Photo by Chris Shott

The Obamas' Super Bowl party had a guest more exciting to this Lagerhead than Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. This Sunday the president and first lady previewed their inaugural batch of home-brewed beer.

White House Honey Ale was brewed on site with ingredients from the White House grounds. According to Eddie Gehman Kohan's food-focused White House blog Obama Foodorama, the presidential home-brewed ale is made with honey from the bee hive in Mrs. Obama's South Lawn kitchen garden. From Gehman Kohan's post last night:

Brewed with one pound of honey from this year's 160-pound harvest from the White House Bee Hive, the Ale was made by an unnamed White House chef who is a home-brewing enthusiast. The President, First Lady, and their guests sampled the special suds for the first time this evening. The label on the bottle reads "Brewed With White House Honey."

The White House also had beer from Hinterland, a craft brewery in Green Bay, Wis., and Yuengling from Pottsville, Pa., for the event. For a picture of the home-brewed White House beer label and more details about the Presidential Super Bowl party's guests and menu, go here.

Official White House photo by Pete Souza

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Well, that wasn't a promising start.

After all the celebrity stalkings and quick-fire guessing games during the show's filming, Top Chef D.C. premiered last night and laid a large goose egg on the White House lawn.

Sure, the decision to conduct the first quick-fire challenge atop the Newseum was a clever change of venue, a "kitchen" that offered vistas of D.C. (as if the producers offered us many), but the challenge itself was as boring as, well, peeling potatoes. Which is what the cheftestants were asked to do. That and brunoise onions and break down chickens. Good skills to know as a chef, no doubt, but watching cooks dice onions packs all the excitement of watching someone write a blog item.

And what was up with that elimination round broken into four groups in which the quick-fire winners picked their competitors, the worse chef the better? It was more convoluted than Senate procedural rules, which, come to think of it, may have been the point.

The four worst dishes in the challenge were likely going to be the four worst dishes, regardless if they came from a pool of 17 contestants or four groupings of chefs allegedly competing against one another within their own group. (The idea was that the worst chef in each group would stand repentantly before the disapproving judges and find out which one deserves a one-way ticket home.)  I guess, technically, one group could have produced two really crappy dishes, and one of those chefs who produced the crappy dish would have skated.

Follow all that? If so, please explain it to me. Because here's what I don't understand: Why force the "cheftestants" to compete against only a handful of competitors? Isn't the whole point that they compete against everyone on the show? The only excuse for this restricted format is TV drama, so we can watch chefs pick teams as if they were on the schoolyard playground, getting to humiliate their fellow cooks by selecting those who were deemed inferior.

During the elimination round, the judges asked the chefs to create a dish that reflected their hometowns or regions. It made for a nice window into each chef's background, but what did it have to do with D.C.? Other than, perhaps, the fact that the District is full of transplants from all over the country. I wonder if the producers even thought that deeply about the challenge.

Next week's episode will be slightly more D.C.-oriented, but only if you define D.C. by the federal government. It will ask the chefs, in the spirit of Michelle Obama's anti-childhood obesity initiative, to prepare a healthy school meal for only $2.68 per student, which as Obama Foodorama notes, "is the reimbursement rate schools receive for each child who is eligible for free lunch under the federal program."

The school lunch episode has already drawn the ire of Slow Cook, Ed Bruske, who takes issue with the math skills of Top Chef producers.

This is shaping up to be a long Top Chef season.

Photo courtesy of Top Chef

And why not? The inaugural White House kitchen garden became more than just a homegrown source for the First Family's meals but an international symbol for local agriculture and even the "site" for a special episode of Iron Chef America.

Will the expanded garden suffer the inevitable sophomore slump this year?

For a complete report on last week's planting, read Obama Foodorama's coverage, including a description of the First Lady's rhubarb dance.

ObFo's Eddie Gehman Kohan notes that White House executive pastry chef Bill Yosses has put together the largest gingerbread house in Oval Office history:

It was made with honey from the White House Bee Hive, and features a marzipan replica of the Kitchen Garden, a mini Bo, and a shadow box view of the State Dining Room.

In his blog, Yosses explains the pains he and his staff went through to produce the annual White House confection:

Each year, the White House Pastry Team comes together with other members of the White House staff to work on a favorite holiday tradition: The White House Gingerbread House. Because this project requires so much space, the gingerbread house is usually assembled in the China Room of the Residence instead of the pastry shop. Everyone from White House carpenters to plumbers to electricians lend their expertise to help make this project a success.

