“Kass ended up as Obama’s senior policy adviser on nutrition and the First Family’s chef through a similar fusion of personal intensity and random luck. “
Cut to the White House, where Kass is chopping vegetables for the president’s dinner. Kass ended up as Obama’s senior policy adviser on nutrition and the First Family’s chef through a similar fusion of personal intensity and random luck.
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Back home in the tightly knit community of Hyde Park, he ran into Michelle Obama, whom he’d known around the neighborhood since he was in high school. Malia would soon be in his dad’s fifth-grade class at Lab; Barack was off in Washington, preparing for a presidential bid. Michelle was an overtaxed working mom, worrying about the girls’ getting good nutrition and staying healthy. Kass stepped into her kitchen, “went through the cupboards, and started doing his thing—vegetables and home cooking,” says Blue Hill chef Dan Barber, a friend and mentor to Kass. Sasha and Malia quickly fell in love with the big-brother figure.
“My hunch is that President Obama at that point needed someone like Sam; it helped him to be able to focus on campaigning for the presidency,” adds Barber. “Sam being there as a cook, as a presence in the household—someone Michelle could be buddies with and the kids could adore—created a happy family life while he was away from home. I imagine Obama feels indebted for how Sam filled the void.”
It was around the Obama kitchen table in Chicago, when Barack was still a long shot for the Democratic nomination, that Michelle and Kass hatched the idea of a vegetable garden on the South Lawn—which has since become a highly visible symbol of her policy priorities. Kass’s wider influence comes from his role as executive director of the First Lady’s Let’s Move! initiative, which aims to encourage Americans to exercise and change the way they eat. “If it’s hard work for a family to make choices that are good for them, we’re not going to be successful,” he tells me. “We want better access to fruits and vegetables, lower prices for them, restaurants serving healthier options, marketing healthy products better.”
The model for feeding the First Family used to be room service: anything you want 24/7. George W. Bush would order hot dogs to a meeting. The new model is a nourishing family meal. The president, who makes a practice of sitting down for dinner with his wife and daughters at 6:30, eats Kass’s cooking five nights a week. “We cook very simple food, but it needs to be balanced and healthy and clean, like no hiding a stick of butter to make it taste good,” Kass tells me. Though he won’t go into much detail about his menus, “there’s always a vegetable, usually a green vegetable. We try to do all whole grains—fish a couple of times, chicken, a good steak now and again.”
Kass and the president are known for having something of a father-son relationship. “He is a close enough friend that he’s almost a family member,” says Kass’s friend Richard Wolffe, who has written three books about Obama. Kass and the president get together for basketball, rounds of golf, and games of after-dinner pool in the White House. Kass won’t talk about any of this except to say that, like Obama, he’s “incredibly competitive” and that he’s never bested the president at golf. “The day I beat him, I will go to the press with that,” he says.
It was Wolffe, also an MSNBC commentator, who introduced Kass to Wagner. After spotting Wagner at White House events, Kass pestered his friend to take him to the MSNBC after-party following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Wolffe says he told Kass that he was aiming way over his head. “ ‘Forget it. Never going to happen,’ I kept telling him.”
TADA!
“The model for feeding the First Family used to be room service: anything you want 24/7. George W. Bush would order hot dogs to a meeting. The new model is a nourishing family meal.”
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This tidbit is really irritating. They cannot seem to stop taking swipes at President Bush.