Foodlore Library

What does food activist and gardener Roger Doiron want you to do with your yard? Eat it! He’s one of a handful of activists who organized a grassroots (or as he calls it, “carrot-roots”) movement to get us to look at the green space in our yards through different lenses.

Doiron’s the guy behind the “Eat the View” campaign that sought to persuade President Obama to resurrect a Victory garden on the White House lawn like former presidential families: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Eleanor Roosevelt among others, in order to send the political message that it’s time to start gardening again.

“We look to our leaders to not only say the right thing and do the right thing, but to chew the right thing,” Doiron is fond of saying. “We want a leader that tells people to get their hands in the soil.”

Doiron has his own "white house" — though a much humbler abode — located north of the U.S. Capitol in the clammy fishing town of Scarborough, Maine. And due to Doiron and his band of like-minded gardeners who created a groundswell, the Obamas just broke ground on March 20th, planting 55 varieties of veggies on the south side of the White House lawn. Michelle Obama says she expects Malia, Sasha and even Barack to help with the weeding.

Doiron started the movement by setting an example of home gardening. He showed people how he created his own garden in front of his own white house. He created a clever video that shows him pulling up a square of grass in his front yard (like a carpet layer would) and dumping a truck-bed full of fertile soil, creating neat rows and planting veggie seeds. All with the intent of showing viewers just how easy it is to garden.

The 41-year-old is an optimist. He’s passionate about gardening, food and the kind of activism that encourages people to get outside and take action. In the face of our nation’s troubles: a financial collapse, energy crisis and food shortages, his message is empowering: Create your own security by getting your hands dirty and planting a seed.

Doiron's front yard garden

And he’s succeeded at getting his neighbors to put their hands in the soil and start raising their own food. He’s build a community of more than 5,000 gardeners strong called Kitchengardeners.org. He also spearheaded the move by three Scarborough elementary schools to develop gardens attached to their kitchens, a feat he maintains was relatively easy (wink, wink- you can do it in your community too.)

“The good energy, the good intentions, the good will — everything we needed was already there,” he said. His efforts are not unlike similar campaigns: Oregon’s Food Not Lawns and one out of Northern California called Edible Estates that both seek to redefine the idea of a the “lawn” and transform our “All-American” sterile spreads of golf-course grass, trimmed shrubs and perky flowerbeds into no-nonsense, free-flowering and fruiting garden patches that can be harvested on a daily basis. Let the tearing up of lawns begin!

Roger became intrigued with the idea of starting a grassroots movement around slow food and gardening when he lived in Belgium where he worked for a global environmental group for 10 years called Friends of the Earth. He was charged with helping to influence policy in support of more sustainable ways of life.

“These challenges that we are up against are so enormous, it’s easy to be overwhelmed,” he said. He reached a point where he felt like the wheels were getting mired in trying to create change from the “top-down” so he decided he would reverse his approach.

“I had an epiphany, I thought, ‘I can continue to butt heads with European members of the parliament, or I can look at small actions I can take – and see if I can get enough people to take—and try to shift policy that way.”

“People are looking for community and fellowship and we need to create that sense of community around growing food.”

From this decision, Kitchengardeners.org was born. The idea is simple and old-fashioned, but Doiron believes it’s exactly what’s needed during these insecure economic times. He wants people to eat what they grow in their own yards and in the process, discover the journey to great food can be as close as a step outside your front door- the ultimate way of shortening the distance between people and their food.

“Kitchen Gardeners has taken ‘local food’ to its logical extreme, saying, ‘you can be a local food producer yourself!'”

What else will gardening do besides reconnect us to our foods? Roger believes it has the power to connect us with community again. “People are looking for community and fellowship and we need to create that sense of community around growing food,” he says.

Gardening is a way of democratizing the Slow Food Movement, which Doiron says is great but has needed a more “hand’s on,” accessible and even affordable, approach. Doiron remembers falling in love with the Slow Food Movement, but realizing he had to change the rules a bit so he wouldn’t go broke. “I wasn’t going to keep up with the lawyer and the doctor spending a couple hundred dollars on dinner.” “We are telling people, now you’ve been won over by the Slow Food Movement, but if you really want to know what good food is, let me hand you this seed packet and tell you about composting.”

While in Belgium, Doiron said he learned about how interconnected gardening was to European culture and how they made the most of every season’s harvest. He fell in love with his mother-in-law’s cooking— a perfect combination of German heartiness with a delicate French side. “I remember those weekends as this seemingly unending blur of one good dish after another.” Dinner was at least a three-course affair, homemade soup followed by a homemade meal followed by homemade dessert, he said.

Thoughts about what she would cook on the weekend when he and his future wife Jacqueline, would visit, kept him going during the week like one of the classic Belgian dishes, Belgian endives wrapped in ham baked in a béchamel sauce and served au gratin with a crusty layer of gruyere cheese. He also recalls a dish his mother-in-law made with wild boar, served, believe it or not, in a chocolate sauce. . . one of the things I realized is that good food doesn’t have to be complicated.”

“The garden tells us what’s for dinner,” says Doiron.

He and his wife and three boys – ages 8, 11 and 16 – have about a 1/3 acre of land around their house. Of that, they’ve devoted 1200 square feet to a garden that produces a little more than half of the fresh food they eat. Produce like: salad greens, carrots, kale, leeks, chard, sweet and hot peppers, cabbages, lots of fat onions and of course Maine Kennebec potatoes from which the Doirons relive their days in Belgium by making fries (See recipe below). They also harvest grapes, apples, raspberries and do root cellaring- creating a space for carrots and potatoes and other roots where they can access them all winter. “We are busy people, but the garden plays a central role in our lives.”

Doiron shares a favorite family recipe, something simple and quick. French fries? Forget about how the French cook ‘em, “Belgium has the best fries in the world,” Doiron says. What’s their secret? They fry them twice.