Michelle Obama, Family Meal Champion, on the Cover of the New 'Cooking Light'

In its nearly 30-year history, Cooking Light has never featured a person on its cover—until now. First Lady Michelle Obama, it seems, was an excellent reason to break with tradition.

Mrs. Obama graces the cover of Cooking Light's upcoming March issue, in which she dishes about the state of her pivotal Let’s Move! campaign—it turns five this year—and the nitty-gritty of her own family’s eating habits.

One anecdote, which involves former executive director of Let’s Move! and White House chef Sam Kass, stands out in particular. First Daughers Sasha and Malia both loved “macaroni and cheese in a box,” but Kass was adamant that if they wanted the cheesy dish, it had to be made with “real food.” To prove his point, he struck a deal with Malia, who was 8 at the time.

"[Kass] took a block of cheese and he said, ‘If you can cut this cheese up into the powder that is the cheese of the boxed macaroni and cheese, then we’ll use it,’" Mrs. Obama recalled. "She sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust. I mean, she was really focused on it, and it just didn’t work, so she had to give up. And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box, because cheese dust is not food, as was the moral of that story."

First Lady Michelle Obama helps school children harvest fruits and vegetables from the White House Kitchen Garden last year. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty

Cooking Light editor Hunter Lewis, who conducted the interview with Mrs. Obama, told us that he was struck by how personal the campaign is to her.

"It was clear from the get-go that her platform is very real and she is 100-percent behind it," Lewis said, adding that Mrs. Obama was refreshingly candid in describing her own struggle to put healthy food on her family’s table. As the article details, before her White House days, when she was first starting to raise a family, even the First Lady once fed her kids too much processed food and relied too heavily on takeout. But as Lewis said, "I was [really] taken by her notion that it’s not about guilting people into cooking family dinner. It’s about empowering people and giving them the tools and solutions to get healthy food on the table, fast."

The print magazine interview is accompanied by an online feature inspired by Let’s Move!, aptly titled “Let’s Cook!" It includes recipes for three dishes that each feed a family of four, cost less than $12, and take 30 minutes or fewer to prepare. Step-by-step instructional photos, Lewis tells us, should make the dishes extra-accessible. Seven more Let’s Cook! recipes are online, and Lewis said we can expect to see more in the future, both online and in print.

"Really, you can look at these recipes as ammunition against fast food," he said. "We wanted to eliminate as many hurdles as possible."

More stories of people trying to change the world through food:

How you’re saving the world by eating Ben & Jerry’s

15 ways to eat more sustainably in 2015

Growing Warriors, an organization that turns veterans into farmers

What do you think about Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign? Tell us below!