Press

I've had some good luck getting my ideas for healthier, happier food system into the media over the years. Here are some highlights:


Associated Press
On the day Americans celebrate the land of the free, a Maine man wants governors to feel free to live off the land. A sustainable food advocate who campaigned for the Obamas to plant a garden at the White House has now received pledges from several governor’s offices to feature local foods on their Fourth of July menus, from Maine lobster to South Dakota pheasant jerky to milkshakes made with Montana huckleberries. Roger Doiron said he was inspired to lobby governors to promote locally grown food after a patch of White House lawn was turned into an organic vegetable garden this spring.

Boston Globe
The image of Michelle Obama surrounded by fifth-graders digging into the White House dirt gave heart to locavores everywhere. The idea of an edible landscape was fertilized by left coast chef Alice Waters and food guru Michael Pollan. But it was Roger Doiron, a modest Zone 6 gardener - my kind of guy - and head of Kitchen Gardeners International who began a lettuce-roots campaign last year to "Eat the View" at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Los Angeles Times
More than 100,000 people have lobbied the president online to plant a garden on the White House lawn, according to Kitchen Gardeners International, a coalition of gardeners whose mission is to inspire and teach people to grow their own food. The group's Eat the View campaign to plant "high-impact gardens in high-profile places" urged the first family to start an edible garden within the first 100 days of the Obama administration. Launched in February 2008 and spearheaded by Roger Doiron, a gardener in Scarborough, Maine, the movement hoped to have the president's family set the right example in terms of healthful eating -- "gardening for the greater good," as Doiron said.
"It begins at home," Doiron said. "That's where we start. And if we get a number of people together carrying out these small actions, it will speak volumes and add up."

Agence France Presse
Nearly 85,000 people have signed an online petition calling for part of the White House lawn to be turned into a vegetable patch, the plan's germinator said Wednesday."The idea is for the Obama family to plant an organic vegetable garden on part of the White House lawn, with the cultivated veggies going to the White House kitchen and any overflow going to feed those in need," Roger Doiron, told AFP, adding the idea had sprouted last year. If the Obamas were to plant a garden on the White House grounds, it would have the "inspirational potential" to spawn millions of similar gardens, not only in the United States but around the world, Doiron predicted.

Washington Post
"If we were to have a first family to take this on and lead by example, we would see a ripple effect across the country and across the world," said Roger Doiron, an organic gardener and food activist in Scarborough, Maine, who last year started a campaign to pressure the next president to grow veggies at the White House. He calls his petition drive Eat the View.

Wall Street Journal
Roger Doiron envisions a presidential vegetable garden. The founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International, an advocacy group in Scarborough, Maine, that is part of the eating-local movement, runs a campaign called Eat the View to promote a White House garden. Mr. Doiron has gathered more than 10,000 signatures on a petition supporting the idea. His cause ranks first in votes among more than 5,000 ideas for President Obama that people have submitted to On Day One, a project of a group called Better World Fund that promotes good ties between the U.S. and the United Nations.

International Herald Tribune
It has been decades since that famous forager Euell Gibbons reached through the White House fence and picked four edible weeds out of the president's garden. This is not something that the Secret Service would recommend you try today. But Roger Doiron has a better plan for eating the view of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He's started a campaign to get a kitchen garden growing on the White House lawn. Doiron works out of his small Cape house in Maine, where I find him one summer day. A wasp-thin 41-year-old, he's part of the fastest-growing (I used the words literally) movement in the country. His organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, is one link in a loose chain of partisans who are neither conservatives nor liberals but locavores. They want to think global, eat local. Very local. As in their front and backyard.

New York Times
Mr. Doiron’s latest cause is challenging the presidential candidates to plant a garden on the White House lawn. He has posted his proposal, “Eat the View,” on www.OnDayOne.org, a Web site where people record their visions for the next president. “This would not be a quaint little garden for the White House chef,” he said. “I have something fairly ambitious in mind, that would make a powerful political statement — a garden large enough to cover most of what the White House needs, with an overflow to a local food pantry."