Roger Doiron could pass for a twenty-first century Buster Keaton, had the silent film actor smiled easily and loved growing food. The forty-two-year-old founder of Eat the View, one of two successful petition campaigns for a White House vegetable garden, has the wide dark eyes, the thin, graceful frame, and that particularly Keaton-like stillness at the center of a chaotic world.
From his living room office in Scarborough, Maine, his childhood hometown, Doiron works at a long wooden table empty but for a laptop computer perched on a cardboard box. A woodstove warms the quiet room—honey-colored wood floor, children’s artwork on the yellow and beige walls—and behind him, two glass doors look onto a small yard buried emerging from the winter’s snow. Come summer, that yard will burst with Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, pumpkins, raspberries, and more, producing over $2,000 in fruits and vegetables from $100 in seeds. Today, though, Doiron is cultivating a bigger plot: to radically change how people think about, make, and eat food.
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It’s a good time in the world to be a food activist. Public health crises, from obesity to heart disease, have put what we eat at the center of our health care concerns, and food-borne illnesses, including avian flu, are a reality of the deeply interconnected global food production systems, with experts suggesting that an outbreak of avian flu, for example, could kill fourteen million people worldwide. Mainstream industrial agriculture is alone the source of 70% of the United States’ total climate change emissions, and will be one of the first industries to suffer if our planet’s atmosphere does indeed change. Industrial agriculture also relies almost exclusively on cheap, plentiful oil supplies—not a sure thing geologically or politically these days—for everything from fertilizer for crops to fuel for farm machinery to gasoline for transportation.
Meanwhile, the world’s arable land, along with our capacity to improve it, is running out just as the global population is exploding: the United Nations predicts that in order for the world to get fed, we’ll need to grow more food in the next forty to fifty years than we have in the last ten thousand. Throw former Homeland Security Secretary Tommy Thompson’s wonderment that terrorists haven’t yet attacked our obviously vulnerable food supply on the doom-and-gloom compost pile—also, shrinking global seed diversity, and dwindling water sources, and a thirty-year-old federal food policy that rewards farms that irreparably damage the soil, and the statistic that nearly two billion people on the planet suffer nutritional deficiencies, despite years of booming global grain productivity—and food panic becomes a responsible state of mind.
Roger Doiron stepped into this tangle of crises with a simple idea. In 2003, he founded Kitchen Gardeners International, a social networking Web site for home gardeners. He wanted to support and promote the idea of local food production as a palliative to food insecurity and inequality, and at the same time help people and communities strengthen themselves by rebuilding the knowledge and traditions that surround growing one’s own food.
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A long tradition of alternative food thinking preceded and informed Doiron’s idea, from the agrarian movement that flourished a century ago to the current “localvore” vogue and farm-to-school programs. The 1970s back to the land movement was perhaps the 20th century’s most visible response to the developing industrial food systems, as primarily young people from white suburbs rejected their mainstream lives for communes, small farms, and home gardens that provided them with good food and a direct relationship to the land. The clarion call for these hopeful pioneers, and the bridge from this food movement to Doiron’s work, was Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, Scott and Helen Nearing’s philosophical treatise on and practical guide to rural homesteading, published in 1970.
Doiron was born in 1966, just as the young back-to-the-landers were shoveling their first composted manure, but he didn’t encounter The Good Life for thirty years, even though Scarborough was still an agricultural town when he was growing up and his parents tended a “tomato and cukes” garden in the backyard.
“I was probably a little more interested in the garden than my brother or two younger sisters,” he says on a late spring afternoon, at home between weekend lectures and conferences. His Belgian wife and two younger sons are in Belgium, visiting family, and his 16-year-old stepson is still asleep. In the small outdoor cold frames, or handmade miniature greenhouses, hardy lettuces are peeking up. “It wasn’t like Roger the Little Gardener out there with a farm stand by the side of the road, but I was definitely paying attention.”
