Sam Kass, former Obama family personal chef and executive director of first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, is being honored Friday with the prestigious Julia Child Award at the Obama Presidential Center, recognizing his lifelong dedication to fostering equitable food systems.
Kass, a Chicago native who worked at several notable city restaurants and kitchens early in his culinary career, said the award is a true full-circle moment.
“Chicago is the city that formed me, that shaped me, that made me who I am, and I take the city with me everywhere I go,” Kass told the Tribune ahead of Friday’s ceremony. “To receive this award in Chicago at the Obama Presidential Center is quite meaningful. I was very lucky to have been on the journey with them.”
Kass’s relationship with the Obamas predates their White House tenure by several decades. He originally met Michelle Obama through community circles in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Kass officially became the family’s personal chef in 2005 following Barack Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate. But before moving to Washington, D.C., his culinary path in Chicago included positions at 312 and Avec, along with training in Vienna under renowned Austrian chef Christian Domschitz.
The annual honor given by The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts celebrates individuals or teams who make a profound difference in how America cooks, eats and drinks. Previous award recipients include Jacques Pépin, Alice Waters, Rick Bayless and José Andrés.
Child, who died in 2004 at age 91, left behind a legacy of culinary art and education. She was a chef, author and groundbreaking television personality who revolutionized American cooking and presented an accessible version of sophisticated French cuisine to audiences for over four decades.
“From reshaping how a generation of American children eat, to backing the entrepreneurs rebuilding our food systems, to sounding the alarm on the fragility of our food supply, Sam has spent his career asking the same question Julia asked every day: How do we make people’s lives better through food?” Eric W. Spivey, chairman of the Julia Child Foundation, said in a statement.
As executive director of the Let’s Move! campaign and senior policy adviser for nutrition in the Obama White House, Kass helped establish the first major White House vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden. Roosevelt’s garden in 1943 was meant to encourage Americans to grow their own food during World War II, while Obama’s garden on the lower South Lawn in 2009 promoted healthy eating and represented a fight against childhood obesity.
Kass said planting that garden was a defining moment of his career and one that ignited a series of policy shifts around nutrition regulation, including a complete overhaul of federal nutrition standards for school meals for the first time in 15 years and a push for more transparent nutritional labeling on packaged foods.
“It really was a symbol to the country about what we valued and what we thought was important to value for our kids,” he said. “When we got to the White House, food and health was something that mainstream America was not focused on, and I think now you see a lot of focus on it. That is — although many people don’t understand or would certainly not acknowledge — entirely underpinned by the work that we did.”
The award also comes with a $50,000 grant from the Julia Child Foundation that the winner can give to a food-focused nonprofit. Kass decided to divide his grant among three organizations: Urban Growers Collective, a Chicago-based, Black- and women-led nonprofit farm that builds economic opportunity for BIPOC urban growers; God’s Love We Deliver, an organization that delivers free, medically tailored meals and nutritional counseling to individuals managing severe illnesses; and American Farmland Trust, which works to protect America’s farmland and support farmers and ranchers through advocacy, research and hands-on programs.
Though Kass left the White House two years before the Obamas did, he has remained engaged in driving transformation within food systems. He works as a partner at Acre Venture Partners, investing in and advising early-stage companies focused on health, food systems and sustainability, and recently published the book “The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis,” focusing on threats to the global food supply.
Kass said the Trump administration’s “complete attack” on the Environmental Protection Agency and rollback of Obama-era and Biden-era agriculture and environmental regulations threaten to undo years of progress on clean air, climate resilience and sustainable agriculture.
“I think what’s happening right now in Washington is a travesty on every level,” Kass said. “More than just our food, but the people who are making food policy right now are not serious people and the damage that they’re doing to this country with conspiracy theories, bunk science, and an absolute deregulation agenda is literally causing people to die.”
For instance, over the summer, a diarrheal parasite wreaked havoc across the country within a year of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scaling back its FoodNet program, which reduced the number of monitored pathogens from eight to just two. That change made federal reporting for the parasite cyclospora and five other pathogens optional. Health experts nationwide had long warned that the loss of centralized data would make it significantly harder to spot multistate trends or identify contaminated food sources quickly.
“You can destroy something much easier than you can build something,” he said. “It’s going to take many, many years — decades probably — to rebuild what has been destroyed over these past four. But hopefully, we can rebuild things in a way that is better and stronger than they were before.”
Kass, who lives in New York City, stressed that food is at the center of some of the biggest issues around public health and climate change. The crux of his mission centers on how best to change the culture and technology of how we get healthy food, how it’s grown and most importantly, how to make access to it easier.
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“(The award) is truly a humbling honor, one that there’s many people who are deserving of, but I am proud to receive it,” he said. “And the work continues.”