IRISH ABROAD:Michelle Obama has taken food out of the lifestyle pages and made it front-page news, with a little help from Irish-born chef Cathal Armstrong. LARA MARLOWEmeets him at his four-star restaurant in Virginia
AMERICANS ARE, quite literally, eating themselves to death. A study published this year by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 68 per cent of Americans are overweight or obese. A steady diet of high-fat, sugar-packed, processed food has sent the incidence of diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer and asthma soaring.
This epidemic of obesity-related illness costs $147 billion each year, according to the White House. The Centre for Disease Control estimates that three quarters of all healthcare spending in the US goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which are linked to diet – including one third of all cancers.
Now, US first lady Michelle Obama has become the de facto spokeswoman for the amorphous “food movement” that grew out of 1960s political activism. On the basis that obese children grown into obese adults, Obama has focused her Let’s Move initiative on the nearly one third of American children who are overweight or obese.
Cathal Armstrong is a chef from Killiney, Co Dublin, the owner of Restaurant Eve in Alexandria, Virginia (one of only three four-star restaurants in the Washington area), and a willing foot soldier in Obama’s crusade.
The food movement “has really gained traction in the last year and a half”, says Armstrong. “I would certainly credit the White House with that. And I would give most credit to Michelle Obama. She has taken the issue out of the style and food sections and made it front-page news.”
As Obama said when she launched Let’s Move earlier this year: “The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake.” Statistics cited by the White House are shocking: childhood obesity in the US has tripled in three decades, and a third of all children born in 2000 will suffer from diabetes as a result of poor diet.
The four basic elements of Obama’s plan are: to provide information parents need to make healthy choices; to feed children fresh, natural food at school; to make fruit and vegetables more accessible in low income “food deserts”; and to promote physical activity. (The average American child spends 7.5 hours a day watching television or in front of a computer screen.)
Obama has planted a vegetable garden at the White House with local school children, similar to the one Armstrong keeps behind Restaurant Eve. It’s a symbolic but important gesture, Armstrong says. “The message has massive reach to every corner of the globe. It’s a teaching tool that reminds people where food comes from. An onion that comes out of the ground in the morning has a completely different flavour. So many of us have come to believe that food comes from shelves in a grocery store.
“We’ve created the sickest generation ever seen,” Armstrong says. “This generation is the first that is projected to die younger than their parents, because of their sedentary lifestyle and the predominance of processed food in their diet.”
In an absurd and vicious circle, US taxpayers subsidise the mass production of corn and soy, which are used to manufacture the sugar, fat and preservative-laced food that inflates healthcare costs by making Americans obese.
“We need you not just to tweak around the edges,” Obama told the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association in March. “But to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children.”
Armstrong became involved in Obama’s campaign last October, when Sam Kass, who the Obamas brought from Chicago and who now holds the title of assistant chef and food initiative liaison at the White House, asked 11 prominent Washington chefs to review the school-lunch programme in the DC area.
Armstrong visited Tyler Elementary School on Capitol Hill, where 60 per cent of students receive free school lunches, because their families live on less than $28,000 a year.
“I was pretty horrified,” Armstrong recounts, dressed in his white chef’s smock in the elegant surroundings of Restaurant Eve. “What we are feeding our children is an outrage. We should be marching with picket signs and pitchforks in revolution.”
Armstrong photographed a turkey sandwich in the school fridge that contained 140 ingredients, nearly all of them chemical. On the day of his visit, the caterers served what they called “spare ribs”: “Two ounces of mystery meat with syrupy sauce, a salad that no one touched and a carton of chocolate milk containing mono and di-glycerides.” The government pays $2.68 per meal per child. The less the caterers spend, the more they keep in profit.
Armstrong followed the food chain to the caterer’s facility, which serves 200 schools in Montgomery County. It was basically a packing company that broke down cases of frozen chicken nuggets into micro-wavable plastic trays.
The caterer imported 200 crates of tasteless apples from China, one for each school. A basic tenet of the food movement is that food tastes better, is more nutritious and environmentally friendly when it is produced locally. “I asked why they didn’t buy local, organic apples,” Armstrong says. “They said there weren’t enough reliable suppliers. The solution is for each school to buy its own apples.”
Armstrong says Obama’s campaign is only beginning to raise awareness; it will take a generation to transform America’s eating habits. Last winter, he hatched what he calls his own “hare-brained scheme”, a non-profit catering organisation called Chefs as Parents, to compete with commercial school caterers.
Armstrong enlisted four other chefs and four philanthropists, and asked Tyler Elementary if the group could provide its lunches from September. If the pilot project goes well, he intends to expand it. “If we can save the life of just one child, isn’t it worth it? This year, we’ll try changing the lives of 300 children in one school. Next year we’ll double that.”
Alice Waters, the owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, is the grande dame of California cuisine and originator of “edible schoolyards”. The New York Times food critic told Waters about Armstrong’s idea for Chefs as Parents. She telephoned him and they met to discuss it over dinner. Zeke Emanuel, the brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and special adviser for health care, invited Armstrong to the White House because he also wanted to hear about it.
