A visit to any presidential center obviously offers a rose-colored view of the person whose name is etched outside. And that’s why the $909 million, 225-foot-tall Obama Presidential Library in Chicago appears as a shrine to some. But it’s also, at times, a depressing time capsule, a somber reminder of America’s past trajectory and current decaying standards.
Those falling benchmarks include a rollback of what was a proud moment for the Obama administration when it comes to food policy. During the Obama administration, first lady Michelle Obama led an initiative focused on childhood obesity called Let’s Move. The program acknowledged the discrepancies low-income communities have when it comes to access to fresh and nutritious food (particularly in Black and Latine households). It saw schools as the common ground that could improve young people's lives by feeding them better.
There’s not a lot inside the Obama Center focused on food policy. However, a small display case is dedicated to the program. MyPlate, which replaced the food pyramid, was a small reminder of how schools have a responsibility to families that extends beyond what they teach in the classroom. It’s also a statement on how the Department of Education has since morphed under the Trump administration, where pandering to white evangelicals has become the priority.
These are strange times when it comes to how we’re feeding ourselves and the government. Groceries are more expensive thanks to a mix of tariffs and the rising cost of energy, made worse by wars in the Middle East. Every other month it seem the FDA is investigating an outbreak. Then there’s the beef tallow and peptides of it all.
The federal government has turned the food world upside down, almost literally, retiring MyPlate and replacing it with an inverted food pyramid. But that’s not all. The Obama administration passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which set standards for nutritious school meals. But in 2018, the Trump administration reversed portions of the Act, loosening standards for school meals, allowing for foods with fewer whole grains, higher levels of sodium, and the serving of flavored milks. Trump Republican policies, which include the Make America Healthy Again agenda and cuts to SNAP, offer a starkly different definition of “healthy.”
As frustrating as seeing what you built disintegrate, Sam Kass, the executive director of Let’s Move and instrumental in developing Obama-era food policies as White House senior policy advisor for nutrition, says outrage isn’t the answer. America needs relentless patience and determination, whether that’s voting in a new administration, prioritizing energy on issues that will make the biggest impact, and working across the aisle in building a broad coalition to help fight entrenched interests. This is just how the game is played, Kass says: “Let's just focus on winning as opposed to being outraged that they're fighting against us.”
Kass, a Chicago native, served as the Obamas’ private chef in 2007 in Chicago, while Barack Obama served as the junior senator for Illinois (a mutual friend recommended Kass to the first lady shortly after he launched a home-cooking service). After the 2008 election, Kass followed the family to DC and served as the White House’s assistant chef and food initiative coordinator. Kass also came up with the idea to plant a kitchen garden at the White House.
Let's just focus on winning as opposed to being outraged that they're fighting against us.
On Friday, October 9, Kass will receive the Julia Child Award, which recognizes his work in helping the public understand foodways and encouraging them to cook. The recipient’s efforts should lead to higher awareness about “eating and drinking and the importance that both can play in improving the quality of life.” Cementing his relationship with the former president, he’ll receive the award at the Obama Center at a $600 per person dinner emceed by Donnie Madia of One Off Hospitality Group.
Kass, a Chicago White Sox fan whose father was a fifth grade teacher, has famously encouraged the notion that young students need healthy diets in schools if they are expected to have success in the classroom. He rallied to reduce sugar and sodium in children’s food, and pushed Walmart to lower produce prices in 2011. That same year, he appeared on an episode of Chopped where school cafeteria chefs used quinoa to prepare meals. During the peak of COVID in 2021, Kass also helped lead the formation of the Independent Restaurant Coalition, which helped secure $29 billion for pandemic relief for restaurants.
The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts has donated more than $3.7 million to various culinary education efforts since the non-profit was founded in 1995. In an interview with Ravenous, Kass says that no one else in America has changed food culture like Child. “[She was] the original advocate for better food,” he says, and that underscores one of the most important lessons Kass learned while working with the Obama administration: Food can make complex issues relatable to the public, and food culture’s influence can be more powerful than government policy.
“[Food is] the mechanism to tell ourselves who we are, what matters, what's happening around us, and the more we can connect people to those issues — but do it in a language that they understand and can emotionally relate to — the more effective we're going to be. I think that's the power of food,” Kass says. For instance, warmer temperatures followed by extreme cold are threatening the existence of peaches in Georgia, where the fruit has been produced for generations and is tied to local identity. If climate change, an issue Kass admits that even the Democrats have blundered, doesn’t seem important in the abstract, maybe the thought of never eating a peach in the Peach State again will make you reconsider.
Leaving The Kitchen Life
While in Chicago, Kass worked with legendary chef Paul Kahan at Blackbird and Avec, influential restaurants in the city’s West Loop neighborhood, which became a popular dining destination after Oprah Winfrey began taping her talk show in the area in 1986. Kass and another young chef, four-time James Beard Award finalist Erling Wu-Bower, were two of the first big hires for Kahan’s One Off Hospitality Group. He spent 2004-2005 working at Avec. Kass introduced Outkast to the kitchen, Wu-Bower recalls. It was a formative time as Avec was both where Kass “crystallized his deep love for food,” while simultaneously realizing he needed to abandon restaurant life to have a bigger impact on society. He launched his private chef business, Inevitable Table, in 2007. While he has respect for his friends who continue to work at restaurants, he “could see that for the kind of life I was hoping to live, both from an impact standpoint and also just like a quality-of-life standpoint,” Kass says. “I wasn't gonna spend my whole life in a kitchen.”
During a recent live recording of The Joiners podcast, Kahan recalled a past conversation with Kass at Chicago’s Green City Market, the city’s largest farmers market. Kass, then a line cook, told Kahan that he was “going to use food to do something really great. I'm going to institute change through food.”
Of course, the conversation came in the context of Kass asking Kahan for a raise, which he received. Kahan didn’t have to wait too long for Kass to make good on his vow to do something really great. He invited Kahan and hundreds of chefs across the country to the White House Lawn in 2010 when Let’s Move launched its Chefs Move To Schools campaign. Those efforts inspired Kahan, along with chefs Jason Hammel and Matthias Merges. They formed Pilot Light in 2010 in Chicago, a charity that uses food as — yes — a mechanism to introduce public school students to different subjects. It’s since expanded to 28 states.
The first lady and Kass shared a vision in using nutrition and flavors as a vehicle to motivate students — to introduce them to new cultures, to ensure they have the basic energy levels to learn. And they provided a powerful example for local chefs to follow, Hammel says. Working within America’s political systems requires diplomacy, as Pilot Light and Kass require as much funding for their missions. Hammel, chef and owner of James Beard Award winner Lula Cafe, maintains there’s common ground and that improving food education is a bipartisan goal.
Kass left DC in 2014 and has since entered the private sector as a partner at Acre Venture Partners, a California-based venture-capital firm that backs early-stage companies working to create a ”healthier, more sustainable food system.” He’s watched U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. tout fast food while the gutting of HHS and the National Institutes of Health results in scientists using evidence-based data being swept away . MAHA continues to “present a model that some view as ideologically driven and not fully grounded in scientific consensus.”
As hope seems in short supply, Kass says spending time inside the Obama Center prior to its public debut in June provided him with powerful reminders that any of the damage done by policy changes can be reversed. Kass says reversing the damage is possible, but not a given. America needs to rebuild its standards.
“That's hard — it's one thing to get some policy done, but it's another thing to rebuild the culture and norms of how we operate,” Kass says. “That's going to take some real time. That's not an easy piece of business. So there's work to do there.”
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