The man whose “best-known culinary accomplishment is maintaining ‘a freezer full’ of roadkill” wants to teach you to cook, said Emily Heil in The Washington Post. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently debuted The Real Food Show, a government-funded YouTube series intended to help Americans “make healthful meals at home on a modest budget.” In the first episode, Kennedy and celebrity chef Andrew Gruel whip up crispy salmon cakes with a white bean, apple, and arugula salad. I followed the recipe and the dish was “quite good.” But actual cooking is not the main focus of the show. Kennedy and Gruel spend far more time ranting about the evils of seed oils and the Biden administration’s “war” on saturated fats than providing “meaningful culinary instruction.” Under Kennedy’s “grim glare,” making a meal becomes “an exercise in airing grievances against the government and a food system hell-bent on keeping people addicted to processed foods.” When he finally samples the finished meal, all he can muster is a muttered “amazing,” a politician’s thumbs-up, and a “pained grimace.”
Kennedy’s fish cakes are supposed to be budget-friendly, said River Page in The Free Press, but it’s clear he has no idea “what it is like to go grocery shopping as a broke person.” I spent nearly $100 buying the ingredients for four servings—including such luxuries as avocado mayo and nutritional yeast—that RFK Jr. claimed would cost a mere $20. This show is less concerned with delivering affordable meals than advancing conservative ideology, said Ashlie D. Stevens in Salon. Underpinning everything is the idea that “if Americans can be taught to eat correctly, perhaps they will require less care”—freeing the government to cut the safety net. Republicans already did that last year, slashing projected federal spending on Medicaid over the next decade by nearly $1 trillion and food benefits by $187 billion.
Of all the terrible things Kennedy is doing, hosting this show is “probably the least offensive,” said Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. But shouldn’t he be busy tackling the nation’s more pressing health problems, like the more than 22,000 cases of explosive diarrhea caused by the parasite cyclospora? RFK Jr. is supposed to be heading the response to that lettuce-linked outbreak. Or perhaps he could focus on the raging measles crisis— this is the worst year for the disease in the U.S. since 1991—which he has fueled as the country’s top anti-vaxxer. But that would mean doing the hard work of being a government official. He’d rather just “play one on TV.”
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