Weeks were spent planning out the details, studying James Hoban’s original architectural designs and blueprints, gathering ingredients and creating a time line.

And then the real work begins. More than 150 pounds of gingerbread dough is made and this year the recipe called for White House Honey! After baking the gingerbread, it is cut into pieces that become the house’s foundation. The gingerbread is so thick that a band-saw is used to create the bricks for the gingerbread replica. More than 250 lbs of white chocolate is then used for everything from the adhesive to the decorative elements. The white chocolate provides the flexibility needed to create details like the rosettes and the banisters, the windows and the wreaths.

Comerford and Flay get fresh (veggies) in the White House garden.

Jeesh, speaking of predictions, Y&H should have guessed this would happen as soon as the White House broke ground on its kitchen garden in March: Iron Chef America has trotted out three of its, ahem, heaviest hitters to cook a meal from ingredients plucked from the hugely symbolic garden.

The special two-hour episode of Iron Chef America, dubbed with a stunning lack of subtlety, Super Chef Battle, features Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse, who take on Bobby Flay and White House Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford in the competition.

The episode has already been filmed, and according to The New York Times' account, First Lady Michelle Obama laid out the ground rules to the teams (they had to cook five dishes using ingredients from the White House kitchen garden) and put in a good plug for her Healthy Kids Initiative.

The show will air on Sunday, Jan. 3, on the Food Network.

Not surprisingly, the air date is politically tinged. So says Y&H's virtual friend, Obama Foodorama, who writes:

The show's January airdate is timed perfectly to be right before Congress comes back into session, when legislators will be addressing the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, which provides federal funding for school feeding programs. Better school lunches are one of Mrs. Obama's priorities, and President Obama's too; Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack frequently notes in his public remarks that this was the very first subject President Obama discussed with him during their "job interview."

And here's another interesting twist: The ingredients used for the actual cooking challenge in Kitchen Stadium were not from the White House garden. So says both The New York Times and Obama Foodorama, who notes:

Today, the chefs reunited in New York in the Iron Chef Kitchen Stadium, the stage set where the competition part of the show occurs. In addition to the "secret ingredient" of White House Kitchen Garden veggies (stand-in organic veggies were used for the actual filming–) the chefs were given a baby pig, and a pantry of dairy products to work with, among other things. Guest judges for the competition part of the episode were cookbook author/chef Nigella Lawson, actress Jane Seymour, and Olympic swimming champ Natalie Coughlin.

Photo courtesy of Obama Foodorama

The traffic is outrageous on Vermont Ave. during rush hour!

No one needs to tell you, least of all Y&H, that in this blog-eat-blog, 24-hour news-cycle world everyone is required to have an opinion. But, really, shouldn't everyone wait until the object under criticism has actually opened?

I'm speaking about the new FreshFarm Market by the White House, which the busy non-profit opens today with guest appearances from First Lady Michelle Obama, Mayor Adrian Fenty, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.  Last month, Mother Jones was first out of the block in predicting dark things about the market:

[I]f this idea becomes reality, the Obamas should be careful to make it a sustainable market for local farmers rather than a kitschy tourist attraction bogged down by pins and t-shirts that say "Yes We Can Farm" and "Change We Can Grow In." But let's face it, due to the massive security detail the market would require and the overwhelming draw for Washingtonians and tourists alike, the latter is more likely.

(Just for the record, Capital Spice has an excellent run-down of the vendors, none of which appear to be hawking pins and t-shirts.)

WTOP continued the early hand-wringing with a story about potential rush-hour traffic snarls:

Word has been circulating through local Advisory Neighborhood Commissions in D.C. and has some on edge.

"I take this road every day, and imagine this will worsen gridlock since 15th Street just north of this block is a major northbound artery out of town," writes a concerned resident to WTOP. "There are so many roads already closed for security, it will only make the H street corridor even worse."

WTOP followed that story with another worrying piece today. But leave it to Obama Foodorama, the take-no-statement-on-its-face blog, to put those traffic fears to rest. The picture above comes from ObFo, which snapped it at 4:55 p.m. yesterday, presumably a rush-hour period.

ObFo also smacks down a lot of the media frenzy over who exactly conceived the idea for the White House market and whether the First Lady had a hand in it. Frankly, Y&H thinks this last issue is a tempest in a teapot. If the White House did have a hand in the market's creation, perhaps even helping to push it along, then good on the Obamas. It's an abuse of presidential power that I can live with.