That attention wandered elsewhere through his adolescence and early adulthood. “I basically became a Francophile,” he says, traveling abroad at fifteen and living with a French family, who incidentally ate very good, fresh food. After that, life was all about trying to get back to France. He majored in French and psychology at Holy Cross College in Indiana, took his first job out of college teaching French in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, then earned a Master’s degree in International Relations at Tufts University.
Doiron moved to Brussels in the early 1990s to work for the coordinating office of Friends of the Earth, a grassroots environmental organization. Other issues dominated the scene, including wildlife and forest conservation; food and farming didn’t emerge as compelling concerns until the late 1990s, when mad cow disease and transgenic foods, which many Europeans vociferously rejected, hit Europe at the same time.
Soon, his work at Friends of the Earth stopped feeling like the best response to the enormous and urgent problems in front of him. “Around me, Europe was starting to think about food and the environment, and to some extent food and well-being. I wanted to find a way to translate this work into something more concrete—not just into policy like we were trying to do at Friends of the Earth, or subject matter for conversation, but something that the average person could understand and do.”
The sprout of the idea had formed, but Doiron couldn’t see how to make it manifest in how he lived his life. The epiphany came over the weekends he and his wife, Jacqueline, whom he’d met in the mid-nineties, visited her family in the Belgian countryside. Gardening and home cooking were living traditions there. “It was natural for them to grow and cook these foods that had been in the region for ages, almost unremarkable, and it was difficult at first to convince my wife’s mother that I really wanted to be involved.” Doiron smiles. “She was a 4’11” whirlwind of energy, do-it-yourself in the sense that she did it all. She would say, ‘You leave the kitchen, I do it all.’ But she let me in eventually.”
In vegetable gardening, the act of skillfully and pleasurably nourishing himself with food he’d grown, he found the substance of his professional life. Gardening could be a concrete, positive and doable response to ecological and economic threats, to energy crises, to health problems resulting from poor diet and lack of exercise, to social inequalities and failed policies that serve expensive excellent food to some and cheap bad food to most others. It had the potential to help people build strong communities and strong connections to their culinary heritage and to the earth. It would allow him to be of service to a hurt world, and to help it change.
The appeal of kitchen gardening, also known as home or food gardening, was personal, too. He loved the actual work, and it was a way to ground the values becoming clearer and more important to him as he and his wife considered life after their sixth-floor Brussels apartment. He started reading about gardening and discovered Maine gardener Eliot Coleman, whose books The New Organic Gardener and Four Season Harvest, and through him have become must-read manuals for modern organic gardeners. Though Coleman, Doiron found Living the Good Life.
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“Eliot Coleman was sort of a disciple of theirs, as so many young people were when Scott and Helen Nearing were alive.” He pours fresh coffee for himself and offers a small bowl of chocolate chip cookies. The more Coleman he read, the more he wanted to go directly to Coleman’s source of inspiration.
“I was really intrigued by the deliberate choices they made to control their lifestyle and their food, and to have a good social impact in their lives.” The Nearings modeled a lifestyle separated from mainstream culture and relying on as few modern conveniences as possible. “My wife and I were thinking deeply about how to raise our young children, and we wanted to try some of that.” He takes a small bite of cookie. “Or at least move a few floors down.”
The obvious question, if the Doirons wanted to build the kind of independent and value-driven life articulated by the Nearings, one that involved growing their own food, was where to find the land. After six years and 3,000 miles away from Maine, Doiron longed to reconnect with his home state. They considered emulating the Nearings’ rigorously austere rural homesteading, but realized that such a life would prevent them and their sons from being part of a larger community. Isolation and exclusivity of purpose, radical in the Nearings’ time, didn’t fit the Doirons’ 21st century need to engage with a complicated and confusing world while keeping their values intact.
