grocery retailer, had joined our effort by pledging to cut the amount of sugar,
salt, and fat in its food products and to reduce prices on produce. And we’d
enlisted mayors from five hundred cities and towns across the country to commit
to tackling childhood obesity on the local level.
Most important, over the course of 2010, I’d worked hard to help push a
new child nutrition bill through Congress, expanding children’s access to healthy,
high-quality food in public schools and increasing the reimbursement rate for
federally subsidized meals for the first time in thirty years. As much as I was
generally happy to stay out of politics and policy making, this had been my big
fight—the issue for which I was willing to hurl myself into the ring. I’d spent
hours making calls to senators and representatives, trying to convince them that
our children deserved better than what they were getting. I’d talked about it
endlessly with Barack, his advisers, anyone who would listen. The new law added
more fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy to roughly forty-
three million meals served daily. It regulated the junk food that got sold to
children via vending machines on school property while also giving funding to
schools to establish gardens and use locally grown produce. For me, it was a
straightforward good thing—a potent, ground-level way to address childhood
obesity.
Barack and his advisers pushed hard for the bill, too. After Republicans won
control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, he made the
effort a priority in his dealings with lawmakers, knowing that his ability to make
sweeping legislative change was about to diminish. In early December, before the
new Congress was seated, the bill managed to clear its final hurdles, and I stood
proudly next to Barack eleven days later as he signed it into law, surrounded by
children at a local elementary school.
“Had I not been able to get this bill passed,” he joked to reporters, “I would
be sleeping on the couch.”
As with the garden, I was trying to grow something—a network of
advocates, a chorus of voices speaking up for children and their health. I saw my
work as complementing Barack’s success in establishing the 2010 Affordable Care
Act, which greatly increased access to health insurance for all Americans. And I
was now also focused on getting a new effort called Joining Forces off the ground
—this one in collaboration with Jill Biden, whose son Beau had recently returned
safely from his deployment in Iraq. This work, too, would serve to support
Barack’s duties as commander in chief.