Queen of the Greens Feeds Elite

When you’re invited to dinner Chez Michelle’s as the spouse of a world leader, be prepared for the Eating-fresh-locally-grown-food-lecture-on-a-plate. The $100-a-lb. wagyu steak favoured by the Obamas is reserved for Wednesday cocktail nights at the White House. But the First Lady may unwittingly have provided the only humour in the hypocrisy of a G20 summit that made a ghost town of an already anemic Pittsburgh, Pa. This modern day Popeye’s Olive Oyl, admonishing the shopaholic wives of world leaders to eat their spinach, insists on being seen as the patron saint of eating “fresh”, “healthy” and “locally grown” greens.

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Health siren Teresa Heinz Kerry, AP-described as a “local philanthropist” and (Italics CFP’s) wife of Sen. John Kerry and widow of Sen. John Heinz, of the ketchup family, yesterday lent Michelle the family farm, Rosemont Farm. It was only last week when The First Lady (Michelle, not Teresa) shut downtown DC traffic when she showed up--somehow with several hundred people in tow--on the hunt for organic salad makings, and shouting out in Marie Antoinette fashion: “Let’s shop!” As noted by AP, yesterday it was Mrs. Obama’s “first turn in the role of international hostess”. We just know that a watching world waited with bated breath to learn that “Mrs. Obama sat between the spouses from Indonesia and Brazil”. (AP never knew their names). We don’t know whether she “poured” tea from a sterling silver teapot asking how many lumps, but White House social secretary Desiree Rogers did greet each guest at the door of the home, then led them to a patio “where Mrs. Obama and Heinz Kerry also greeted them”. (Knew THEIR names by now). Lucky for the munching ladies that publicity-hogging Grace Mugabe, second wife of Zimbabwe despot Robert Mugabe, didn’t seem to be too nearby. “Salad greens and apples from the farm were served during the dinner, although a detailed menu could not be immediately released for security reasons.” (AP, Sept. 25, 2009). If this had been a bona fide UN event like the Johannesburg Earth Summit, food tasters and prostitutes would have been in order. If only Americans worried about jobs, mortgages and their Grade 2 kids’ “Oh-Bam-a” singalong could take their minds off their anxieties for a moment to absorb how Mrs. Obama had her hair “swept up into a fluffy ponytail” and was wearing “pink patent leather heels” not having to worry on this occasion about towering over hubby, they might find a laugh. Can there be any doubt that Michelle’s greens trump Teresa Heinz Kerry’s healthy eating tips, which include for arthritis: “You get some gin and get some white raisins--and only white raisins--and soak them in the gin for two weeks, then eat nine of the raisins a day”? Michelle’s leafy feast also trumps the King Henry the VIII kind of fare served at the UN summits her husband so admires. At the Johannesburg Earth Summit, thousands of UN delegates gorged themselves on “buckets of caviar”, lobster and filet mignon, while South Africans, many of them children, were starving in slums just a few miles away.”

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