Soil toxins now associated with White House garden

July 7, 6:26 AMLA Environmental Health ExaminerNJ Jaeger

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This excellent report reveals more about the Clinton's choice to fertilize the White House lawn with sewage sludge in the ‘90s, leaving traces of lead in the soil. This report was taken in part from Grist.

Obama garden drama, and other choice morsels from around the Web by Tom Philpott

A high-profile urban garden, two writers, and some vile sludge

Andrew Kimbrell of the Center for Food Safety is one of our most important critics of industrial agriculture. (Here’s a brief video interview with him I did last fall.) Eddie Gehman Kohan of Obama Foodorama is quickly establishing herself as an important food-politics blogger—deceptively serious despite her blog’s sometimes-frivolous obsession with all intersections of food and the Obamas. Both are fervent supporters of chemical-free, ecologically responsible agriculture.

The two have crossed forks, so to speak, over the White House veggie garden—specifically the revelation that the Clintons fertilized the lawn with sewage sludge in the ‘90s, leaving traces of lead in the soil. Kimbrell weighed in in a HuffPo piece last week, concluding that: “in the best spirit of NIMBY, the Obamas, after removing that contaminated soil from their lawn, should be the first family to push the EPA to halt the sludging of our public lands and farmlands.”

Gehman Kohan quickly rose to the garden’s defense, declaring Kimbrell’s contamination claim “irresponsible” and the garden’s lead reading “ridiculously low.” She concluded:

No one is being poisoned by eating the bounty of wonderful crops that have been grown in the White House Kitchen Garden, and it’s become a source of inspiration for people all over America and around the world. 

Now Kimbrell has fired back, lecturing that Gehman Kohan should “acquaint herself with the real facts about the levels of heavy metals, priority pollutants and the myriad other toxins in sludge. There is ample evidence that coming into contact with or unknowingly consuming it can cause severe illness and worse.”

My take: the White House should use the episode as a teachable moment on the hazards of applying sewage sludge as a fertilizer—recently documented in a Grist piece by Catharine Price. “There are pathogens,” Price wrote; “there are heavy metals. PCBs, dioxins, DDT, asbestos, polio, parasitic worms, radioactive material—all have been found in sludge.”

As Kimbrell demonstrates, the Clinton and Bush administrations cravenly coddled the sludge industry even as it became clear its product was toxic; half of all U.S. sludge is applied to land as fertilizer.

Obama should convene non-industry-related public health experts to examine the garden soil and decide if it presents a menace. If it does, the soil should be replaced with compost as Kimbrell suggests (perhaps with the Clintons themselves pitiching in shovel-work). If it doesn’t present a threat—and it may well not, since the nasty stuff was applied back in the ‘90s—then the garden should go on as normal. Either way, consumers will have been educated about the vile practice of spreading toxic sludge on farmland—which Obama’s EPA will soon end, I hope. They’ll also have seen seen the precautionary principle—widely scorned during the Clinton and bush years—get some respect.

To read the full article go to Grist