When Is a Tuna Sandwich Not a Tuna Sandwich?

When it's the press asking us to see Kamala Harris as the second coming of Julia Child

Let’s say you are really good at playing guitar. Maybe not Billy Zoom, but damn good; you know your stuff, you’ve been doing it for years if not decades. Then, as if out of nowhere, you learn that Vice President Kamala Harris really shreds. You learn this from no fewer than six major news outlets on the same day, coincidentally, within 48 hours of Harris becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

This might cause you to wonder why the administration had kept this light under a bushel. But you won’t wonder this because, as a journalist and a regular American, you’ve been repulsed by the conveyor belt of garbage coming out of the White House for months (and, it turns out, years), garbage journalists and regular Americans were expected to dutifully deep throat, about how President Biden was not experiencing cognitive decline, and that to suggest otherwise was “unacceptable and does not live in reality.”

@newsweekFox News' Peter Doocy questioned the #WhiteHouse about Joe #Biden's age after the special counsel's report claimed the president has "poor" memory. #news #newsweek

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If I try very hard, I can squeeze out a drop of admiration for the White House staff. They stayed at their posts, and if this meant feeding the public a steady diet of bullshit sandwiches with the intent of keeping Biden in office, no less sentient, then so be it. But I cannot summon that drop for the journalists conscripted to distribute the sandwiches. They had one job, to be the eyes and ears for the public, and in this they failed. Some of the failure can be traced to a susceptibility to a brain fever inspired by Donald Trump, a fever that told some reporters it was not only okay to act on a set of alt-journalistic principles, it was noble, and if this meant squinting hard enough to see a visibly failing 81-year-old man as the most capable person to lead the nation, they would do it. They had to. Animus for Trump was the power-pack they and the administration had counted on riding to 2028 and, as stinky and rickety as it might be, they could let go only at their own peril.

And then on Sunday, in flew a deus ex machina. You can nearly hear the communal heave of relief from those on the political beat. No more proppin’ up ol’ Joe; with Harris, they had a fresh candidate to spit-shine, and I imagine the country’s editors working double-time, trawling for stories that made the vice-president look, if not cuddly, then at least relatable, and didn’t she do some cooking thing a few years ago?

Which is how we wound up with multiple national reporters snorting up what crumbs they could from a short-lived “Cooking With Kamala” series on YouTube, in which - spoiler alert - the only item Harris herself cooks to completion is a tuna sandwich.

Which none of the journalists seem to find ridiculous or worth mentioning. Sample headlines:

New York Times: “When It Comes to Food and Politics, Kamala Harris Is Riffing on the Recipe.”

San Francisco Chronicle: “‘Cooking with Kamala’: Inside Harris’s not so secret obsessions with food.”

Eater: “Let Her Cook: Most politicians fumble when it comes to food. Could Kamala Harris be the exception?”

As someone who cooks and bakes daily - I am currently looking at a banana bread I just pulled out of the oven - I can attest that “Cooking with Kamala” makes only a slight feint at being a cooking show. It’s was a way for then-Senator Harris to express her views - on the Kavanaugh hearings, on racism and Covid testing - while holding a salt shaker, showing what would turn out to be a very small number of voters - the seven videos, last updated on October 28, 2020, had 35,452 views - a softer of herself.

Before I go further, I’ll admit I am disinclined to see softness in Harris, not since the shameful and in my opinion unforgivable war she waged against New Times founders Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, which resulted in, among other things, Larkin committing suicide, a travesty Harris has never publicly shown compassion for, and which did not bear mention in any of yesterday’s stories. Why bring up a man blowing his brains out after his life was utterly ruined by Harris, when you can highlight a four-year-old video of her frying apples?

Why does this series exist at all? For that, we need to go back to 2019, when Harris was running to be the Democratic nominee for president. She was polling in the single-digits that November when she visited Mindy Kaling in the actress’s kitchen, the hook being they would share their Indian heritage in a segment called, “Kamala Harris & Mindy Kaling Cook Masala Dosa.”

“Can I just tell you something? I’ve never made dosas,” says Harris, who for the most part then watches Kaling cook. Yes, Harris chops an onion, a feat with which she is apparently so pleased she repeats it with chef Tom Colicchio in May 2020. It’s not a pretty sight, but Colicchio nevertheless offers praise; it’s the pandemic and they’re just trying to muddle through on split-screen. And Harris? She’s got her eye on the VP spot - it’s been six weeks since Biden re-pledged to pick a woman as a running mate - and won’t watching her make meatballs for her family humanize her? Except, she admits, she hasn’t had time to thaw out the hamburger, and so instead of cooking uses the bulk of her 20 minutes with Colicchio to discuss the prospect of stimulus money for restaurants, a dream that would become the Biden-Harris-backed Restaurant Revitalization Fund, the $28.6-billion program that ran out of money within weeks and birthed a raft of lawsuits from restaurateurs upset that funds were distributed based on equity rather than need.

I didn’t see this brought up in any of yesterday’s stories either.

I am not daft. I understand journalists have different beats and that the public craves seeing their representatives away from lectern. The problem I am having is with writers gobbling up a four-year-old YouTube piffle and regurgitating it into our in-boxes like it means anything. It doesn’t. What I fear, after yesterday’s onslaught, is the press falling into the same position they might have escaped on Sunday, the presumptive alchemy they performed on Biden - he’s fine, he’s great - now to be applied to Harris. I would, for instance, rather hear from a woman on the precipice of assuming the presidency why, back in February, she called special council Robert Hur’s comments about Biden’s poor memory “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate”? I think knowing why Harris did not clock the president’s decline, or chose not to admit she did, as more important to the American people than reading four paeans to Monster Cookies.

If any of yesterday’s stories had been about Harris being a whiz at rebuilding carburetors - or shredding as well Billy Zoom - I might have been impressed and left it at that. But I know my way around a kitchen, and the stories were thin gruel. Call it opportunism, with butter and sugar as the vehicle, one that, with a press this willing, the candidate need not even drive herself.