Super Eco

Photo credit: sarah gilbert

At 28, Sam Kass is young but has cooked for the new First Family for years, recently as their personal chef. Now he's moving to Washington, D.C., to work with Bush legacy Cristeta Comerford, the White House executive chef. His role in the kitchen will be to opine on the foods served for the Obamas' meals, and he'll also be one of the many cooks on the payroll preparing food for White House events. But most of all, as local food activists and parents angry at the state of public school food hope, he'll make some school lunch waves.

Critics were vocal about the selection of Tom Vilsack as Secretary of the Interior; he was too much in corn's pocket, they said. Odds are, were he not up for this new job, Kass would have been among those critics. As Kass wrote for a periodical gathering of food thinkers called "Rethinking Soup," the government subsidies of industrial agriculture are harmful to small farmers, and the nutritionally bereft end product of these taxpayer-funded crops is fed to school children. He wrote that "between 80 and 85 percent of schools fail the basic government standards for the percentage of fat in the lunches due to the food it supplies schools." Kass's selection makes a quiet statement that Vilsack may not be the poster child for our President's food values.

Perhaps the Obamas, sensitive to potential controversy, asked Kass to have the blog post with his remarks removed, as the link to it now ends in an error message. But devotees of Alice Waters and Michael Pollan take heart; even Michelle Obama's official spokesperson mentions that the President and First Lady are pleased "[Kass] happens to have a particular interest in healthy food and local food."