Photo via Obama Foodorama

Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack explains the USDA's local farm program.

UPDATE, 5:52 p.m. Weds.: The Los Angeles Times has more details on the market here.

As part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign, the White House will launch a farmers market tomorrow in the 800 block of Vermont Avenue NW. It'll run every Thursday from 3 to 7 p.m. until Oct. 29.

The Chicago Tribune quoted USDA Undersecretary Ann Wright as saying that the market and other programs to support local farming are "very much a part of the president's initiatives to bring more healthy food to underserved communities and children."

According to Y&H fave Obama Foodorama, the opening of the White House market will also coincide with another KYF2 initiative: Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan "will announce farmers market promotions program grants for markets in the northeast corridor..."

The Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign, according to a USDA press release, is designed to break down policy barriers and "help develop local and regional food systems and spur economic opportunity."

Author and organic-food expert Samuel Fromartz interviewed Merrigan about the new program. In addition, here are some of the elements of KYF2, according to the press release:

In the months to come, cross-cutting efforts at USDA will seek to use existing USDA programs to break down structural barriers that have inhibited local food systems from thriving. Today, USDA announced a small initial group of moves that seek to connect local production and consumption and promote local-scale sustainable operations:

* USDA's Risk Management Agency announced $3.4 million in funding for collaborative outreach and assistance programs to socially disadvantaged and underserved farmers. These programs will support 'Know You Farmer' goals by helping producers adopt new and direct marketing practices. For example, nearly $10,000 in funding for the University of Minnesota will bring together experts on food safety and regulations for a discussion of marketing to institutions like K-12 schools, colleges, universities, hospitals and other health care facilities.

* USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service proposed regulations to implement a new voluntary cooperative program under which select state-inspected establishments will be eligible to ship meat and poultry products in interstate commerce. The new program was created in the 2008 Farm Bill and will provide new economic opportunities for small meat and poultry establishments, whose markets are currently limited.

* USDA's Rural Development announced $4.4 million in grants to help 23 local business cooperatives in 19 states. The member-driven and member-owned cooperative business model has been successful for rural enterprises, and bring rural communities closer to the process of moving from production-to-consumption as they work to improve their products and expand their appeal in the marketplace.

* USDA's Rural Development will also announce a Rural Business Opportunity Grant in the amount of $150,000 to the Northwest Food Processors Association. The grant will strengthen the relationship between local food processors and customers in parts of Idaho, Oregon and Washington, and will also help the group reduce energy consumption, a major cost for food processors.

As the 'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food' initiative evolves, USDA will continue to build on the momentum and ideas from the 2008 Farm Bill and target its existing programs and develop new ones to pursue sustainable agriculture and support for local and regional food systems.

So Michelle Obama and the First Family's defacto White House chef, Sam Kass, dined at Oyamel last week, and you know what? The local media didn't Tweet their fingers to a pulp to report every last chip slathered with salsa that crossed the First Lady's lips.

Eddie Gehman Kohan, the indefatigable blogger who covers all things Obama and food at (what else?) Obama Foodorama, thinks she knows why:

Although there was a gaggle of onlookers clustered around the front of the restaurant, it's interesting to note that the outing didn't make national news, a la Mrs. Obama's visit to Good Stuff Eatery, or the President's visit to Five Guys. Apparently things are normalizing, on that front, somewhat.

I have another theory: The media care more about the President's eating habits than the First Lady's. It's a bigger deal for Barack Obama to take a moment from his schedule to visit a restaurant than it is for Michelle Obama. Hence, each of the President's restaurant visits takes on a deeper significance.

I mean, if the President puts aside the economy, the environment, and various foreign crises to eat a hamburger, it must be a damn fine burger.

Oh, and I also suspect that fewer reporters follow Michelle Obama than the President.

UPDATE 2:50 p.m.: I asked Eddie Gehman Kohan for more of her thoughts on why Michelle Obama's eating habits don't get the same media attention as the Prez's, and if any sexism is involved here. Here's what she typed back:

I don't think it's sexism so much as Mrs. Obama is afforded more of a private life than POTUS. Everything he does gets much more scrutiny and is taken as a Symbol or a Clue or a Prediction of what he's going to do or might do in terms of policy. Also regarding coverage:  He's not allowed out without the pool and the motorcade. FLOTUS can "sneak" around with a smaller motorcade. As well... If the First Lady's press office thought it was a good idea for coverage they would have alerted the usual suspects...

