Last week, the USDA released the Food Desert Locator, an interactive map which allows users to see where there is poor food access across the country. This map was inspired and influenced by Michelle Obama's Let's Move! campaign, and is meant to further educate Americans on food distribution in the country. More

The Federal Trade Commission last week released recommended guidelines for marketing food to kids. These guidelines will be open for public comment and soon sent to Congress for consideration. What do you think? Should foods marketed to children have healthiness standards? Does this mean no more Cap'n Crunch mascots? More

As the Child Nutrition Bill makes extremely slow but somewhat steady progress through Congress, First Lady Michelle Obama is once again speaking out to encourage its passage. In a Washington Post op-ed piece today, she highlights that "our country has a major opportunity to make our schools and our children healthier" through reforming school food programs. More

Michelle Obama just kicked off her new healthy children campaign, called Let's Move. In New York City, chef Bill Telepan is trying to reach those same goals by working directly in school kitchens and improving lunch recipes at public schools. Read on to find out more about these two initiatives. More

We mentioned this in our New York Times roundup today, but it deserves an extra little shout-out. First Lady Michelle Obama will make a guest appearance on Food Network when she challenges Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, and White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford to a special Iron Chef battle. The secret ingredients? Produce grown in the White House garden. The episode will air on Sunday, January 3 at 8 p.m. EST.... More

First Lady Michelle Obama and White House chef Sam Kass give us a tour of the first White House garden since Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden during World War II (which technically was only the size of a bed, and didn't qualify as a feeding-lots-of-people garden like this one). Planted in March with the help of Bancroft Elementary School students, the White House vegetable garden has already yielded hundreds of pounds of food. Fun fact: the seeds came from Monticello's head gardener, originally passed down from Thomas Jefferson himself. Watch the video after the jump.... More

The New York Times' Amanda Hesser made an interesting, thoughtful, and insidiously provocative suggestion over the weekend; that Michelle Obama, who has already adopted local, healthy food as one of her signature issues (how was dinner at Blue Hill the other night?), should also encourage families to sit down to meals they have actually cooked instead of ordered or reheated. So here's the question: Should our First Lady also be our nation's chef de cuisine? Hesser was actually having an Alice Waters moment (Alice has been advocating this for years), but somehow coming from Hesser, this bit of advocacy sounded downright soothing. There's no doubt that both Hesser and Waters are right: Cooking and eating meals together are good for... More

According to the New York Times, Michelle Obama has taken on healthy, delicious, and local food as one of her main issues. The serious eaters at world headquarters here certainly second that emotion and support her efforts, and how can we not love and cherish a first lady who eats (and talks up) local and still takes her staff to Five Guys for a burger and fries? In fact, she says the White House kitchen can rustle up "a mean batch of french fries" (fresh, we're sure) when called upon. Oh, yeah. She and our president also indulge their craving for their favorite Chicago pizzeria. So Michelle Obama likes healthy and delicious local food, burgers, and pizza. Here are some... More

Honestly, I don't know what's going on in this video. Fake Barack Obama makes bacon, some of the kids behind Sizzology rap about it, and then—how did we ever miss this tidbit of news?—they cut in a Michelle Obama breakdown in which she says, "I do my protein as bacon. We're bacon people." I'd imagine that was clipped from some appearance on a morning talk show where she either made a recipe or talked about breakfast. The video, after the jump.... More