Michelle Obama and the White House's Legacy of Healthy Eating

This month's Cooking Light features a lengthy interview with First Lady Michelle Obama. With the support of the President, FLOTUS has been an outspoken champion of healthy eating since her early days in the office. Jokes aside, the First Family has done a lot to encourage Americans to think about their food and where it comes from since the Let's Move campaign began five years ago.

The Obamas have good taste in restaurants, sure, but Michelle is most proud of the way the White House garden and the Let's Move initiative has spurred the growth of community and home gardens. She tells Cooking Light about her parents' meal plans, and how "maybe once a week we'd do takeout, get pizza."

Later in the interview Mrs. Obama explains that she has convinced her kids to eat only "real food," and how she weaned them off packaged boxed mixes:

So my oldest daughter [Malia], who was probably 8 at the time, [Sam Kass, who was White House chef at the time] took a block of cheese and he said, if you can cut this cheese up into the powder that is the cheese of the boxed macaroni and cheese, then we'll use it. She sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust. I mean, she was really focused on it, and it just didn't work, so she had to give up. And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box, because cheese dust is not food, as was the moral of that story.

Of the famous White House ale, Mrs. Obama confirms, "Yes, it's delicious."

Overall, Michelle Obama sees her legacy in the ongoing success of Let's Move, and doesn't plan to drop the program when she leaves office:

Well, because our goals are generational, clearly we won't be done by the time we leave the White House. So we're going to be thinking hard about ways that I can use my next platform as a way to keep shining a light on the things that we're doing. If there's one word that I could say about what we do in the future, it's "more." It's more of this. It's finding more partners. It's getting more schools to bring salad bars into their schools. It's encouraging more communities to plant gardens. It's including more of big industry to find ways to change or improve their products to meet these new demands. It's getting more athletes to sign up and speak out to encourage kids to eat differently and to train differently. So it's more.