Tim Walz took some heat Thursday after telling Kamala Harris he eats “white guy” food without flavoring or spice.
At the beginning of a conversation published on YouTube, the Minnesota governor joked with the vice president about his predilection for “white guy tacos,” which he characterized as “pretty much ground beef and cheese.”
“That’s OK, do you put any flavor in it?” Harris asks.
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“Uh, no,” Walz, her running mate in the presidential election, replies. “Here’s the deal—no, they said to be careful and let her know this, that black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota, you know?”
Walz was obviously pleased with the bit, taking the trouble to share a clip of the exchange on his X account. “Listen, I’m just not much of a spice guy,” he wrote.
Others were less impressed. Several X users were quick to point one of Walz’s previous posts in which he showed off an award he’d won in the Minnesota Congressional Delegation 2016 Hotdish Off. “I make a pretty mean hotdish,” Walz wrote in the 2022 tweet, sharing a link to the recipe for his “award-winning recipe for Turkey Taco Tot Hotdish.”
The recipe calls for a can of “mild green chilies,” a bottle of “taco sauce (medium),” and spices including chili powder and paprika. For some MAGA fans, it was a smoking gun:
Other conservatives were offended simply by what Walz had characterized as “white guy” food.
“This isn’t cute,” Fox News columnist David Marcus wrote. “Walz is being used as a clown to mock white people. If Walz doesn’t like spicy food that’s fine, but it has nothing to do with being a white guy.”
Another X user accused Walz of falsely “playing to every stereotype of ‘whiteness’ in a cloying way to ingratiate himself with the diversity thang,” while radio host Larry O’Connor went as far as to describe Walz’s comments as “like a minstrel show lampooning white, Midwest stereotypes.”
Ashley St. Clair of the Babylon Bee wrote: “oh haha i get it, it’s funny because white people can’t season food and don’t like spicy things good thing kamala will bring some *spice* to the white folk and the white house ha ha.”
In the full video of their conversation, Harris also brought up Walz not answering the phone when she called to tell him she’d chosen him as her running mate.
“I called you, Tim—you didn’t answer, Tim,” Harris says. “What happened?”
“The most important call of my life,” Walz acknowledged. “It popped up and we didn’t recognize the caller ID, and it went to voicemail.”
The video then showed Harris laughing as she realized she’d have to leave a message, saying: “Hey, Tim, it’s Kamala—I really want to talk to you!”
