Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has a cooking show.
It’s called “The Real Food Show,” and RFK Jr. posts the episodes to YouTube. It also has its own page on HHS.gov.
The whole pitch is that healthy dinners can be made for under $5 a serving, “affordable for every family.”
In one recent episode, Kennedy and his co-host, the chef Andrew Gruel, make “wild Alaskan salmon cakes” with a white bean, arugula, and apple salad. It’s ostensibly meant to serve four people, at a stated cost of $19.64 total — or $4.91 a serving.
CNN correspondent Tom Foreman took the recipe to the grocery store, buying all the ingredients. But the bill came to $70.54 — three and a half times the ostensible cost of the salmon cakes and salad. “I couldn’t make it work,” Foreman told Erin Burnett.
Why? Well, the show prices the wild salmon, the centerpiece of the meal, at $8.99. But the cheapest Foreman could find anywhere was $24.04.
The red onion is listed at eight cents, but a store charges $1.03. And Kennedy says avocado mayonnaise costs 40 cents; but the bottle costs $11.19.
The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse ran the same experiment at her local Maryland grocery store, deliberately choosing the cheapest option for every ingredient. Her total came to $73.46.
As Kennedy replied on X, “Trump Derangement Syndrome has so debilitated @ErinBurnett,” he wrote, “that she has abandoned both common sense and basic arithmetic.”
He defended his math by saying that the show uses “standard recipe costing.” He counts only what the recipe uses, and “the rest stays in the kitchen.” If you charged a whole bottle of ketchup for one squirt, he argued, it would be dishonest accounting.
That’s not crazy on its face. Recipe costing is a real method. Restaurants use it, for instance.
But, as Hesse observed, “Safeway does not let you walk in, scoop some mayo out of a jar and pay one dollar.”
Anyway, it’s not just the Mayo.
Some components of the recipe make no sense, even if you’re doing fractional costing.
The show uses an entire fish, which it says should cost $8.99. But t he cheapest wild salmon CNN could find was $24.04.
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Anyway, “the rest stays in the kitchen” defense assumes you can afford to stock the kitchen. But to cook Kennedy’s $19.64 dinner, you hand the cashier roughly $70 first. And if you’re a household that needs to tightly budget meals, like the ones Kennedy is ostensibly pitching to, the difference between $20 and $70 isn’t exactly minor.
Kennedy’s math works great for people who already own $11 avocado mayo. But something tells me that people who buy avocado mayo aren’t exactly struggling to make ends meet..
This administration campaigned on lowering the cost of groceries starting on day one, but food prices are up 4.2 percent since Trump took office. That’s outpacing wage growth.
Voters keep telling pollsters they care most about affordability, but the administration’s contribution to easing costs this month is by making a YouTube show informing families that dinner is cheaper if you use accounting tricks.
I’ve written about this show before. Kennedy launched it in the middle of a multistate cyclospora outbreak — a parasite spread through contaminated produce, which resulted from the HHS’s cuts to monitoring of disease in fresh goods. That outbreak has since grown, per the CDC, to 6,358 confirmed illnesses across 15 states. It’s caused its first two deaths, both in Michigan.
And recipe Kennedy chose to showcase affordable food includes salad — all while his agency spent the summer managing a salad-borne outbreak. Yeah, no thanks.
Kennedy had lots of easy outs he could’ve offered CNN. Maybe “we’ll re-check our numbers.” Or perhaps “we used regional prices.”
But no. Instead, the Secretary of Health and Human Services diagnosed a news anchor with a mental disorder.
If that reflex sounds familiar, it should.
When Ossoff asks about Natalie Harp, the White House says he’s a “cuck loser.” When Natalie Harp’s letters get published, they’re “Fake News.” And when a CNN anchor goes grocery shopping, it’s “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
All these guys do is insult the media, because this is an administration has stopped believing it owes anybody a fucking answer.
Anyway, you can test this stuff yourself.
Take Kennedy’s recipe to your local grocery store this week and see how much it costs.
CNN did that, and got $70.54; the Post got $73.46. But RFK Jr. says $19.64, and says the people who checked are “deranged.”
Deranged?
Well, two people are dead of a parasite his agency is supposed to manage. Groceries are up 4.2 percent. And the Secretary of Health and Human Services is on YouTube arguing about the price of a fucking onion.
