Why It Matters That Kamala Can Cook

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.