House garden, I mentioned that many Americans had trouble accessing fresh
produce in their communities and tried to remark on the health-care costs
connected to rising obesity levels. I wanted to make sure we had buy-in from
everyone we’d need to make the initiative a success, to anticipate any objections
that might be raised. With this in mind, we spent weeks and weeks quietly
holding meetings with business and advocacy groups as well as members of
Congress. We conducted focus groups to test-market our branding for the
project, enlisting the pro bono help of PR professionals to fine-tune the message.
In February 2010, I was finally ready to share my vision. On a cold Tuesday
afternoon and with D.C. still digging out from a historic blizzard, I stood at a
lectern in the State Dining Room at the White House, surrounded by kids and
cabinet secretaries, sports figures and mayors, along with leaders in medicine,
education, and food production, plus a bevy of media, to proudly announce our
new initiative, which we’d decided to name Let’s Move! It centered on one goal
—ending the childhood obesity epidemic within a generation.
What was important to me was that we weren’t just announcing some pie-
in-the-sky set of wishes. The effort was real, and the work was well under way.
Not only had Barack signed a memorandum earlier that day to create a first-of-
its-kind federal task force on childhood obesity, but the three major corporate
suppliers of school lunches had announced that they would cut the amount of
salt, sugar, and fat in the meals they served. The American Beverage Association
had promised to improve the clarity of its ingredient labeling. We’d engaged the
American Academy of Pediatrics to encourage doctors to make body mass index
measurements a standard of care for children, and we’d persuaded Disney, NBC,
and Warner Bros. to air public service announcements and invest in special
programming that encouraged kids to make healthy lifestyle choices. Leaders
from twelve different professional sports leagues, too, had agreed to promote a 60
Minutes of Play a Day campaign to help get kids moving more.
And that was just the start. We had plans to help bring greengrocers into
urban neighborhoods and rural areas known as “food deserts,” to push for more
accurate nutritional information on food packaging, and to redesign the aging
food pyramid to be more accessible and in line with current research on
nutrition. Along the way, we’d work to hold the business community
accountable for its decision making around issues impacting children’s health.
It would take commitment and organization to make all this happen, I
knew, but that was exactly the kind of work I liked. We were taking on a huge