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First Lady Michelle Obama and students from Bancroft Elementary School came together Tuesday afternoon to harvest the White House's vegetable garden.

"Today is the culmination of a lot of hard work," Obama said in a speech to the students.

The students not only picked vegetables from the garden, but joined the first lady and White House chefs in the kitchen to prepare a meal from the produce. Obama is seen splitting peas with some students.

Planted back in March, the South Lawn garden provides organic vegetables for the first family, as well as formal dinners. According to Obama, the garden is also a "fun and interesting way" to teach children about nutrition and eating healthy.

"The planting of this garden was one of the first things I wanted to do as first lady at the White House,” she told the students, adding: “You helped make this dream a reality.”

In her comments, Obama discussed the importance of regulating diet in order to eat healthy. She said that nearly one third of all children are obese and that roughly the same percentage will eventually have diabetes. She said "those numbers are unacceptable."

The first lady also said that medical experts predict that the current generation of children will live shorter lives than their parents due to dietary factors. Talking about her own life growing up, Obama said that eating habits have changed "substantially since I was a little girl."

"When I was growing up, fast food was a rarity," she said. "It was a special treat and we had to beg for it. Eating out was a luxury."

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On the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth earlier this month, the Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and his staff at the department’s Washington headquarters broke out its shovels and “broke pavement” on a garden.

Dubbed The People’s Garden, the project seems slated to simply replace a lot of unnecessary pavement with grass. But it is nonetheless a symbolic nod to the eat-local movement, which encourages community gardens in urban areas.

Will the Obamas be following suit? Vilsack adviser Neil Hamilton, the chair and director of the Agricultural Law Center at Drake University Law School in Iowa, says yes.

“I believe that by this summer there will be a garden – another garden, a vegetable garden – on the White House lawn,” Hamilton said at a weekend legal seminar at Yale University.

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