“Before coming to the White House, I struggled, as a working parent with a traveling, busy husband, to figure out how to feed my kids healthy, and I didn’t get it right,” she explained, sharing a story about her children’s doctor who pulled her aside to talk about her family diet.
“I thought to myself, if a Princeton and Harvard-educated professional woman doesn’t know how to adequately feed her kids, then what are other parents going through who don’t have access to the information I have?” she recalled.
Her personal struggle helped her launch her mission to address childhood obesity, she explains, especially passing a law requiring schools to provide healthier meals for kids.
The First Lady recommended that schools make decisions for children because their parents struggle to feed their children well.
“It’s so important for our schools to make the hard calls for our kids, because parents are struggling enough at home,” she said, pointing out that schools would simply feed children sweet cereal, chocolate milk, donuts, burgers, and fries.
Here’s the chronology: Malia Obama was born in 1998, younger sister Sasha in 2001. At the time, Barack Obama was a state senator, winning election to the U.S. Senate when Malia was 6, in 2004, and Michelle Obama was working in the first of multiple executive positions with the University of Chicago. In 2008, before the family arrived in the White House, they had already hired Sam Kass as personal trainer.
Which makes me curious:
Did Michelle Obama in fact make serious missteps in feeding her kids? Was it a rotation of pizza, McDonald’s, and Chinese carryout for dinner at the Obama household, or maybe a rotation of chicken nuggets from the freezer, and mac & cheese? This really seems improbable, especially for a family which set their kids to the University of Chicago Lab Schools ($26,000 per year tuition). Certainly, the cafeteria there would have been serving top-quality food even before Michelle’s crusade.
I suppose if that really is the case, that would explain her point of view now — the zeal of a convert, in part, and also a conviction that if she couldn’t do it, as a wealthy Ivy-league executive, then no one can, and healthy eating is something that simply can’t be left to be an individual decision. But does that mean that major policy decisions are based on her attitude that, since she failed, that must mean that everyone else is failing too, rather than owning up to individual problems.
Or is it that she was doing a perfectly adequate job, but fell into a pediatrician and a community in which “adequate” isn’t? — in which “healthy eating” means organic, and whole grains, and no refined sugar, ever, and so on, the sort of diet that the “What to Expect” childrearing series promotes, in which even eating white bread is a very occasional splurge. And is her crusading the result of feeling inadequate, from a working-class family, now among the elite?
Or is this just a matter of creating a narrative to make personal connections to her audience, with little resemblance to the truth?
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