Michelle Obama spent much of her time in the White House working on a healthy-eating task force to combat childhood obesity. She also was the executive producer of Netflix's Waffles + Mochi, a children's cooking show. But that doesn't mean she's always been a good eater.
On the first episode of Michele Norris' Audible podcast Your Mama's Kitchen, which is co-produced by the Obama's media company Higher Ground, the Former First Lady opened up about her childhood aversion to breakfast.
"I was kind of a picky eater. I didn't like any breakfast-anything. And my brother, who ate breakfast all the time, thought I was crazy," she told Norris. "We had big breakfasts because my brother, he was a growing athlete. So it was everything—cereal followed by scrambled or fried eggs, followed by lots of toast and bacon and link sausage. So breakfast was big."
According to a "really stubborn" Obama, her mother tried everything. "Everybody else in the whole household, on the whole planet, loved breakfast food except for [me] ... I despised breakfast."
Instead of conforming to something simple like toast, she opted for peanut butter and jelly "every morning" until college. "That was all I really liked," she admitted.
Ultimately, Obama "kind of OD'ed on it" and started incorporating eggs and other breakfast foods into her diet. "I'm big into all of it now," she said. "Give me eggs Benedict. Any eggs, any way."
When it comes to culinary memories of her childhood, it isn't the peanut butter and jelly she holds nearest and dearest to her heart, but rather, recipes from her time on the South Side of Chicago.
"There are a couple of things that taste like home," she said, naming red rice and her mother's homemade cakes. "She tried to [make the cakes] in the White House, but she felt that the ovens weren’t right. And there’s something different about a homemade cake…"
