Sam Kass - guest coach for the iVillage Get Moving Now Community Challenge - serves as Assistant Chef and Senior Policy Advisor for Healthy Food Initiatives at the White House.
A Chicago native and college athlete, Sam played baseball for the University of Chicago and graduated with a degree in U.S. History. During college, he took a job cooking at the restaurant 312 Chicago under Chef Dean Zanella, an experience that set him on his current path. While finishing his final college year abroad Sam was trained as a chef by one of Austria’s greatest chefs, Chef Christian Domschitz in Vienna.
In 2009, Sam joined the White House Kitchen staff under Executive Chef Cris Comerford’s leadership as Assistant Chef and, in 2010, became a Senior Policy Advisor for Healthy Food Initiatives. In this role, he works with the First Lady on her Let’s Move! initiative to reverse childhood obesity within a generation. Let’s Move! is an effort to engage every sector of society in ensuring the Nation’s children grow up healthy and live the vibrant lives they deserve.
Sam has had a long interest in sustainable and nutritious ingredients and helped First Lady Michelle Obama create the first major vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden. To date, the garden has yielded upwards of 3,000 pounds of produce that has been used to feed event guests, staff and the First Family at the White House, with further harvests donated to local food shelters.
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