Michel Nischan presents a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award to Gus Schumacher, right, as White House assistant chef Sam Kass looks on. (Kent Miller, Kent Miller Studios)

NEW YORK CITY — In his first public appearance since returning to work after the government shutdown, Sam Kass, the assistant White House chef who is also executive director of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, traveled here to introduce Gus Schumacher, one of the James Beard Leadership Award winners at its annual dinner on Monday.

Kass did not comment on the shutdown except to say, “If you get furloughed you get a life.”

Kass, who has worked in the White House since President Barack Obama took office in 2009, recently became engaged to Alex Wagner, the host of MSNBC’s “NOW with Alex Wagner.”

Kass noted that the first lady had planted the first White House kitchen garden since Eleanor Roosevelt and opened the first farmers’ market a block from the White House “since Thomas Jefferson’s time.”

“The fact that it was even conceivable that the first lady could plant a garden is such a place was the product of visionaries like Gus,” Kass said.

Noting that when Schumacher was Massachusetts secretary of Agriculture in the 1980s, he took tomatoes grown in Massachusetts to chefs to show them they were fresher and superior to those that came from far away, Kass said, “Farmer by farmer, chef by chef Gus has weaved together what we call the local food movement. He is optimistic to his core. He never lets cynicism get in the way of real change.”

Upon accepting the award from Kass and Michel Nischan, the chef who founded Wholesome Wave, Schumacher noted that while he was Massachusetts agriculture secretary he went on his first date with his now wife Susan and took Massachusetts tomatoes to a restaurant and asked for a knife to cut them up so they could eat them and show the chef.

When she did not object to this odd exercise, Schumacher said he concluded, “I’ve got to take this girl out more.”

Schumacher followed up by taking her to a banquet that had six courses with blueberries at each one and to a cider-toasting banquet with eight courses of cider before asking her to marry him.