You could tell me that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., arguably the world’s most famous failson, was doing literally anything and I would believe you. The man is not exactly known for his prudent decision making, and has been in the midst of some truly unbelievable shenanigans — remember when he killed a bear and dumped its remains in Central Park? — and as such I could see him undertaking any conceivable inadvisable task. If you said that he was going to disembowel himself on live television, I’d say that’s something I could totally see him doing.
But I’ll admit that I was a bit puzzled when I saw that he was launching a new cooking show.
Called The Real Food Show, the YouTube series is produced by the Department of Health and Human Services (read: your tax dollars are paying for it) and is intended to make “healthy, affordable cooking simple and accessible for every American.” That seems like a perfectly reasonable goal, especially considering how unaffordable and inaccessible good food feels in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis and a foodborne illness outbreak, but RFK Jr. is not exactly the first person who comes to mind when I think about championing this message.
It doesn’t even seem like this dude even enjoys eating all that much. RFK Jr. has been effusive in his praise for the carnivore diet, a self-explanatory way of eating that’s focused almost entirely on consuming meat. He has also spoken extensively about the benefits of fermented foods, which he also makes himself and takes to restaurants to complement his meals. As someone who enjoys both meat and fermented cabbage, though, there’s absolutely nothing about the way that this man speaks about food that makes me want to eat anything he has prepared.
“I’ll eat anything,” Kennedy said while speaking with USA Today on August 3. “I don’t have a gag reflex.” This is not exactly an inspiring message when I am thinking about taking cooking advice from someone. “I don’t have a gag reflex” implies he’s doing a lot of things that might provoke a normal human being (the average Joe, someone who doesn’t regularly consume the meat from a bear that they’ve killed with their car), to want to toss their cookies. If Ina Garten were out here sharing roadkill recipes, I imagine we might also be skeptical of her whole deal, too.
Treat yourself to a paid subscription to Ravenous. It's just $70/year, which is far less than RFK Jr. spends on fermented cabbage — and essential to helping us pay for this kind of culture coverage (no pun intended).
In the show’s first episode, Kennedy enlists some guy named Andrew Gruel — apparently chef of a restaurant in MAGA-crazed Huntington Beach, California (where he’s also a city council member) — to come on and teach us processed-food-obsessed Americans how to make crispy salmon cakes with a salad of apple, white beans, and greens. That’s a perfectly normal meal for a person to have, one that RFK Jr. admits he absolutely will not eat. It all starts out looking like a regular cooking show, with Gruel walking Kennedy through the process of mashing the salmon to form cakes.
Things begin to go off the rails, though, when Gruel starts preparing a vinaigrette for that aforementioned salad. In the episode, Gruel claims that he became “addicted” to the seed oils that were present in the refrigerated condiments he slathered over the pre-made meals his mother served him, a victim of the “microwave generation.” He later yaps about how the microscopic amount of pectin in a pinch of lemon zest might support his gut bacteria, making sure to shoehorn in each of Kennedy’s dietary obsessions. As he continues to cook, Gruel (I cannot believe I continue to be mature about this man’s name — please send me a medal.) practically runs down a checklist of the Make America Healthy Again agenda that Kennedy so eagerly promotes.
Aside from the fact that this is, essentially, a worse version of the pedantic, reality-ignoring cooking show that Jamie Oliver was making 20 years ago, RFK’s new cooking show is, mostly, just boring. He just stands there looming like a specter over Gruel as he cooks, adding no insights or conspiracy-fueled rants. (This is, if you’ve ever heard the man speak out loud, actually a blessing.)
Ultimately, The Real Food Show is little more than a slick and simplistic attempt to make Kennedy’s MAHA nonsense seem both reasonable and mainstream. How could anyone argue with the idea of eating more beans for fiber? Or tips for creating affordable veggie sides at home? Neither of those things are the problem, it’s that the insistence on cramming this politically motivated pseudoscience into something that seems totally innocuous is part of this whole broader effort from President Trump and his cronies to make everything a little bit stupider.
On Ravenous This Week
Frances Dumlao
Jaya Saxena
🐦⬛ Bird Droppings
- Wired reports that AI is taking over fast food, a phenomenon that was already happening but is only gonna get weirder and worse. Don't you just love talking to robots?
- Amazon is working really, really hard to make you believe that Whole Foods is affordable now, per Bloomberg.
- Because everything is horrible in the world, diet candy is having a moment, the New York Times reports.
