It was seven years ago this July that Barack Obama brought his presidential campaign to the Van Fossen Farm in Adel, Iowa. There, standing between corn and soybean fields, he held forth on agricultural issues. Obama didn’t have a lot in common with Iowa farmers. In his Chicago neighborhood, he conceded, “the main livestock is squirrels.” But that didn’t stop him from trying to feel the farmers’ pain in the way he knew how. Remarking on falling crop prices, Obama asked, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.”

Arugula-gate, as it inevitably came to be called, was immediately deemed a gaffe—a sign that Obama was an out-of-touch elitist. (The New York Times noted that there wasn’t a Whole Foods in all of Iowa.) And throughout the rest of the campaign, the candidate’s taste in food would often be used as a class-signifying cudgel against him. After watching him not finish a breakfast of waffles and sausages during a stop in Pennsylvania, Maureen Dowd did what Maureen Dowd does and wrote, “[T]his is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites.”

But one person’s gaffe is another person’s dog whistle and, for a certain type of voter, Obama’s arugula reference revealed a kindred spirit. It outed him as a foodie, perhaps even a member of “the food movement.” To these people, food is more than a lifestyle issue or even a cultural one; it’s political. They care about how their food tastes, but also where it comes from and what it is doing to their bodies, their communities, and their planet. They like their veggies sustainably grown and their meat humanely raised.

And to them, Obama was offering much more than just a like-minded grocery list. He pledged that, if elected, he would require that foods including genetically modified ingredients be labeled as such and that a food’s country of origin be labeled as well, “because Americans should know where their food comes from.” He promised increased federal assistance to organic farmers. He even name-dropped Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the food movement’s troubadour, in an interview with Time. “[O]ur entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil,” Obama went on to say in the same interview. “[I]t’s creating monocultures.” In the heady days after the 2008 election, some foodies even referred to Obama as “Farmer in Chief.”

Viewed from one vantage point—like, say, a Whole Foods parking lot—Obama has lived up to that honorific. The president and the first lady have frequented locavore restaurants and visited farmers markets. They’ve planted an organic garden on the South Lawn whose crops, grown with crab meal and ladybugs rather than pesticides, include spinach, kale, and (yes) arugula. Even Sam Kass, the Obamas’ personal chef who moved with them from Chicago to cook in the White House kitchen, now holds the title of White House Senior Policy Advisor for Nutrition Policy and serves as a public (not to mention photogenic) face for the administration’s foodie-friendly initiatives.