Name: Michelle Obama’s new Netflix show comes to Oakland, San Francisco
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Michelle Obama’s new Netflix show comes to Oakland, San Francisco

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This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateI’m not the target audience for Netflix’s new children’s show “Waffles + Mochi.” It’s fine, I’ve come to accept that not everything is made just for me, even if my late millennial streaming habits have gotten more desperate with the pandemic. (I’m currently watching “The Repair Shop,” where British craftspeople fix family antiques. It is excellent.)So at first I ignored what seemed like a do-gooder piece of children’s television. Fine. Maybe it’s not for me. I like . I like . I also don’t have my own children, so I figured I could stand to not watch yet another show, given that we’re in a second golden age of television, and shows are in abundance.If this sits true with you, dear reader, I’m here to tell you: I was wrong. “Waffles + Mochi,” makes for excellent TV watching.Created by Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company Higher Ground (the main reason I gave it a chance), “Waffles + Mochi,” follows the adventures of two best friends: Waffles, who is half-yeti and half-frozen waffle, and Mochi, a small, pink, round mochi who speaks in “meeps” and purrs. They live in the Land of Frozen Food, with dreams of becoming famous chefs — they watch reruns of Julia Child cooking on their television — but instead, all they can cook is, well, ice. When they escape their frozen home, they begin working at a grocery store run by “Mrs. O” (otherwise known as Michelle Obama to those not living in a frozen cave) where they learn all about fresh foods, like tomatoes, pickles and eggs.As a fan of the , “Waffles + Mochi” not only scratches my itch for travel — they head to Peru, Italy and Japan, to name a few — but it manages to mash all the enjoyable parts of other TV genres: the Muppets, food documentaries (“Salt Fat Acid Heat” and “Ugly Delicious” among others), cooking and more. Even the “edu-tainment” genre gets a noticeable upgrade with this new show. “Veggietales,” this is not.It also doesn’t hurt that they hit my soft spot for and movies, with Oakland and San Francisco making cameos to pump up my interest (but more on that in a bit).What I found so charming and perfect about the show is how it excels at showing children healthy food while not hammering in the (lame) messaging of eating vegetables because “it’s good for you.” Executive producers Erika Thormahlen and Jeremy Konner echoed this sentiment, telling that they fashioned the show to never talk about health food, or whether food is “good” or “bad.” Instead, it’s about the “excitement of food”:"'Waffles + Mochi' is a show about a love of food," said Thormahlen. "It's not a love of healthy food. It's a love letter to food in general, foods from all around the globe. There's this healthy side effect when you start cooking at home, and the goal isn't necessarily to eat more vitamins or work your way up the food pyramid. It's simply to be excited to get in the kitchen and cook with your friends and family."Bay Area adults and children alike will get a kick out of seeing Oakland and San Francisco featured prominently in two episodes of “Waffles + Mochi.” In the “Tomato” episode, chef Samin Nosrat of “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” fame chats with her young friend, Mia, about whether tomatoes are a fruit or a vegetable, while “Herbs &amp; Spices” features chef Preeti Mistry teaching about what herbs and spices actually are. (In the latter episode, Waffles calls Oakland the “” which elicits a chuckle from both me as a viewer, and Mistry. Kids, of course, will most likely gloss over the line.)Although Nosrat and Mistry flex their cooking muscles, it’s not in a step-by-step manner that turns this into a cooking tutorial. If you’re looking to make “tomato candy” — the phrase Nosrat uses to describe the roasted tomatoes used in her pasta dish — there is a for that, but this is less about the mechanics of cooking and more about learning about the ingredients that we all use.Another thrill is seeing Nosrat and Mistry in two Oakland gardens, rather than a set, much like the grocery store set Mrs. O operates in (sorry, Mrs. Obama). Nosrat’s segment was shot in her backyard garden in Oakland, while Mistry chose to film their segment in the home garden of Bija and his parents, a farmer with whom Mistry has worked in the past.The sensory experience of wandering through a garden to try all sorts of homegrown vegetables isn’t lost on the audience, and the artistic flourishes of when Waffles tries Mistry’s pani puri dish give extra oomph to its message of good food. “It’s got crunch,” Waffles explains as they taste the dish, “and then I taste the chickpeas, it’s really creamy and soft. And then you get a pow with the tomato!” as onscreen swirls and colors emphasize the point.“Waffles + Mochi,” operates in the space of guiding viewers through the world of food, but its more subtle message is one of inclusivity. Another Bay Area location featured in “Waffles + Mochi” is Mozzeria, the (unfortunately, ) San Francisco pizzeria where both owners and employees are deaf. It’s a small, but conscious point on behalf of the showrunners to highlight Mozzeria over other local pizza places, but it’s done to great effect and without becoming too cloying or obvious.The show’s inclusivity is a point that seemed to win over Nosrat. She that a friend with a hearing impaired son viewed the episode featuring Mozzeria and told her, "'That's amazing for him to see that on screen. It's just the most incredible thing.'""I think for me, probably the most special thing about this show is something that I almost hope people don't even consciously notice, which is there was an extraordinary amount of work and conscious decision-making that went in, on the part of the people making the show, to put people in front of and behind the camera and stories on screen that represent the broadest possible part of humanity,” Nosrat told . “That in my eyes, in my mind, to my mind, has never happened in food television certainly, and I'm not an expert in kids' television, but it's a really, really extraordinary thing.”That inclusivity was planned from the start, and gives the show its own unique feel. Food (and people!) isn’t othered like it can be in other spaces. Instead, food from many countries is embraced. In the “Salt” episode, which saw a family in Japan making miso, children talk about food in their own native languages (although it is lightly dubbed over in English, I should mention, to reach its littlest, non-subtitle-reading viewers).“Because there's no one story about food, everyone has their own individual experiences that may ladder up to culture for them,” Thormahlen said. “We really wanted it to represent real kids and their real experiences. What's strange for one kid is really familiar and exciting to another.”Another one of those subtle lessons of inclusivity includes the LGBTQIA community. One of the puppet characters, Busy the Bee, isn't identified as gay, but puppeteer Jonathan Kidder — who is "one of children's puppeteering only openly out gay creatives," — sought to create a character that could resonate with a young LGBTQ audience. In another instance, Mistry, who uses they/them pronouns, is referred to as “they” throughout."It was just completely just matter of fact. ... I was watching the episode where Waffles and Mochi get in the Magicart to go meet Preeti and Magicart says, 'We're going to meet Preeti Mistry, they ...' It's like no big deal, they're just using 'they' pronoun[s] for Preeti, just no big deal," Nosrat went on to say. "Those are all really careful choices. I really hope that this sets a new standard for food television, for children's television, for all television, for storytelling."Mistry agreed.“From a representation place, I feel honored to be a part of it,” Mistry told . “It’s great for kids to see different types of people, different races, genders, orientations. All of that inclusivity is a really important thing. I already got a tweet from someone who said that their kid watched it and exclaimed, 'They’re like me,' to their parents. I think that that’s really powerful, in addition to all of the lessons and fun.”

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateI’m not the target audience for Netflix’s new children’s show “Waffles + Mochi.” It’s fine, I’ve come to accept that not everything is made just for me, even if my late millennial streaming habits have gotten more desperate with the pandemic. (I’m currently watching “The Repair Shop,” where British craftspeople fix family antiques. It is excellent.)So at first I ignored what seemed like a do-gooder piece of children’s television. Fine. Maybe it’s not for me. I like . I like . I also don’t have my own children, so I figured I could...

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Michelle Obama’s new Netflix show comes to Oakland, San Francisco

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