Joseph Robinette Biden was sworn in as the forty-sixth president at noon on January 20, 2021, but with half a million Americans dead from the COVID pandemic, and National Guard troops on alert after the violent siege of the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, the inaugural committee radically scaled back the celebration. The inaugural luncheon—a staple since the late nineteenth century that has evolved into a lavish, three-course meal accompanied by music in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall—was canceled. As was the inaugural ball that evening, for the first time since 1949. And in a last flouting of tradition, the Trumps refused to attend the inauguration (joining the small club of presidents—John Adams in 1801, John Quincy Adams in 1829, and Andrew Johnson in 1869—who snubbed their successors). Yet continuity was maintained, and the transfer of power proceeded smoothly.
Biden was sworn in on the west side of the Capitol, as presidents had been for forty years. He gave an inaugural address that welcomed Vice President Kamala Harris as the first mixed-race woman elected to national office. He promised a period of “renewal and resolve” and pledged to be a “president for all Americans.” That night, Tom Hanks hosted a celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, where Bruce Springsteen sang “Land of Hope and Dreams,” followed by a musical tribute by the kind of A-list performers Trump had failed to attract. It was a presidential transition unlike any other, and the prospect of a return to normalcy glittered on the horizon.
First Lady Dr. Jill Biden echoed that reassurance by wearing an ocean-blue dress, with a matching coat and COVID face mask, to the inauguration—an ensemble that signified “trust, confidence, and stability,” explained the designer Alexandra O’Neill. That night, the Bidens ate a quiet family dinner with their grandchildren at the White House. They did not publicize what the chef Cris Comerford prepared, but it was no doubt good, nutritious, simple fare.
One reason Biden was considered a safe choice in perilous times was that people felt they knew him. “Everybody knows Joe,” they said. He was friendly with players across the political spectrum and understood that lawmakers accomplished more when they broke bread together than when they didn’t. A moderate consensus builder by nature, Biden was seventy-eight, eclipsing Trump as the oldest man ever elected commander in chief. He had worked in Washington for forty-four years and knew how the gears spun. Having served as Barack Obama’s vice president, he knew how the White House functioned. And he had a better sense of the District’s geography and mores, its history and social rituals, its languages and meals, than any other president.
If food is a form of language and taste is an expression of identity, then Joe Biden’s middlebrow palate neatly encapsulated his Average Joe persona. “He’s pretty much a basic eater,” his wife said, underscoring the nation’s relief at trading the spectacle of Trump’s fast-food binges and midnight rage-tweets for Biden’s “boring, white-bread” politics.
Like Harry Truman, Biden kept himself trim and fit and dressed in natty suits. Like George W. Bush, he lunched on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Like Clinton and Trump, he squeezed ketchup on his burgers. Like many people, Biden hankered for angel hair pasta with red sauce, only more so: he was contractually guaranteed the dish at campaign stops. And for dessert? Biden was an ice cream fanatic, with a special fondness for chocolate chip.
Almost every president since Thomas Jefferson has enjoyed ice cream (with the notable exception of Bill Clinton, who was allergic to it), and the forty-sixth president’s rallying cry—“My name is Joe Biden, and I love ice cream”—was hailed as “the most Joe Biden quote of all time.”
When Trump accused him of using performance-enhancing drugs for a debate, Biden chuckled and said that “ice cream” was his “performance enhancer.” While campaigning, he dropped in on Dairy Queens across the country, and he made a star of the Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream chain, where his standard order was a double scoop of chocolate chip in a waffle cone. When he won the election, the artisanal ice creamery returned the favor. Just as the Herman Goelitz Candy Company made red, white, and blue jelly beans for Ronald Reagan, Jeni’s created a new flavor for Biden’s inauguration—White House Chocolate Chip, made of chocolate flakes and pieces of chocolate-covered waffle cone in vanilla ice cream—in 2021.
Joe could boil pasta and heat sauce from a jar, but he was not a cook. When he offered to help in the kitchen, Jill shooed him away. “It’s my turf,” she explained. “I like doing it by myself.”
