Michelle Obama: Cheese dust is not food

First lady Michelle Obama is offering a word of wisdom to home cooks: Don’t trust the dust.

In an interview in the March edition of Cooking Light Magazine, Obama spoke about how her former personal chef, Sam Kass, banned boxed macaroni and cheese in her home after she and her daughters were told “cheese dust is not food.”


“[Kass] said there’s nothing wrong with mac and cheese, but it’s got to be real food,” she said.

Her daughter, Malia, who was 8 years old at the time, “sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust,” Obama said.

“She was really focused on it and it just didn’t work, so she had to give up,” Obama said. “And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box because cheese dust is not a food, as was the moral of the story.”

Kass has since stepped down from his position at the White House, and Malia, now 16, is beginning to tour colleges in New York, where boxes of mac and cheese are not expected to appear in her care packages.