

…

I’m happily playing tea party with my daughter, contemplating future good works, thinking about sending a fruit basket to my producers (who I’d abused so badly after the blowhole incident), generally in the kind of mood that makes me want cuddle stray dogs, adopt a kitten, sing Cumbaya with the homeless crackhead who hangs outside my neighborhood supermarket - when the text of Alice Waters’ open letter to the President hit my Inbox.

The new guy in the White House has a lot on his plate - as a recent trip through America’s Rust Belt had just brought rather poignantly home. So I found the allegedly chronic non-voter Waters’ offer to head up a “kitchen cabinet” - an advisory board guiding the new administration to a new, organic, locavorean foodie Valhalla - well …presumptuous. Particularly in light of the Normandy invasion of chefs, logistics and ingredients for the series of benefit meals which followed. I had a hard time visualizing all these guys foraging for vegetables in D.C. in January. The combined carbon imprints of these talented interlopers - alone …seemed at odds with the high minded sentiments in the letter.

Out pops Vic and next thing you know, my comments are all over the blogosphere, attacking the Mother Theresa of the food world, viciously sinking my snaggled teeth into the shanks of St. Alice of Berkeley - possibly the most beloved and revered figure in the world of food.

This is made only more awkward by the fact that we’ll soon be appearing together in a panel discussion in Connecticut. I cringe, imagining myself in the green room, sheepishly extending a hand over the tuna wraps, Fiji water and complimentary spanokopita, mumbling something like, “Wow …like, sorry I compared you to Pol Pot. Perhaps that was a bit …excessive.” Next, I’ll be accusing Tom Hanks of cannibalism.

Bourdain and Waters, along with Duff Goldman, will be appearing at The Connecticut Forum’s “Food for Thought” on May 14, 2009.

I see the Dems have decided that the issue they should really be fighting about is: “Who knew that AIG was going to be paying out those big bonuses, and when did they know?”

Dodd blames Treasury, Treasury blames Dodd, Treasury also blames the Fed…
The press, of course, are totally eating this up, because it’s really easy to cover a story like this.  Get an AIG official off the record, someone from the Obama team on or off the record, a Republican to show “balance,” and then, most imnportantly of all, hand it off to the blowhards to talk about endlessly on the TV machine.

Fuck you, Norm.

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