In 2001, the Doirons began their move, making meticulous plans to find nonprofit work and settle the family. “We moved the week before September 11, and then everything changed.” He shakes his head, still bewildered by the experience. The non-profit jobs they’d researched dried up; the careful arrangements they’d made for their oldest son, a Belgian citizen, to come to the U.S. were in disarray. In a week the family had become wild seeds, whirled by wind, unsure where they’d land.
In 2005, the family, bigger now by two boys, finally bought a home in Scarborough, a suburb near Portland, Maine. They settled 200 yards from Doiron’s parents, new roots next to old.
Before the move to Scarborough, however, Doiron had started writing freelance articles about employment, and unemployment, simply to make money to support his family. In doing so, he found a second career.
“I never meant to write, but I had to start in the Brussels years,” he says. “As someone who purported to want to Change the World, I realized I couldn’t just do it in the corner; I had to communicate publicly.”
On the page, Doiron’s voice is solid and passionate, often clever and always smart. His manifesto on kitchen gardening appeal to both converts and the uninitiated: “Kitchen Gardeners do not dream of eating a good tomato, but a true tomato, picked warm and juicy from the vine at the peak of its ripeness. They taste not only the fruit, but the care and honest labor that went into making it.”
Despite being published in Mother Earth News, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Saveur, and Organic Gardening magazine, among others, Doiron still suffers doubts. “I never feel my writing is exactly what it should be. I just say, I’m going to write what I know, using words that I’m comfortable using. I want authenticity. In the end it’s just about communicating well.” His brother, the editor of Down East magazine, is The Writer in the family, but Doiron can hold his own. The manifesto continues: “Kitchen Gardeners more often than not have a strong, independent streak, bringing their day-to-day cuisine into the realm of the divine.” At the very least the family has two “Writers.”
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When Doiron began thinking about kitchen gardening in Europe, he looked at the landscape of non-profits he knew and found nothing connecting people who grew their own vegetables. Nor did he find groups advocating for and supporting gardens on a lawn-by-lawn basis. The lack of a social and practical network for home gardeners was a strange situation, given that people who grow their own vegetables tend to fall loopily, unabashedly in love with gardening, to filling entire photo albums with shots of their carrots and salad greens. Food activism and interest has for some time been a diffuse thing: in his book Blessed Unrest, the environmentalist and author Paul Hawken writes that although food reform “is the largest social movement in human history,” with are perhaps two million different organizations worldwide working in one way or another on the subject, this movement is “unknown to itself and unknown to the media.”
“I started talking up this idea once I was back in Maine,” Doiron says, of the part-gardening resources clearinghouse, part-meeting place, and part-activism platform he envisioned in Kitchen Gardeners International. “I found some people who I thought could help out, and they said, ‘Yeah! Why not!’” Doiron had been doing Web design and management for his work with other Maine non-profits, and with the encouragement of his early supporters, put a couple of pages up on the Internet. In 2003, Kitchen Gardeners International went live.
The goals even then were ambitious, local and international at the same time. As the social networking tools morphed into a kind of specialized Facebook, using the Ning platform, KGI initiated the annual International Kitchen Garden Day, a loosely structured celebration of community backyard harvests. Gardeners in Pakistan, England, the United States, France, Holland, and Argentina held public Kitchen Garden Day gatherings in August 2008. KGI also wanted to raise money for small grants to help communities start or expand kitchen garden projects. Groups in El Salvador, Nepal, Kenya and India have received grants, and KGI has provided materials and technical assistance to new and young programs in the United States.
Jan Maes, a Belgian expatriate and New Hampshire gardener, discovered KGI through an online search for vegetable gardening resources in 2005. A former organizer in international microfinance, he was especially interested in the grant program and he called Doiron for more information. “He was very excited that someone with my background called him up, because he had neither time nor much experience to develop the microgrant idea,” Maes wrote in an email. “So he asked me if I wanted to become a board member.”