She was an accomplished cook who had been raised eating well in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where Sundays meant separate family dinners with two sets of grandparents who didn’t get along. Her mother’s parents kept an immaculate house and lawn, canned their own peaches, pickles, and applesauce, and served platters of roast beef, mashed potatoes with gravy, green beans, and cake. Her father’s parents, the Italian side, kept a funkier house redolent of basil, oregano, fresh tomatoes, and garlic. They taught her to love homemade pasta, tomato sauce and meatballs, Italian wedding soup, good Italian bread, and braciole (stuffed rolled steak simmered in tomato sauce).
“I love to cook,” Mrs. Biden said. For her, food was a way to communicate, decompress from her job as an English teacher at a community college (she was the first First Lady to hold a paying job outside the White House), and be creative; like Cris Comerford’s mother, Mrs. Biden liked to cook by instinct rather than from recipes.
Previously divorced, Jill married Joe Biden in 1977. While other pols were slapping backs over cocktails in Washington, Joe faithfully returned home to Wilmington, Delaware, by Amtrak train in time for dinner with his family. Food was “an important way of establishing my relationship with” his sons, Beau and Hunter, who had lost their mother and sister in a car crash, Jill said. She raised the boys as her own and had a daughter, Ashley, with Biden.
“Because they were such great eaters and so appreciative, I baked and cooked all the time,” Jill recalled. “It’s always fun to turn on a little music, have a glass of wine and cook.”
She liked healthy meals with plenty of fruits and vegetables and was known for her fried egg sandwiches and chicken Parmesan. Though Joe was a teetotaler (his family had a history of alcoholism), Jill indulged in the occasional martini and declared, “I love French fries!” Her mantra was “food is security and love.”
Like Obama, President Biden came under pressure to “fix the American food system” even before he took office. Though Alice Waters sat this dance out—fed up with national politics, she focused on local issues, such as her Edible Schoolyard Project, “where the doors are open”—Biden faced a blizzard of demands: that he prioritize climate change, strengthen GMO labeling, support Black farmers, prioritize healthy school meals, improve rules for organic livestock, and support agricultural e-commerce, among other things.
Issues like these had been shunted aside in the previous four years, and before he could launch any major new food initiatives, Biden had to right the ship of state and set it on a new course. There were many examples, but to pick one, consider the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which had gone from being on Forbes’s list of best employers to a husk of its former self under the Trump administration. Though it had a $153 billion annual budget and twenty-nine agencies, many of the department’s employees had been fired or quit, billions of dollars had been cut from programs, and morale was decimated.
Trump’s agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, considered Big Ag his “customers,” and said, “Our mission is to provide our…producers with what they need, when they need it.” He was hardly a tough regulator. As American food growers were whiplashed by trade wars with China and Europe, Perdue provided them with $46 billion in aid, far more than any previous farm subsidy. At the same time, he tried to limit SNAP food stamp benefits and pooh-poohed worries about climate change.
Most notoriously, Perdue relocated the department’s biggest scientific research agencies—the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Economic Research Service—from Washington to Kansas City, Missouri, in 2019. The move was ostensibly “to bring research closer to agriculture” and save $300 million. But critics deemed the move “ridiculous” and politically motivated. Indeed, 64 percent of USDA’s top researchers left their jobs, a brain drain that set urgent COVID research back. And rather than save money, the move to Kansas City cost the government between $83 million and $182 million, depending on the metrics. (Trump also relocated the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 247.3 million acres of federal lands, from Washington to Colorado, with similar results.) The Union of Concerned Scientists called the relocation “a blatant attack on science,” and a former employee lamented, “It’s had its intended effect. People have left, morale is low. The agency will take a long time to recover from the damage.”
Faced with multiple food crises, Biden turned to Tom Vilsack, Obama’s USDA secretary, to lead the department once again. The number of hungry Americans had risen from thirty-four million in 2019 to more than fifty million in 2020, and Biden gambled that even if his pick remained controversial, the public hankered for an experienced hand guiding the nation’s food supply. Vilsack rushed to vaccinate his employees and turn the department from a climate change denier into a leading investigator and prioritized research on food and health issues. With strong Republican resistance and the looming midterm elections, it was a race against time.
