『I was not a gardener and never had been in my life,but thanks to Sam Kass and our family efforts to eat better at home,I now know that strawberries were at their most succulent in June,that darker-leaf lettuces had the most nutritions,and that it wasn’t so hard to make kale chips in the oven. I saw my daughters eating things like spring pea salad and cauliflower mac and cheese and understood that until recently most of what we knew about food had come from food-industry advertising of everything boxed,frozen,or otherwise processed for convenience,whether it was in snap-crackle TV jingles or clever packaging aimed at the harried parent dashing through the grocery store. Nobody,really,was out there advertising the fresh,healthy stuff —the gratifying crunch of a fresh carrot or the unparalleled sweetness of a tomato plucked right of the vine.
Planting a garden at the White House was my response to the problem,and I hope it would signal the start of something bigger. Barack’s administration was focused on improving access to affordable health care,and for me the garden was a way to offer a parallel message about healthy living. I saw it as an early test,a trial run that could help me determine what I might be able to accomplish as First Lady,a literal way to root myself in this new role. I conceived of it as a kind of outdoor classroom,a place kids could visit to learn about growing food. On the surface,a garden felt elemental and apolitical,a harmless and innocent undertaking by a lady with a spade—pleasing to Barack’s West Wing advisers who were constantly concerned about “optics,”worrying about how everything appeared to the public.
But there was more to it than that. I planned to use the work we did in the garden to spark a public conversation about nutrition,especially at schools and among parents,which ideally would lead to discussions about how food was produced,labeled,and marketed and the ways that was affecting public health. And in speaking on these topics from the White House,I’d be offering an implicit challenge to the behemoth corporations in the food and beverage industry and the way they’d been doing business for decades.』*
『At the time Barack took office,nearly a third of American children were overweight or obese. Over the previous three decades,rates of childhood obesity had tripled . Kids were being diagnosed with high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes at record rates. Even military leaders were reporting that obesity was one of the most common disqualifiers for service.
The problem was woven into every aspect of family life,from the high price of fresh fruits to widespread cuts in funding for sports and rec programs in public schools,TV,computers,and video games competed for kids’time,and in some neighborhoods staying indoors felt like a safer choice than going outside to play,as Craig and I had done when we were kids. Many families in undeserved sections of big cities didn’t have grocery stores in their neighborhoods. Ritual shoppers across large swaths of the country were similarly out of luck when it came to accessing fresh produce. Meanwhile,portion sizes at restaurants were increasing . Advertising slogans for sugary cereal,microwavable convenience foods,and supersized everything were downloaded directly into the minds of children watching cartoon.』*
『A year after launching Let’s Move!,we were seeing results. We’d aligned ourselves with different foundations and food suppliers to install six thousand salad bars in school cafeterias and were recruiting local chefs to help schools serve meals that were not only healthy but tasty. Walmart,which was then the nation’s largest grocery retailer,had joined our effort by pledging to cut the amount of sugar,salt,and fat in its food products and to reduce prices on produce. And we’d enlisted mayors from five hundred cities and towns across the country to commit to tackling childhood obesity on the local level.
Most important,over the course of 2010,I’d worked hard to help push a new child nutrition through Congress,……(content in between omitted)……The new law added more fresh foods and vegetables,whole grains,and low-fat dairy to roughly forty-three million meals served daily. It regulated the junk food that got sold to children via vending machines on school property while also giving funding to schools to establish gardens and use locally grown produce. For me,it was a straightforward good thing —a potent,ground-level way to address childhood obesity.』*
Michelle was born and grew up in an average black family in southern side of Chicago. She was educated in Harvard University and pursued initially a career as a practicing lawyer,and later on followed her own heart to switch to areas on social work to help the poor and minority people.
She said she her quality was more cautious and always focused on details,and always asked herself whether she was good enough whenever taking new challenges;however Barack Obama was a totally different breeding who was always so confident about himself,taking pressure at ease,and thinking doing big thing with major impact.
The challenge to a success black woman as Michelle Obama was that,at that time,she seemed always to be one of those few black students studying in a male and white people dominant Harvard University,one of a few black lawyers working in the prestigious law firm,the only black people and woman presented in a CEO meeting,and the first black First Lady in the American history.
She had always been working very hard and she found that there were a lot of colored people no less smart than her but would never have her chance due to the lack of proper education and good family support and social environment to bring them to become successful. A lot of the them were intimidated by implicit or implicit discriminations and would easily shun opportunities,or were purely by a lack of self confidence which is formed through a variety of negative discourage experiences. So once become a First Lady,although politics was not her pursuit,she had always been trying to help those minorities and open up White House more to the public,especially to children,soldiers’families and the colored people.
About Donald Trump,Michelle was disheartened and wrote in the book as the following:
『Since childhood,I’d believed it was important to speak out against bullies while also not stooping to their level. And to be clear,we were now up against a bully,a man who among other things demanded minorities and expressed contempt for prisoners of war,challenging the dignity of our country with practically his every utterance. I want Americans to understand that words matter—that the hatful language they heard coming from the TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it. I want to make appeal for—the idea that as a nation we might hold on to the core thing that had sustained my family,going back generations. Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice,and not always the easy one,but the people I respected most in life made it again and again,every single day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by,and offered it that night from the stage:when they go low,we go high.』*
Although 3 millions more Americans voted against Trump,he still won and was elected according to the design of the presidential election mechanism that who won a few more bigger states marginally would overwhelm the opponent who won many small states with majority votes.
Barack and Michelle was the first black American president and the first Fist Lady in American history. It was a perfect fulfillment of an really big American dream. Now Americans had chosen an atypical president who would never hesitate to bully other countries as well as the immigrants or minority people within it’s own country. We don’t know if Barack and Michelle Obama’s success would be eventually becoming as a one time magic event only. But we know they did have made a history of legacy that the colored people would keep telling about in the future.
*：“Becoming,”by Michelle Obama
2019/5/10 Becoming Damakey