As this loose association of home vegetable gardeners and experts started coalescing around and developing his ideas, Doiron relentlessly promoted KGI through every media outlet he could find. The unexpected freelance career came to fruition: he wrote a monthly newsletter; nabbed food and gardening assignments for Mother Earth News, Saveur, and Organic Gardening magazines; and had articles, op-ed pieces, and letters to the editor published in national newspapers and online news sites. He produced videos for YouTube; redesigned the Web site; reached out to potential donors; and used his international contacts to grow the membership base. Local and national reporters and writers soon came calling, including the New York Times’ Anne Raver, who profiled Doiron in April 2008.
“I could describe him as a weed, because he is so persistent,” wrote Maes, “but let’s call him Belgian endive. They grow outside until September like Roger does in his own kitchen garden, then keep on growing once transplanted inside during the winter, as Roger does at his computer for KGI. It is a long process, and hard work, but the result is well worth it, and to be enjoyed for a long time.”
In early 2008, Doiron was selected to be a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Fellow. Professionals in food and agriculture receive a stipend and training to promote sustainable food systems through the media. For Doiron, this has meant lecturing at for non-profits, schools, and conferences across the country to help teach how to harness new media tools for activist causes, as well as ramping up the media presence of KGI, which currently boasts nine thousand members from one hundred countries.
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In February 2008, halfway through the presidential campaign, Doiron posted an idea to a contest at OnDayOne.org, a site run by the Better World Fund, a nonprofit organization that works to improve relations between the United States and the United Nations. The contest invited “ideas for creating a better world”; visitors to the site would vote on one idea to be taken to the new president’s administration.
Doiron called his idea Eat the View: “Replant a large organic Victory Garden on the First Lawn with the produce going to the White House kitchen and local food pantries. The White House is ‘America's House’ and should serve as a model at a time of economic and environmental crisis. The president would not be breaking with tradition, but returning to it (the White House has had food gardens before) and leading by personal example on global challenges such as food security, climate change, and energy independence.”
In conjunction with the contest, he created an Eat the View Web site and sent a petition out on the winds of the Internet asking for support. He also created and posted a clever, cheerful, silent movie-like video to promote the idea, showing him digging a small garden in front of his own “white house” to the tune of “This Land Is Your Land” (the video ended up winning third place in a national contest). Six months later he’d gathered ten thousand signatures, including many from food luminaries such as Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Bill McKibben.
In July, Doiron put the petition on Facebook. Ten thousand more people signed within one week. Eat the View won the On Day One contest in January 2009, beating out 4,000 competing ideas. Because winning the contest by no means guaranteed the White House would plant and garden, he continued to push the petition, and by February 2009, over 100,000 people had signed.
The idea, the petition signatures, and the many comments from signers were delivered in February to Michelle Obama’s staff, who talked with Doiron several times in the following weeks. Doiron started to hear whispers of progress, hints in speeches by Mrs. Obama, and gossip from his fellowship colleagues, and then, on March 20, Mrs. Obama, twenty-two area school kids, and White House kitchen staff started digging up ground on the South Lawn for a 1,100 square foot organic garden that will grow more than 55 varieties of vegetables, fruits, edible flowers, and herbs.
“Begin pinching yourself now,” Doiron wrote in a letter to KGI members on March 20. “THEY ARE REALLY GOING TO DIG THIS GARDEN! AND WE HELPED MAKE THIS DAY POSSIBLE!”
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Breathless euphoria aside, not everyone is hoeing the garden row. From 1870 to 2005, home gardening production in the United States fell from 35% to 1%; it is not part of contemporary mainstream culture to want or know how to grow food. There is also the problem of access to healthy soil and safe water, neither of which is a guarantee in, say, large cities or arid climates. Seed availability is also troubling, writes Paul Roberts in The End of Food, as a virtual cartel of three companies—Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta—control nearly half the world’s seed supply; Monsanto in particular has sued farmers who save seeds, claiming copyright infringement of their patented seeds.