Assisting Vilsack and Biden was an experienced politician and cook: Vice President Kamala Harris. The first woman, and Black and Southeast Asian person, to hold such a powerful office, she represented a paradigm shift. If Biden was a reliable white Democrat of the old school, then Harris embodied the young, dynamic, multicultural new school—the face of future America. Combined, the two represented a Democratic “dream ticket,” politicos said.
Born in Oakland, California, in 1964, Harris was the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher born in Madras (now Chennai), India, and Donald J. Harris, a Stanford economics professor born in Jamaica. Following her high school years in French-speaking Montreal, Harris spent her formative years in foodie cities—Washington, D.C., at Howard University, and San Francisco, at the University of California Law School.
After school she served as the San Francisco district attorney (2004–11) and the California attorney general (2011–17), before returning to Washington as a U.S. senator from California (2017–21). She was a rising Democratic star who voted to impeach Donald Trump for obstruction of justice and abuse of power.
In 2014, Harris married the white Jewish entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff. Much like Jill Biden, Harris used family dinners as a way to bond with her stepchildren, Ella and Cole Emhoff. While “the Doug” cooked on Wednesdays and Saturdays, Harris reserved Sundays for herself. “It’s a tradition I really care about, just having a really good home-cooked meal on a Sunday,” she said.
Harris was raised in a household where the transmutation of ingredients into a delicious meal was considered a nearly magical event. As a child, she would hear her mother banging pots and smell her sizzling Indian spices, and “kind of like someone in a trance, I would walk into the kitchen to see all this incredible stuff happening,” she said. Noticing her daughter’s wide eyes, Gopalan said, “Kamala, you clearly like to eat good food. You better learn how to cook.” And so she did, taught by her mother and a neighbor.
As a prosecutor Harris gained a reputation for aggressive questioning, but as she campaigned in the 2020 Democratic primary—under the slogan “Kamala Harris, for the People”—she took pains to humanize herself. Food was an important part of her pitch. One of the “little specialties” Harris mastered in the third grade was scrambled eggs topped with cheese cut into a smiley face, she said. It was the kind of story she told on the campaign trail, hinting that beneath her sometimes stern exterior, Harris had a more relatable, impish side.
Wearing jeans, Converse sneakers, and a Howard University sweatshirt, she baked cookies (shades of Hillary Clinton) with a seventeen-year-old fan and cooked dinner with a family in Iowa. Indeed, Harris used the kitchen to blend the personal and professional spheres of her life in a way that was unprecedented in presidential campaigning.
Like Trump, she posted images of herself with food and her lively videos that often went viral, though her diet was far more eclectic than his. She cooked masala dosas with the comedienne Mindy Kaling, discussed turkey brining with the State Department’s Nick Schmit, laughed with the chef Tom Colicchio about Emhoff’s “onion-cutting goggles,” and tutored the vegan New Jersey senator, Cory Booker, on carrot-chopping knife skills. Most celebrated was the video in which Harris schooled the Democratic senator Mark Warner of Virginia on proper tuna-melt technique. He didn’t drain his can of tuna, used heaps of mayo, and microwaved his sandwich, she said, deeming his effort “a hot mess.” (Though the point of his video was to encourage people to wash their hands during the pandemic.) Harris demonstrated how to do it right: drain the tuna, dress it with a mix of Dijon mustard, parsley, and lemon juice, add crisp lettuce, top with two slices of cheddar cheese, coat the outside of the bread with more mayonnaise, and toast the sandwich in a skillet until golden brown.
These small, bright moments gave Harris an air of “authenticity,” which consultants believe is the coin of the realm in modern politics. It worked. She was seen as not just a consumer of food but a knowledgeable cook who knew her way around a grocery store or farmers market. She was not considered an elitist but a savvy policy wonk who pushed supermarket chains to give workers hazard pay during COVID.
It helped that the public tenor had changed since Obama was castigated for “Arugula-gate”: when Harris was criticized for wearing a “creased apron”—which supposedly indicated her cooking was a staged photo op—the attack was laughed away. While campaigning, she employed the age-old tactic of eating in restaurants around the country, talking to their chefs, and listening to their customers’ concerns. When possible, she ate handmade meals and remembered their creators.
