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Do you remember when the question arose whether Michelle Obama would run for the new presidency of the United States?

Well, the former first lady is now hosting a cooking show.

For children.

In conversation with two hand puppets.

On March 16, the ten-part series "Waffles & Mochi", which originates from the Obamas production company "Higher Ground", celebrates its premiere on Netflix.

The couple signed a multi-year deal with the streaming provider back in 2018.

Although one is already used to a lot from the White House (Barack Obama, who performs comedy interludes, a poet who seals the inauguration of the new president), Obama's new project works, even if you look after her disciplinary transgressions like fallen out of time.

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Cook?

Children?

Dolls?

For real?

Really.

Perhaps feminism is simply so far advanced that it has come back to the starting point after a circumnavigation and can affirm with a clear conscience a woman who raises children in a playful way.

Because nothing is more diagnostic of the present than the cooking show, which has been enjoying a booming renaissance for several years.

“The Great British Baking Show”, “Chopped”, “Top Chef” and many others combine competitive logic, a feel-good atmosphere and do-it-yourself instructions.

In addition to a basic need, the preparation and supply of food is a cultural practice that can be used to demonstrate the characteristics of our time: the anti-virtual return to a concrete physicality that is urgently topical, especially in times of pandemics.

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As a compensatory counterbalance to digital data streams and one of the few remaining leisure activities.

Where virological and political processes are becoming less and less apparent, one's own stove offers a refuge for those seeking control, who can follow every step from the first contact of the flour with their own hands to the finished loaf of bread.

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The turn to the body, its materiality and spatiality, is also accompanied by a sharper focus on questions of health and cultural identity, which have long been the arenas of the political par excellence: whether the favorite food is vegan or meaty, the side dish is potatoes or sweet potatoes, and what you call your schnitzel says more about your own personality than political affiliations.

With the cooking spectacle, Obama plans to continue her previous involvement in working with children and in the health sector.

As a supermarket owner, she kidnaps the two dolls Mochi, a pink fluffy ball that embodies the Japanese rice cake of the same name, and Waffel, a light blue figure with waffle ears, from her world of frozen food in order to make the culinary delights of a healthy and fresh diet palatable to them .

“Hungry for an adventure” (so the subline on Netflix), the cosmopolitans harvest potatoes in the Andes, taste spices in Italy and cook miso in Japan.

Nevertheless, the signature of the present speaks a conservative language: instead of technically upgraded avatars in bright colors, we see plush dolls in muted colors, reminiscences of the successful "Muppet Show" of the 70s.

You can still nibble, which raises the question of cannibalism for two sugary cooks.