Yet more difficult, Roberts writes, is that backyard food production simply can’t begin to meet the immense needs and weaknesses of a politically powerful and inextricably entwined global food production systems. Whatever can’t be produced locally, which is a lot, will fall back on the same long-distance, high-energy, and all around-ecologically disastrous mainstream system. In the face of such massive problems, kitchen gardening appears just whimsical.
Doiron isn’t fazed. “All these are things that can be overcome, because we have to live in reality: we have to grow a lot more food now than ever before, this time with fewer resources. That’s going to require a complete rethink about what good food is and where it comes from and who produces it.” Paul Roberts agrees: “With so many food problems converging, and a new President in town, there’s a feeling that these issues might finally get some attention,” he said in a recent phone conversation. “The White House garden is a pretty small thing, mostly symbolic, but every moment is a potential tipping point. There is a hunger for a new attitude about food.”
Doiron is pushing that tipping point potential by retooling Eat the View as campaign for food gardens in prominent public spaces across the country, starting with governors’ mansions. And for those who love and support kitchen gardening already, the White House garden and the community-building of KGI are not too far from small miracles. One petition signer and KGI member wrote to Doiron, “Thank you. This has been a childhood dream of mine, and I thank you for taking it to where it might be a possibility.” An Iraq War veteran, also a KGI member, wrote that his vegetable garden was keeping him connected to his desire to get healthy, and in February, a Kenyan organic farmer asked Doiron if it was okay to start a White House garden petition over there. Then he offered to take up a collection for the cause.
“It is so, so touching.” Doiron finished his coffee an hour ago; he’s getting ready to go back to work on the laptop, which he calls his favorite gardening tool. “These messages really help me understand the power of this idea. I don’t expect the Obamas to read the notes, probably, but I get to see over and over again my place in this powerful process. It was never just about the White House, but the millions of gardens it could inspire.”
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For a quiet man, Doiron has handled the explosion of media interest in his work gamely, his eye on the big picture. “There is such fear and exhilaration when you get a call from a big time newspaper. I’m not naturally an extroverted person; I have to pull up out of my shell to put myself out there. But you do one interview, you do one lecture, and afterwards you can say, ‘That worked; I survived; I didn’t make a fool of myself.’” Here he departs from Buster Keaton, whose art was playing the fool. Growing food often does look silly—dirt has a way of getting all over a gardener’s face, and a new grower might have three pockmarked tomatoes and a bushel of crab grass to show for a week’s work—but that awkward vulnerability, under the sun or in writing or on the phone, is the first step toward something more than food security and lower household bills. Across cultures, gardens have been the metaphor for the start of life, and an original source of joy.
For many KGI members, it’s the just action that feels best and right. It’s not violent, but it is consuming; it’s personal, but it is also a response to political and global concerns. It seems in this moment there is room to believe that a practice so militantly peaceful as to be good for us could help save us from the disasters we face.
In such a moment, a new kind of leadership can emerge, too, like a still point in a storm, from a person with quiet integrity and intelligence and imagination, with a sustaining desire and skill to shape the world into a more equitable and safer and happier place, with a love for his work and respect for the people he serves, someone who cultivates his mind as thoroughly as a garden plot and cares for his family as tenderly as one brushes the tops of young tomatoes, to give them sturdier stems.
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The Doirons are preparing now for their spring planting—lettuces, kale, snap peas, and spinach. Indoors they’ve filled black plastic trays and small peat pots with tomato, pepper and melon seeds, all plants that need head starts of heat and light to make fruit in Maine’s short growing season. As the snow melts, Roger and Jacqueline will rake back last fall’s mulch, turn the soil with new compost, seed rows and mark them with sticks and string. His boys will plant winter squashes in their plot, though squashes take up so much room, Doiron learned last summer, he may need to transplant a raspberry bush from a front corner of the 1.3-acre yard and let his boys start digging there.
In the meantime, Doiron is looking forward to parsnips. “I’ve never had a decent parsnip crop before. They’re under all that snow, though, little parsnip popsicles. I can’t wait to dig them up.”
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