Recalling the “magic” cilantro rice she had at a small restaurant in Reno, Nevada, Harris said she worried about the cook during the pandemic. “It weighs on me, as it should on all of us….What’s happening [to] our small businesses, and in particular our restaurants? Those restaurants in your neighborhood where they know what you like to eat, or they might just sit down with you for a minute to talk? [They] are hurting like you can’t believe.”
This was smart politics, of course, but Harris’s consistent focus on food and cooks appeared genuine rather than purely opportunistic. In 2019, before COVID hit, she said, “People aren’t just suffering, they’re hungry,” and noted that up to 40 percent of college students were food insecure—a number that reached 70 percent at some historically Black colleges and universities. Then there were older people without access to nutritious food, or parents who couldn’t feed their children, to worry about. “It’s breaking my heart,” Harris said. “This issue is not getting enough attention. People are starving in America right now.” In response, she launched legislation to support cafés, bodegas, and other small businesses—the places that define neighborhoods—with grants up to $250,000. And she worked with José Andrés, the celebrity chef and founder of World Central Kitchen, to make federal dollars available to cover state-restaurant partnerships in times of crisis.
As the presidential race slogged through 2020, Harris would take a break in her home kitchen refuge. While stuck on conference calls, she’d make a pot of beans (starting with dried, not canned, beans) or cook double batches of Indian or Jamaican dishes to stock the fridge. As any seasoned cook does, Harris considered craft and thrift equally important. Her roast chicken, for instance, took two days to prepare and resulted in three meals. After inserting garlic, lemon zest, and herbs under the skin, she salted and peppered the bird and let it dry out in the fridge for a day; then she rubbed it with butter and olive oil, slow roasted it at 325 degrees for a couple of hours, and turned the drippings into gravy. The result was dinner, while leftovers became chicken salad, and the carcass was boiled with carrots and celery to make a rich soup stock.
Cooking, Harris said, is “a gift that you can give people. That’s how I came to it.”
The stark contrast of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to Donald Trump and Mike Pence was illustrated by their widely different approaches to entertaining. Democrats and many Republicans had been mystified when Trump kept to himself and a small cadre of loyalists at the White House, the Trump International Hotel, or the golf course. Pence was a cipher who refused to eat dinner alone with a woman other than his wife, and emulated Trump by posing with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Though Joe Biden was not an inveterate entertainer in the way the Reagans or Clintons were, he considered socializing part of the job and partook of Washington’s traditions. As second couple, he and Jill had hosted an annual “beach party” for journalists at the vice president’s house at the Naval Observatory, featuring Super Soaker fights, bouncy castles, and plenty of food and drink.
Biden’s inauguration in 2021 brought the sense that a fever had broken in Washington. As the Trump supernova seemed to sputter and COVID vaccines became available, the Establishment dared hope the new administration would “make schmoozing great again,” as a Washington Post headline wistfully put it. The District’s “buffalo”—the bipartisan elite—couldn’t wait to return to the Kennedy Center, charity events, museum fundraisers, embassy galas, and the White House—perhaps even at state dinners.
As the nation struggled to recover from COVID anxiety, financial setbacks, and hunger pangs, people dared hope that Biden and Harris would turn the fraught debate over food production and supply into a meaningful discussion and change. When talking about the pasta sauce Jill simmered, the ice cream Joe ordered, or the jerk chicken that Kamala made for Doug, the administration linked their food choices to hard-hit regions of the country, which in turn spotlighted the people who made and served food (including immigrants), and furthered discussions about health, sustainability, and the existential threat of climate change.
The hope was that this approach would lead to discussions and even arguments, which was not necessarily a bad thing when it came to the staff of life. Though great divisions over race, religion, guns, governance, and the like continued to split the nation, the dream inside the Beltway was that people of all stripes would once again be able to “disagree agreeably,” as the social secretaries Lea Berman and Jeremy Bernard phrase it.
Or, as Jill Biden’s Italian grandfather, Dominic Jacobs (né Giacoppa), liked to say, “Finire a tarallucci e vino”—or “to finish with tarallucci and wine” (tarallucci are little cookies). In other words, the First Lady said, “No matter our differences or our arguments during dinner, we finish as a family. All’s well that ends well—or at least, I think you’re dead wrong, but let’s put it aside so we can enjoy the pleasures of life together.”