The First Lady of the land is often a trendsetter in food, as well as in fashion.

Michelle Obama has taken the lead as the nation’s Nutritionist-in-Chief, planting a vegetable garden behind the White House, supporting a farmer’s market across the street, and ordering a vegetarian menu for her first state dinner (in honor of the Prime Minister of India, who does not eat meat).

Edith Wilson played food politics, too. In 1917, soon after the United States entered World War I, Edith, like Michelle, planted a garden on the White House lawn.

Edith also signed the “Hoover Pledge,” promising to limit food consumption. Herbert Hoover, who later became our country’s 31^st president, was the wartime Food Administrator in Woodrow Wilson’s administration. He advocated food conservation, including meatless and “wheatless” days, so surplus could be sent overseas. The First Lady gave the newspapers her recipe for cooking inexpensive cuts of meat.

Even more picturesque – though controversial – was Edith’s decision to pasture a small flock of sheep on the White House lawn. When the sheep were sheared, the wool was distributed to the various states, two pounds to each one. The wool was sold at auction, raising well over $50,000 (the equivalent of almost three-quarters of a million dollars in 2007).

However, passersby – who previously had had access to the grounds – were prevented from entering because the sheep had to be fenced in. Furthermore, the lawn was littered with their droppings. When the Hardings succeeded the Wilsons in the spring of 1921, the gates were once again thrown open, the sheep were banished, and the American people were happy to see them go.

Last week’s New York Times Magazine featured an essay on the Obamas’ marriage.

“It’s modern,” announced the cover.

Well, yes and no.

I have been writing about three presidential couples: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; Woodrow and Ellen Wilson; Woodrow and Edith Wilson.

The Obamas are not so very different from their White House predecessors of a hundred years ago.

Michelle Obama speaks out on health care reform, mulls over Supreme Court nominees, and consults with her husband on personnel and public opinion.

Ellen Wilson lobbied for urban renewal (the first First Lady to work with Congress on legislation). She advised her husband on his Cabinet choices. And she prompted him to socialize with members of the opposite party, and arranged for him to meet a Democratic leader whose support would prove crucial during the nominating convention.

“The Obamas mix politics and romance in a way that no first couple quite have before,” according to the New York Times.

After Ellen Wilson’d death, Woodrow Wilson met and married Edith Galt, a Washington widow. Their courtship and marriage was widely reported in the press. A few months after the wedding, reporters noted that the Wilsons were “still on their honeymoon.”

Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were, like the Obamas, like “a pair of heads of state,” each with their own constituencies and concerns.

Then, as now, reporters wrote about “First Marriages,” usually in glowing terms. Michelle Obama is different in this regard: “The image of a flawless relationship is ‘the last thing that we want to project,’” she said.

She wants the “ups and downs” in their marriage to be on the record, to “help young couples … realize that good marriages take work.”

I want to put the ups and downs of those three other marriages on the record, too. Eleanor Roosevelt and Ellen Wilson had to reconcile with husbands who were drawn to other women. ER and Edith Wilson had to cope with husbands who were disabled.

Each woman was able to meet these challenges in part because she saw her husband’s work as larger than either of them. Michelle clearly has the same attitude.

That’s neither modern nor traditional. It’s necessary.

Putting these letters between the covers of an actual book was an absorbing project for me and co-editor Robert H. McGinnis.

We transcribed the letters, put them in order, looked up names and places and phrases that were unfamiliar to us, and finally wrote a narrative to connect them all.

The work was not inconsiderable, but nothing about it was especially hard.

However, historians in the future may find such a task all but impossible. They could be stymied by that very first step.

Children are learning to use computers at earlier and earlier ages. It’s not just a joke that your second grader can do more on the computer than you can.

Even if these young people learn to write, it’s very likely they will not learn to read other people’s handwriting. Invitations, thank you notes, love letters – all the documents people used to pore over — increasingly arrive in electronic formats, invariably typed.

Deciphering Isabella’s and, especially, Eleanor’s sometimes difficult handwriting was not particularly hard for me because I had spent fifteen years teaching high school English, reading the handwriting of 100 or so different people every year. I know most of the peculiar ways to write an S or an R. I have practiced making educated guesses based on context.

Judy Nolte Temple, professor of women’s studies and literature at the University of Arizona, and an expert in women’s diaries, speculates that within a generation specialists will be needed to decipher cursive writing, much as scholars translate Latin today.

Historians scrolling through archived emails will not have the sensuous, almost mystical pleasure of handling a document touched by the actual hand of their subject. They will miss the subtle clues to personality that emerge in handwriting. A connection will be lost.

Volume of Friendship is distributed by the University of New Mexico Press