First Ladies, for their part, have always—whether consciously or unconsciously—sent messages about themselves in talking about food. Remember the showdown four years ago when Laura Bush’s Oatmeal-Chocolate Chunk Cookies beat Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Pumpkin Spice Cookies in the Family Circle’s Cookie Cook-Off? No? Ah, perhaps we have different hobbies.

Like Laura Bush, (carrot-ginger soup; Cinco de Mayo chilled avocado soup with Serrano-flavored crabmeat; sweet-potato casserole), Cindy McCain has posted a few family recipes up on her husband’s official website. Cindy and John apparently favor crab scampi and whole-wheat spaghetti, Ahi tuna with Napa cabbage slaw, rosemary chicken breasts and warm spinach salad with bacon. Her recipe for a mixed fruit tart involves gelatin, low-fat granola, graham cracker crumbs, fat-free, low-sugar vanilla yogurt, and fruit.

Potential First Husband Bill Clinton, according to Mimi Sheraton’s article in Slate about Hillary’s favorite foods, likes peach yogurt, strawberry malts and Big Macs. “If President Clinton was on his own for dinner, he invariably cancelled the healthful meal that had been ordered for him and asked Scheib [the White House chef] to dig into his secret stash of prime meat and grill a 24-ounce porterhouse steak with béarnaise sauce and fried onion rings,” writes Sheraton.

Michelle Obama, who does not have any recipes up on her website (neither does Bill Clinton), did, however, recently make some comments about food in a Milwaukee diner where she was rallying support. Lauren Collins, in the New Yorker, passed them on: 

“Having given thoughtful but boilerplate responses most of the morning, Obama suddenly departed from her script. It was the most animated I saw her on the campaign trail. “You know,” she said, “in my household, over the last year we have just shifted to organic for this very reason. I mean, I saw just a moment in my nine-year-old’s life—we have a good pediatrician, who is very focussed on childhood obesity, and there was a period where he was, like, ‘Mmm, she’s tipping the scale.’ So we started looking through our cabinets. . . . You know, you’ve got fast food on Saturday, a couple days a week you don’t get home. The leftovers, good, not the third day! . . . So that whole notion of cooking on Sunday is out. . . . And the notion of trying to think about a lunch every day! . . . So you grab the Lunchables, right? And the fruit-juice-box thing, and we think—we think—that’s juice. And you start reading the labels and you realize there’s high-fructose corn syrup in everything we’re eating. Every jelly, every juice. Everything that’s in a bottle or a package is like poison in a way that most people don’t even know… Now we’re keeping, like, a bowl of fresh fruit in the house.” 


The candidates have all, much to our frustration, carefully and cleverly avoided making statements that reveal their various stances on the American food system and what, if elected, they plan to do about it. But sometimes…actions are clearer guides than words.