Obama Family Cook Named Policy Adviser

In a comical move even for a czar-happy president who has rewarded dozens of cronies with distinguished titles, the White House has named the Obama’s personal Chicago cook as “Senior Policy Adviser for Healthy Food Initiatives.”

It’s no joke, even though is sounds like a bad one. The Chicago chef’s rapid ascension, reported this week by a conservative Washington D.C. newspaper, has been kept under the radar for the last month. Sam Kass went from being a 20-something, Windy City gourmet cook—privately paid by the Obama’s to feed them—to big-time White House adviser in a matter of months.

In between, Michelle Obama made Kass a “Food Initiative Coordinator” for her new healthy nutrition program which is supposed to eliminate childhood obesity within a generation, especially in the nation’s inner cities. The First Lady claims that childhood obesity is a threat to national security and a crisis equivalent to AIDS and youth violence.

Because it’s such a dire situation, she has convinced her husband’s administration to spend $400 million a year to bring “healthy foods” to low-income neighborhoods and $10 billion to revise a decades-old federal measure that already feeds tens of millions of poor children at school for free.

This culinary revolution no doubt requires a trusted senior policy adviser—like Kass—who is an expert in healthy cuisine. The First Lady refers to her cook as a “partner in crime” and says it’s “just pretty powerful” to see what started out as talk in her South Side Chicago kitchen turn into a major initiative that “hopefully will change the way we think as a country.”

Makes you wonder what Kass, who also doubles as a White House chef, has been putting in the Obama’s food all these years. Incidentally, the “most transparent administration” in history doesn’t want Americans to know how much the famous family cook earns. Although he’s an important administration wonk, Kass’s salary is excluded in the Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff because he’s considered “residence staff” and those salaries don’t need to be disclosed.