Photo by La Citta Vita via Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License

Shortly before the holiday weekend, a small shitstorm started brewing over the the elevated levels of lead discovered earlier this year on the White House lawn, site of the vegetable garden heard 'round the world. In a column for Huffington Post, Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, wrote that National Park Service tests found "highly elevated levels of lead — 93 parts per million."

"It's enough lead for anyone planning to have children pick vegetables in that garden or eat produce from it to reconsider their plans: lead is highly toxic to children's developing organs and brain functions — however, it's below the 400 ppm the EPA suggests is a threat to human health," Kimbrell added.

As leader of the Center for Food Safety, a non-profit dedicated to fighting Big Ag and its anti-environmental and sustainable ways, Kimbrell figured he had cornered the devil living in the White House dirt: a commercial fertilizer called ComPRO, made from a wastewater plant's sewage sludge, which the Clinton Administration apparently had agreed to spread on the lawn during its temporary stay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a theory that Kimbrell borrowed from Mother Jones, which first reported on the possible ComPRO connection.

Kimbrell took this rare gift horse — a highly visible White House vegetable garden and a major commercial fertilizer with potentially harmful effects — and rode that sumbitch as far as he could go. He rode her hard:

So what is sludge, really? A stinking, sticky, dark-grey to black paste, it's everything homeowners, hospitals and industries put down their toilets and drains. Every material-turned-waste that our society produces (including prescription drugs and the sweepings of slaughterhouses), and that wastewater treatment plants are capable of removing from sewage, becomes sludge. The end product is a concentrated mass of heavy metals and carcinogenic, teratogenic, and hormone-disrupting chemicals, replete with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. There are some 80,000 to 90,000 industrial chemicals, including a host of dioxin-like deadly substances, which are allowed to be present in sludge under current EPA rules. What's worse, there's no way of knowing which toxic chemicals and heavy metals are entering the wastewater stream at any given time or in what concentrations. Sludge is always an unknown quantity, and therefore, assessing whether sludge is safe to use for growing food, is — in practice — impossible.

Farmers who care about what they grow know this, and — despite the best efforts of government and the sludge industry — growing food in sewage sludge is prohibited under the federal organic regulations. Still, sludge is still widely used as a cheap alternative to fertilizer, and unless you're buying organic produce, it's impossible to know if the food you eat was grown in it.

Scary stuff indeed. Kimbrell continues hitting the spurs:

So when people living or working in the vicinity of sludged fields and when diary cows and other farm animals grazing on sludged land have gotten sick from heavy metal, chemical or pathogen based maladies, the EPA has either ignored, denied or, in some cases, even fraudulently covered it up. However it's getting harder for the agency to ignore the toll of sludged land as we see increasing reports in adjacent communities of elevated levels of cancer or deaths believed to be related to sludge exposure. In some areas where sludge has been heavily used, whole families are evincing the same symptoms: sores in their nasal passages, chronic staph infections, crippling headaches and sinus troubles. Yet — despite the mounting evidence — EPA wants to continue to promote sludge as a benign alternative to fertilizer.

And then Kimbrell rides his gift horse all the way to the front steps of the White House, where his steed kicks the Obamas square in the mouth:

The Obamas may be the newest sludge victims. Certainly Michelle Obama's hopes of having a truly organic garden and healthy vegetables for her own children and other children who visit the White House have been dashed. The impact on their lives is symbolic; it's not just the Obamas under threat, it's all of us. Municipalities around the country have jumped on the bandwagon to sell their "biosolids" to sludge companies, a convenient solution to profitably rid themselves of hazardous waste. Over the last several years, we have all become unwilling guinea pigs, testing the safety of foods raised on sewage-sludged land. We're also unknowing guinea pigs, since none of this produce is labeled to show how it was grown.

I have to admit, it's a pretty effective dismantling of sewage sludge as fertilizer. But then journalist Eddie Gehman Kohan, a food politics dynamo over at Obama Foodorama, wrote a rebuttal piece the following day for Huffington Post. It pointed out two majors flaws to Kimbrell's argument: that the lead levels are far below the 400 parts per million considered dangerous to childhood health and that the sewage sludge likely didn't cause the elevated levels of lead.

This, in short, is why real dogged reporting is so much more important than agenda-driven editorializing — even when the agenda is worth fighting for. Once you start exploiting public events and public personas — without checking all the facts first — you lose credibility.

Image by dbking via Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License