First Lady Michelle Obama likes to talk “Let’s Move” but can’t do the same for her own garden. Reports the Obama garden blog:

In the eleven days since the shutdown began on Oct. 1, the pounds and pounds of ripe organic bounty have gone to waste.  The vegetables filling the 1,500 square-foot plot are now rotting away on the vines and in the boxed beds, thanks to the mandate for “minimal maintenance” placed on the skeletal crew of National Park Service gardeners who remain on duty at 1600 Penn.

The gardeners are not allowed to harvest the crops, a White House source told Obama Foodorama.  Weeds are springing up everywhere, and the vegetables that have already fallen off the vines are now mouldering on the ground.

[…]

It’s a big change for the iconic symbol for Mrs. Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign, which she lovingly memorialized in her book American Grown.  The First Lady has been credited with a national spike in home and school gardening, but her Kitchen Garden is to a backyard plot as a Bentley is to a VW Bug.  It is usually curated with obsessive precision, a masterpiece of living installation art.

[…]

A portion of the Kitchen Garden crop is routinely donated to Miriam’s Kitchen, a DC social services agency that offers free healthy meals to homeless and underserved residents.

Read the whole thing.

I didn’t realize that FLOTUS was a federal employee. A real heart for service wouldn’t be stopped from harvesting and delivering to those in need. A real heart against waste wouldn’t allow the harvest to rot on the ground.

Were I advising the White House, I’d have FLOTUS and her daughters outside in the garden, elbows-deep in the dirt, protesting congressional gridlock Rosie the Riveter-style before personally delivering the excess bounty to area soup kitchens. Unfortunately, the White House is so petulant that they cannot even be prevailed upon to act in a manner that would, at the very least, benefit them optically. Of course, this would mean that FLOTUS has to trade her $450 kicks for some garden-variety Crocs.