Waffles and Mochi are two puppets from the land of frozen food who spend 10 episodes of Waffles + Mochi discovering the wild world of food that lives in the rest of the grocery store: rice, pickles, salt, and the mysterious produce section. They’ve got an origin story and everything (and some wacky visuals: Waffles has frozen waffles for ears!), but trying to translate the imaginative, savory landscape of this children’s show from creators Erika Thormahlen and Jeremy Konner into black-and-white prose makes it sound like weird nonsense. In fact, it’s much more than that. I can’t be certain that Waffles + Mochi will convince picky children to try new foods, but count me among its converts: I’m finicky about raw tomatoes, but the first episode, featuring cheery appearances from Samin Nosrat and José Andrés as tomato educators, has me jonesing for gazpacho.

I suppose I could nickel-and-dime the creators for some of their choices, or to be exact, for perhaps not making enough choices; the show bristles with gimmicks and gags and surreal overlaps between puppet world and real world. Then again, it is a show with puppets made for children that wants to excite them about the foods that weird them out. Some sensory overload is called for. I love that this show highlights the grocery store as a site for wonder; we live in a flawed world, but the sheer spectacle of the American grocery store is a sight to behold and cherish. 

Food television has come up with all sorts of ways to immerse the viewer in food without making them taste it, and it feels as if Waffles + Mochi has a little of each method mixed into the batch. There are travelogues that document the anthropological history behind certain crops or methods, sequences that emphasizes the foods’ tantalizing colors and textures, and personalities that offer up not just a recipe, but a face and a story to go with it. It’s all injected with a zaniness that sends Mochi, a small rice paste ball filled with ice cream, on a journey to Japan to discover his (its? their? her?) “ancestors,” the rice plant, and shows us a potato receiving a style makeover with spud-sized clothing from Queer Eye stylist Tan France. Even if it doesn’t convince your kids to eat gazpacho, Waffles + Mochi is a show that feels wholesomely entertaining.

Waffles + Mochi also has another thing going on: the presence of grocery store owner Mrs. O, who seems to spend most of her time watering the plants on her rooftop garden. Patiently she explains to Waffles and Mochi their duties for the day, and at the end of each episode, she gives them a badge to commend how much they’ve learned. Perhaps she’ll slip under the radar for the youngest viewers, but for everyone else, she’s Michelle Obama, charmingly awkward on-camera as she teaches the puppets about food.

Waffles + Mochi is a lot more nuanced and understanding about food than Obama’s anti-obesity campaign as First Lady, “Let’s Move!” But its glossy kitchen interiors and grocery store with abundant fresh food still point to a specific kind of life, one that makes nutrition about “choice” when so often it is about forces outside one’s control. That being said, I may not have even noticed this subtle elite signaling had Obama’s presence not made me look for it. It is a quirk of this bizarre media landscape that one of the most polarizing families in American politics is now in the business of creating content—which makes everything you might say about this series oddly charged.

Take Mrs. Obama herself, for example. She’s a slightly stiff host! She shines when she’s onscreen with kids, but working with puppets requires some goofiness that is not endemic to dignified Michelle. (Guests Rashida Jones and Zach Galifianakis are rather more comfortable with that territory.) Funnily, the show has positioned Obama as both educator and boss to Waffles and Mochi—meaning that she’s still kind of a First Lady in this context, serenely no-nonsense in the midst of puppet-induced chaos. It’s a political image, designed to be as inoffensive as possible—so on camera in a puppet wonderland, it comes off a little lifeless, a persona without any hooks to grab you.

That’s not a real problem, for the show or in real life. But it reveals the awkwardness of the marriage between politics and content, which has been playing out in the media in various ways—uninvolved and uninformed people yelling at each other about Dr. Seuss and Gina Carano. Waffles + Mochi feels like a carefully designed weapon in the absurd culture “wars”—presenting a certain set of values around fresh, culturally diverse, and sustainable eating in a way that makes criticism of it feel inherently absurd. Are the celebrity chefs involved aligning themselves in some way with the Obamas’ technocratic liberalism? Why is Mrs. O’s assistant a snotty bee wearing a tie? Where is this puppet utopia, and does it have universal healthcare? I can imagine that someone might grumpily turn off Waffles + Mochi because Obama stars in it, but I know 20,000 armchair pundits are going to cite this grumpy person as a reason civilization is crumbling to dust.

My guess is that Waffles + Mochi will be both well-liked and somehow also commonly reviled, something that is possible in a world that imperfectly amplifies the chattering classes. Which is why I wish Obama had just let it all hang loose in her hosting role, and given us some of the edge and humor that she must have in her role as the primary audience for Barack Obama’s dad humor. There’s a very narrow range of emotions Michelle Obama betrays in public, and that’s never been more obvious than when she’s faced with two chaos puppets who end up trashing her grocery store once an episode. Now that she’s pivoted from political wife to executive producer, maybe Michelle Obama can be a little bit more than just perfect.

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