What qualities make for a good cook? Which make for a good president? In a lot of cases, they overlap.
Credit: Reuters, X/@PadmaLakshmi
By Padma Lakshmi
The candidate is a proud cook, and cooking is a way to connect.
I see what everyone else sees on Kamala Harris’s résumé: a history of public service that qualifies her for the presidency. But I would argue that the qualities she shows as a cook might say even more about her success as a leader.
What qualities make for a good cook? Which make for a good president? In a lot of cases, they overlap. Cooking well requires organization, attention to detail, patience — and the impulse to bring people together. In a divided country, these qualities can help Ms. Harris be a good, even a great, president.
Talking about food is a way to relate to more Americans, even those uninterested in her politics. We’ve all been eating since we were babies, and we’re experts on our own tastes. Talking about food paves the way to harder conversations. Food removes barriers and unites us.
Ms. Harris evinces clear delight in cooking and in talking about almost any type of food — a passion that is core to who she is, like basketball for Barack Obama or golf for Donald Trump.
She is omnivorous and a versatile cook. We got a glimpse of who Ms. Harris is in the kitchen in the YouTube series Cooking With Kamala, filmed during the 2020 campaign. In the videos and elsewhere, she talks about turkey stock and tacos, Moroccan tagines and gumbo, frying bacon with apples (she says that “bacon is a spice, as far as I’m concerned”).
As a host and a judge on Top Chef, I could see contestants’ characteristics and potential by watching them in the kitchen. One chef, for instance, always splattered food and left jars knocked over — he was frazzled and out of his depth, displaying a lack of leadership potential.
If people are handling food carefully enough to elevate it, I know they’re thoughtful. If they panic under pressure when the clock is ticking, I know what they’re like in a crisis.
On my show Taste the Nation, I saw that many cooks are nurturers, using food to give care, comfort and create community. On a small island off South Carolina, I met a chef named Bill Green, whose restaurant, Gullah Grub, functions as a community center. He dispenses food and teaches children to cook using the produce he and his partner grow on their farm by the marsh.
Indeed, we cooks rarely cook just for ourselves. When I recently spoke with the great chef and educator Jacques Pepin, he told me that “you have to give of yourself to be a good cook.”
I want a president who is intent on nurturing and nourishing all Americans.
I recently spoke with Meena Harris, the vice president’s niece. The two spent a lot of time together in the kitchen while Meena was growing up.
Kamala helped teach Meena to cook as her “sous chef.” But she conveyed bigger lessons in the kitchen by her example. She taught Meena to be patient, and to pay attention to how ingredients work, so she could confidently innovate. Ms. Harris was detail-oriented (another sign of a good cook and leader). She taught her niece to problem-solve on the fly to bring balance to a dish, and the importance of keeping close with the people she loves.
Similarly, in a Cooking With Kamala video, Ms. Harris gives a cooking lesson to Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, who had microwaved a tuna melt and hadn’t even drained the liquid from the tuna in the can. “I love you to pieces and we got to work this whole tuna salad thing out,” she tells him, laughing.
In another cooking video, the actress Mindy Kaling says she’s worried that Ms. Harris may not like her Indian food. Ms. Harris reassures her. “Can I just tell you something?” Ms. Harris asks, lowering her voice confidentially. “I’ve never made dosas.”
Some of the videos have a policy dimension, too. Ms. Harris has marched with McDonald’s workers seeking better pay and supported legislation expanding SNAP benefits as well as improving farmworkers’ wages. As a presidential candidate, she has said she will back a ban on price gouging on groceries.
In various ways, Ms. Harris’s candidacy is reinventing the rules, as she simply bypasses old expectations about race, gender and political campaigning. Food is yet another example of how Ms. Harris sidesteps generations of tension.
Cooking was for a long time a trap for female political figures. Many felt they had to disavow the household sphere altogether to be taken seriously — and then produce baked goods to counterbalance perceptions they were too ambitious.
In 1992, Hillary Clinton defended her professional life as a lawyer, saying, “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies.” When her comments galled women who did stay home, she repented by submitting a cookie recipe to a bake-off with Barbara Bush hosted by the magazine Family Circle. That first lady bake-off continued in every presidential election until Family Circle folded in 2019.
Today, in talking about cooking, Ms. Harris has found a way to reconcile what a previous generation may have seen as a contradiction and simply present it as who she is.
But the way she talks about food, and access to food, is also a way of opening doors and building consensus about who Americans are. While campaigning, Ms. Harris has sometimes cooked with regular people, sharing personal recipes. So often I have found that cooking helps break the ice. Once, filming an episode of Taste the Nation, an elder woman was reluctant to speak of the loss of her children while escaping the Khmer Rouge, but after 90 minutes of making num banh chok, a Cambodian fish noodle soup, we not only shared the dish but also connected by revealing deeply personal stories.
Curiosity and care about the foods and experiences of others is at the heart of “Taste the Nation.” These are also, I think, at the heart of Ms. Harris’s diverse culinary repertoire — which speaks to her personal history as a child of immigrants growing up in a multiethnic California neighborhood and, later, her travels across the country as vice president.
Food relays the complexity of people’s stories. It tells the places they’ve lived, the people they’ve shared meals with. The foods we talk about and share define how we see ourselves as a country.
In cooking, Ms. Harris displays the very qualities this country sorely needs — her care, and her ability to tell a new kind of story about what it means to be American.
There is something very American, and expansive, about including many food traditions in one kitchen. Ms. Harris’s next cooking adventure, and all the traditions it will bring together, should be in the White House.