Bay Area Public Radio Mourns Obama's 'Food Legacy'

Bay Area public radio station KQED is mourning Barack and Michelle Obama’s departure from the White House because of their contribution to healthy food awareness, as well as their elite food tastes.

“President Obama and the First Lady did more to further the causes of local agriculture, children’s health, and food safety than any administration of our generation,” Brie Mazurek writes at KQED. “And what other presidential family has kept bees at the White House, homebrewed, eaten bun cha with Anthony Bourdain, and made turnips go viral?”

Critics of the Obamas’s food crusades often noted the First Lady’s preference for french fries, or the consternation of school children across the nation when subjected to her lunch priorities. In 2010, the TV show Iron Chef America featuring produce from Michelle Obama’s White House garden turned out to have sourced its food elsewhere.

Still, with the rise of a new president who is unashamed of his preference for fast food, more refined palates are apparently nostalgic for the Obama era already.

Mazurek lists several Obama food achievements: the White House vegetable garden; the “Let’s Move” exercise initiative; “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food,” a movement to support local sourcing of agricultural products; the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, “setting new nutrition standards for free school lunches and breakfasts”; the MyPlate depiction of a healthy diet, replacing the “food pyramid”; the Food Safety Modernization Act, which “gave the FDA more regulatory powers to shift the focus from response to prevention of food-borne illness”; the Farm Bill 2014, which included “some wins for local and sustainable food”; the Trans fats ban; and the Modernized nutrition facts label.”

Not listed, oddly, was President Obama’s support for the Pigford settlement for farmers who supposedly suffered discrimination by the federal government, which turned out to be a massive vote-buying scheme.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.