What would it mean to have a foodie as president? Someone who has manned the fries station at McDonald’s in her 20s; someone who proudly describes how she dry brines her Thanksgiving turkey; someone who is such a self-described foodie that she has declared that she aspires to, in addition to becoming president of the United States, write a cookbook. We could find out soon.
Of course, Kamala Harris is hardly the first politician to use food to align themselves with particular communities, values, and traditions. Virtually every campaigner on the trail has photo ops with food, with results ranging from weird (John Kerry ordering Swiss on his cheesesteak in Philly) to weirder (Elizabeth Warren awkwardly holding a corn dog at the Iowa State Fair) to weirdest (Gerald Ford infamously eating a tamale with its husk on because he didn’t know to remove it). Harris, though, is the only candidate who doesn’t just awkwardly eat; she can cook, too, and she’s not afraid to talk about it.
When Harris cooks, it doesn’t feel like a performance. She’s not swanning around in a caftan in a news station’s faux kitchen pretending to stir. She’s detailed. She’s not afraid of a little bourbon and bacon grease. And like any true chef, she’s just the tiniest bit judgmental.
Interestingly, and perhaps counterintuitively, Harris has been relatively quiet about food on the campaign trail: She has let many others, including famous chefs, do the talking for her. She’s been uninterested in dispelling the idea that fast food is “clean” (a Trumpian philosophy) or highlighting the everyday populism of an ice cream cone (Biden’s trick to remind people that he’s young at heart). But just as there’s a difference between talking about food and cooking it, there’s a difference between using food as a political prop and doing the political work to bring policy change that would improve the food system across race and gender lines. No other presidential candidate has so clearly stood as a representation of the ancient associations between women, food, and race. And no other candidate is as poised as Kamala Harris, by virtue both of her identity and her previous political history, to affect change in food.
If she reaches the White House, Harris’s identity as a Black South Asian woman from a middle-class background would mark a pivotal moment for intersectional feminism. The term may sound jargony to some, but it simply explains how multiple social identities influence individuals’ experiences.
A Harris presidency could reshape the narratives surrounding Black women and food. As food-studies scholar Psyche Williams-Forson established in her books Building Houses out of Chicken Legs and Eating While Black, Black women who cook have historically been relegated to the role of mammies, celebrated primarily for their culinary caretaking while their capacities for agency have been overlooked. By embracing food politics in her platform, Harris could challenge these reductive stereotypes. She could reframe the conversation around Black women’s contributions to food culture, emphasizing their roles as leaders and innovators. This shift would acknowledge the profound legacies of activism for food justice and health equity among Black women.
In some ways, we’ve been here before. Barack Obama was a notorious lover of good food and fine dining. But the then candidate muffed it while visiting an Iowa farm in 2007, when, standing between soy and corn fields, he told the farmers gathered there that the price of arugula—at Whole Foods—had recently gotten him down. Since there was not yet a Whole Foods in the state of Iowa, Obama was mocked in various news outlets and consequently got much quieter about food.
When it comes to food policy, Obama’s administration was arguably best known not for his actions but his wife’s. The first lady’s Let’s Move campaign was the driving force behind the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, which set new nutritional standards for school foods for the first time in 30 years and ultimately led to improvements in school nutrition and reductions in obesity for kids living in poverty. So Harris would not technically be the first woman in the White House to make food policy a platform.
However, as the country’s top elected official, Harris would have the power to go further and transform food policy. A Harris administration would likely continue the work laid out in the Biden-Harris 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Health, and Nutrition, the first such conference in 50 years, which outlined a national plan for ending hunger and cutting diet-related diseases like obesity and type 2 diabetes. Notably, the plan included a call to introduce clear front-of-package food labels—a policy that the FDA is set to propose this fall. Real-world data show that these types of labels spur companies to make more nutritious products and consumers to make healthier choices. Despite the recent attention to making America healthy again by some Trump campaign affiliates, these policies would likely be killed in a Trump White House, which has supported looser food industry regulations and a diminished role for federal agencies.
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Harris could also take a page from the playbook of her running mate, Tim Walz, whose home state is among the few to offer universal free meals in all public schools. While the previous Trump administration tried to weaken nutrition standards in schools, under Biden-Harris, the USDA has begun implementing stronger rules, including cutting added sugar, reducing sodium, and supporting culturally inclusive meals, small- and medium-sized US producers, and local foods. A Harris administration could go even further by reducing ultra-processed foods and increasing minimally processed, fresh foods in school meals. Given that kids get about a third of their daily food intake from schools, improved school nutrition has tremendous potential for enhancing health.
The Harris administration could also be the first to integrate environmental sustainability into the US Dietary Guidelines, a step long urged by scientists to support sustainable, healthy food production. In 2019, Harris suggested the guidelines include cutting back on red meat to address climate concerns. During the Biden-Harris administration, the federal agencies responsible for the Dietary Guidelines began a process toward incorporating sustainability into future guidelines. In contrast, Trump limited the scope of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines, and Project 2025 has proposed axing them entirely.
Harris is a “joyful warrior,” as she calls herself, in her approach to food. In many online videos of her in the kitchen—like the one of her making dosas with Mindy Kaling—she embodies the joy of cooking. Food, despite being a source of political conflict, is also about connection and cultural expression. And food politics isn’t just about policy but celebrating the traditions and communal bonds cooking fosters. Joy isn’t a platform issue. And yet a Black female president who loves to cook makes a statement that a woman’s place isn’t limited to the kitchen—nor must she abandon it.