The White House has since presented a similar, less structured plan, called Chefs Move, in which professional chefs adopt a school and in some way seek to endow it with better nutrition. Armstrong was seated in the front row when 700 chefs attended the White House launch on June 4th. The following week, he and a handful of chefs began lobbying Congress for the Obama administration’s request for $10 billion in 10 years to improve the National School Lunch and Breakfast programme.
Armstrong has worked 70 hours a week for 20 years, but he still finds time for food activism. “I don’t do it for publicity. I have great reviews all over the walls. I do it because I care about it. Having kids changes your perspective.” His four-star restaurant is named after his daughter, Eve, and the “Dublin Chipper” he opened around the corner four years ago is named after his son, Eamonn.
Armstrong met his Filipino-American wife Meshelle 18 years ago, in a restaurant where they both worked. “She’s a marketing genius,” Armstrong says. “I never met anybody who understood people better. She’s done all the interior decoration and public relations, and designed the websites for all three restaurants.” In addition to Eve and Eamonn’s, the Armstrongs own a luxury 1940s-style bar called PX, and manage the Majestic, which is owned by Democratic senator Mark Warner.
It’s been a hard slog for Armstrong, who dropped out of college in Rathmines because he hated the career path he’d chosen in computer programming. When he looks back on it now, intimations of his future were embedded in his childhood.
Armstrong’s father, Gerry, raised his own herbs and vegetables in the family garden in Killiney. “My dad is a great natural cook, and because he’s a travel agent, we ate food nobody else ate then in Ireland – Spanish, Greek, Tunisian.” Armstrong’s mother, Angela, sent him to Paris as an exchange student every summer, and fluent French helped with cooking. He was 11, and a boarder at Coláiste na Rinne in Co Waterford, when his parents took him to Darina Allen’s restaurant at Ballymaloe, Co Cork. “It was like an escape from prison,” he laughs. “I loved it. When I opened my own restaurant, I thought of Ballymaloe.”
Armstrong didn’t know he wanted to be a chef when he started washing dishes at da Vincenzo on Leeson Street aged 18, in 1988. By April 1994, he had worked his way up to the position of sous-chef in the kitchen of Jeffrey Buben, one of the best chefs in Washington, at Vidalia restaurant. “There was a specific moment when I stood up one day in the kitchen and I looked around and watched the others working, and I could see the world around me. It was an epiphany. I smiled to myself: ‘I get it now. I see how it’s done.’ I realised there was a career here.”
Armstrong eventually followed Buben to a new restaurant on Capitol Hill, Bistro Bis, where he was promoted to chef de cuisine. “I cooked for Teddy Kennedy, Dick Gephardt, Newt Gingrich, John Kerry . . . they were all there, all the time.”
He divides politicians into two groups: “One is confident, they like meat and potatoes. The other thinks they like French food.” But most share one characteristic: “They don’t like leisurely dining; they want to eat and get out.”
Armstrong cooked a meal for George W Bush, at the home of Bush family friends in Virginia, in 2003. In 2007, senator Mark Warner asked him to prepare dinner at the Majestic for a fundraiser for a still relatively unknown senator from Illinois. In the middle of his speech, Barack Obama excused himself to call his daughters to say goodnight. Armstrong was impressed by the candidate.
Last winter, Michelle Obama, her daughters, mother and a few aunts and cousins asked Armstrong to prepare a meal for a family birthday, again at the Majestic. In March, he made canapés for the White House St Patrick’s Day reception.
In his previous life at Bistro Bis, Julia Child was the customer who left the greatest impression. “Before Child, Americans thought food was jello moulds and TV dinners,” he says. Child had come to Washington to launch a television programme. Armstrong was told she’d lunch at Bistro Bis on Thursday. In the event, she arrived a day early. “Off the cuff, I had to cook lunch for her. It was terrifying.”
Child liked Armstrong’s cuisine so much that she cancelled a reservation elsewhere to return the following day. “To Cathal, a great chef. From Julia, a home cook,” she wrote in his guest book.
Armstrong doesn’t want to see the film, in which Meryl Streep plays Child. “I have an exceptionally fond memory of her. She reminded me of my grandmother Mattie. I have photographs of me with her. She was 86 years old, and she was in the bar at 11pm, drinking snifters of cognac. I just don’t want that image to change.”
Armstrong left Ireland at the age of 19, to earn cash at Murphy’s pub in Washington. Does he ever miss Ireland? “Of course!” Armstrong exclaims. “I played hurling for Dublin. At school, we spoke only Irish. It was romantic nationalism, not militaristic. I’m thrilled whenever an Irish guy does well – when Graeme McDowell won the US Open. I serve Kerrygold butter and we sell Club Orange, Cadbury’s Irish chocolate and red lemonade at Eamonn’s.” He believes the Irish need to reform their eating habits, too, “but Ireland has an easier problem to solve”.
