xcodebuild drives me nuts, or is it the unix shell ?

I want to pass OTHER_CFLAGS into the build system. xcodebuild "OTHER_CFLAGS=-DFOO=1" works nicely. My problem is that I don't want FOO to be a number, I want it to be a string. It's not a problem of gcc, it can do it

aden:/tmp nat$ cat main.c
main()
{
   printf( "%s\n", FOO);
}
aden:/tmp nat$ cc -w -DFOO='"VfL Bochum"' main.c -o main ; ./main
VfL Bochum

But I can't get xcodebuild to preserve the quoting no matter how I try.