It’s hard to keep up with the shape-shifting forms of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Half Democrat, half Trump ally. Half environmental lawyer, half New Age health guru. Here’s a politician with a dead worm in his brain and a dead bear in his car.
Trump’s secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is a strange fish. So it’s no surprise to find him cooking fish, strangely, in a new video series funded by your tax dollars.
Some people have called “The Real Food Show,” which premiered July 30 on YouTube and the HHS website, a cooking show. But Kennedy does far less food prep for it than your regular hosts of NBC’s “Today” show do for theirs.
Kennedy does far less food prep than your regular hosts of NBC’s “Today” show.
Kennedy mostly lectures the poor unsuspecting viewer about his new food pyramid, which prioritizes protein and recommends full-fat dairy. He also goes on about the thinning of cattle herds in the country and what might be good for your microbiome.
Somehow, his HHS team found a chef, Andrew Gruel, to stand alongside him and talk even more. Gruel is also now a politician. The conservative commentator, who is a frequent Fox News guest, was appointed last year to the Huntington Beach, California, City Council.
We could count the ways that this “cooking show” is a waste of the public’s time and money. Never mind the talk about substituting salmon for abalone or adding nutritional yeast to your salmon cakes.
This is plainly not a video series to help struggling Americans prepare healthy and affordable meals for their family.
The videos that were formerly recorded to do that were funded by the federal government and produced by expert partners. They were part of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education, or SNAP-Ed, and made for the lower-income families who receive the assistance popularly known as food stamps.
SNAP-Ed included simple videos for recipes like tilapia with tomato-mango relish, produced by Purdue University as part of its nutrition education program. These programs, which include hands-on teaching in person, have a proven track record over six decades.
Sadly, funding for SNAP-Ed ended in September as part of President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and paid for it with cuts to social services.
Why trust a proven program to help make America healthy when you can vandalize the federal government in the name of saving money and then waste money on a YouTube series?
It is hard — no, impossible — to reconcile the idea of making Americans healthy again while cutting funding to teach them how to eat healthfully.
It is hard — no, impossible — to reconcile the idea of making Americans healthy again while cutting funding to teach them how to eat healthfully.
Then again, it’s impossible to figure out how to make Americans healthy while trashing the vaccines that would stop them getting sick from measles. That contradiction hasn’t stopped RFK Jr. from his anti-vaccine crusade, including his dumpster fire of an interview on CNN on Sunday in which he claimed that during the Covid-19 pandemic “the thing that did the most damage to our country was the lockdowns.”
Kennedy would love Americans to believe that he has moved boldly, nay, radically, to flip the food pyramid by telling everyone to eat more protein. But he knows full well that the food guidelines HHS produced don’t change anything in terms of what Americans eat.
The real political power to shape how Americans eat, and how much they pay for their food, lies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funds SNAP and, until recently, used to fund SNAP-Ed.
If Kennedy really had juice — or ambition beyond recording internet videos — he would have wrested that power out of the USDA’s hands. That would have been bold, radical and life changing, because for the first time our health guidelines might have lined up with our food subsidies.
Instead, Kennedy is cosplaying at hosting a cooking show that is as unwatchable as his diet is unaffordable to average Americans.
Which prompts the question: What’s his game? Why is he so determined to carve out the time to travel the country making bad videos?
Is there room for a third-party candidate with a love of salmon cakes laced with nutritional yeast?
My guess is that Kennedy, who ran for president in 2024, is thinking about the next presidential election and that he knows the contest is wide open for disruption.
Is there room for a third-party candidate with a love of salmon cakes laced with nutritional yeast? Possibly. Kennedy likely has a higher chance of gaining an audience for another wackadoodle campaign than for his atrocious YouTube series.
But because he’s currently a supporting actor on “The Donald Trump Show,” the health secretary has to hope that his boss doesn’t notice that he’s jockeying to follow him in the Oval Office. Because nobody likes too many cooks in the kitchen, or too many aspiring lead actors in the TV show that is the Trump White House.
Richard Wolffe
Richard Wolffe is a best-selling author and Emmy Award-winning executive producer.