Aug 214 min read

🥾 It's the Campaign Trail MIX (and other cool things)

August 16, 2024

Get 5 Cool Things in your inbox every Friday!

Happy Friday!

Here are some things I found interesting, inspiring, and just plain cool this week…

✈️ 🍔 🗳️ Food is a hot topic in the 2024 Presidential Campaign!

🗞️ This week in particular, I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of things about it, so I wanted to devote the first 3 Cool Things to this topic.

(Make sure to check out all of the links because we’ve got more than 5 cool things this week!)

The thing is, food has a LOOOOOONG history on the campaign trail. 🗳️

From presidential favorite foods to excursions, it has become a part of pop culture. For example, we all know that Trump enjoys 🍔 McDonald’s and Biden LOVES 🍦 ice cream!

But I’ve always been fascinated by why food takes such a center stage on the campaign trail. Not just in policy discussions, but in the ways that the candidates are eating on the campaign trail.

Obviously, there’s the political function. 💙

Eating is on the campaign trail is a way for politicians to build connection with prospective voters. Breaking bread with someone builds community. Whether the target voters are literally there at the table with them 🍽️ or whether they see pictures in the newspaper the next day.

Eating also humanizes them. In fact there’s an adage all about this: Americans decide the next president by figuring out which person they’d most like to have a 🍻 beer with!

I’d also add that there’s something kinda fun about seeing folks on the national stage who have the same favorite foods as you.

There’s a vulnerability in eating.

This is maybe a bit more far fetched, but there’s the animal element as well. The act of eating is vulnerable. Hell, our pets know this: you have to let your guard down to eat. And you have to hope that no one is going to steal your food. 😅

But, I also think there is a really interesting cultural vulnerability here. 😨 These politicians are putting their family traditions, their likes and dislikes, and their personal tastes on display.

There is something so personal here.

By owning who their tastes, politicians are trying to connect. 💗

Yes, for politics and whatnot. But as humans, they are opening themselves up to critique and ridicule. (Just think of the politics of your school lunchroom). And I think that that is incredibly brave.

It’s way easier to stand on a stage and present a logical argument (or in the case of one candidate illogical argument). 💬 It is entirely another to welcome the world into your childhood home as you eat your favorite food.

🍟 “Rachel,” you may say, “what if they are faking it? What if their ‘favorite foods’ are all just for show and are part of the ploy to get more votes?”

It’s possible, of course, but I think it would be hard to fake.

These campaign foods and photo ops 📸 seem to tap into a nugget of truth about the person underneath the politics. The campaign team then just needs maximize these truths.

Of course, that could be my worldview shining through. I believe food is something so central to the human experience, it would be hard for anyone to fake it.

But what do you think?

🌭 Candidates in the 2024 election are big foodies!

Here’s a cool article all about the JOY that the Harris-Walz campaign is finding in food!

🍛 “Kamala Harris is, by all accounts,

an exceptional and enthusiastic home cook,

and has made cooking part of her political brand—surely

an intentional calculation, given the negative connotations

that might arise when the potential first woman president

openly embraces domesticity.”

Oh and if you missed it, here’s Tim Walz’s (verrrry Minnesotan) hotdish recipe. (Also, impeccable move by the Harris-Walz campaign to highlight his cooking abilities while Harris gets critiqued for her love of cooking).

🍎 With the Kamala Harris’s selection of Tim Walz, the campaign trail is suddenly very abuzz on free school meals. As governor, Walz signed a bill that provides Minnesotan students with free breakfast and lunch (and it’s a heartwarming video 🥰). 👇🏽

I worked in the school meal nonprofit space for several years and I strongly believe that universal school meals will do WAY more good than harm. But for more on the partisan divide on this issue, check out this article from The Hill.