The Talk of the Town: Alex Wagner and Sam Kass—Politics' It Couple
I never heard of Sam Kass until now; he's a big part of the Obamas' life.
The Talk of the Town: Alex Wagner and Sam Kass—Politics' It Couple
by Jacob Weisberg
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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. At the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where his father taught, Kass “wanted to do nothing else but be a professional baseball player.” After playing center field at a community college in Kansas City, he returned to the University of Chicago and found his calling on a semester abroad in Vienna, where he apprenticed in a Michelin-starred restaurant. “They couldn’t understand why someone with a good education wanted to do what they did,” he says. “But there’s a great ethic in kitchens. If you want to learn, they’ll teach you.”
We’re sitting in the comfortable, if slightly threadbare, lobby of the Tabard Inn, near his apartment. The restaurant is decisively closed, but Kass, dressed in a beige cashmere sweater, jeans, and suede shoes, effortlessly charms two cups of coffee out of the staff. After college he spent five years cooking and eating his way around the world, including stints making wine in Italy, planting corn with Zapatista farmers in Mexico, and serving as a private chef in New Zealand. “As wonderful as the chefs I worked with were, I realized there was very little thought about the implications of what we were putting on the plate,” he says. The intersection of food and politics became his abiding fascination.
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.”
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http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/the-talk-of-the-town-alex-wagner-and-sam-kass-politics-it-couple/#1
= new reply since forum marked as read
as Chef at the WH and his work with Michelle on nutrition. However I did not know his early background with the family.
(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
First lady Michelle Obama and Chef Sam Kass, left, took part in the groundbreaking of the White House Kitchen Garden on the South Lawn of the White House.
A delightful story. Thanks for sharing, babylonsister.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/washingtons-not-so-secret-garden/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
Bet on it. 
mahalo babylonsistah~