Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Kamala Harris is a foodie? Who knew?
Somehow, I had missed this, but the New York Times’ Kim Severson to the rescue: When It Comes to Food and Politics, Kamala Harris Is Riffing on the Recipe: From giving turkey-roasting advice to making dosa with Mindy Kaling, Ms. Harris has leaned into cooking in a way no other candidate has.
Ms. Harris has turned cooking videos into campaign assets and has taken a particular interest in food issues like hunger and farm labor. But she also turns to cooking as a meditation…“Everything else can be crazy, I can be on six planes in one week, and what makes me feel normal is making Sunday-night family dinner,” she told The Cut in 2018, when she was a senator. “If I’m cooking, I feel like I’m in control of my life”…In a 90-second video from 2019 that recently resurfaced on social media, she tells a reporter how to prep a Thanksgiving turkey as she’s getting a sound check before a spot on MSNBC.
She had her own cooking show!
She’s cooked with José Andres on Instagram Live.
She collects cookbooks. KosherSoul’s Michael W. Twitty) was thrilled to find his book displayed in her kitchen.
Esquire did an analysis: An Entirely Serious Investigation into Kamala Harris’s Cookbooks,
Look, let’s levelset a little bit. That we’re even presented with a stack of cookbooks to decode from a presidential candidate feels like a win. It’s good news. Like, finally, we have a real human being—a real cooking human being—who might be the President.
The press is onto this.
The L.A. Times says: Kamala Harris is a cook — and she knows her L.A. restaurants. Will it help her win?
Eater says Let Her Cook.
Social media users, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle, have resurfaced Cooking With Kamala, a short-lived cooking series that was published to Vice President and now-prospective Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s YouTube channel in 2019. In one episode, Harris visits Iowa, where she cooks her mother’s recipe for bacon-fried apples. In another, she bakes candy-filled “monster cookies.”
In the most popular episode, with 6 million views as of this writing, Harris makes masala dosa with the actress Mindy Kaling and the two bond over their shared South Indian heritage.
What fun! A breath of fresh air!
Just think about what White House state dinners could be like.
