Unlike many political food photo ops, Cooking With Kamala makes the politician seem normal. | Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Most politicians fumble when it comes to food. Could Kamala Harris be the exception?
We’ve made the claim before at this publication that “maybe politicians should just stay away from food.” Too often, they fumble; instead of using food to convey relatability and authenticity, they highlight the gap between us (normal people with correct opinions on how to eat a steak) and them (people who order their dry-aged New York strip well-done and covered in ketchup).
Food has made so many politicians look out of touch, like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who recently caught flack for allegedly staging a picture of himself grilling, or the Texas representative Mayra Flores, who was accused of passing off other people’s pictures of Mexican food as her own. Just yesterday, former president Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, the senator from Ohio, attempted to invoke Diet Mountain Dew in an “anti-woke” joke, only for it to fall flat.
But, it seems, there are exceptions. 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 (Harris’s mother was born in Chennai, the city formerly known as Madras) and their families’ propensities for storing spices in repurposed Taster’s Choice containers. No matter what you think of her politics, Harris comes off as charming and approachable, using the casual context of the kitchen to relay stories about family and identity and how they’ve informed her career.
As Harris recalls in one video, “My mother said to me, Honey, you like to eat good food. You better learn how to cook.” Indeed, Harris appears to be a good cook, and that’s why these videos work: She’s putting on a show, of course, but it’s believable. In one clip, she neatly dices an onion. In another, she confidently cracks an egg with one hand. Hers is obviously a life filled with aides, and yet this is a person who’s clearly done these tasks before, not raising doubt like Schumer with his dubiously cooked burger.
The takeaway is an image of Harris as not only a successful politician but also a working mother — despite attempts by conservatives to smear Harris for not having biological children — and, maybe most appealing of all, a person who legitimately enjoys food and has fun with it. Who’s to argue with that? Cooking With Kamala does what every politician hopes to do through food: It makes Harris seem real, down to earth, and relatively normal. In this political landscape, that’s refreshing.
