Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been called out for vastly underestimating ingredient costs while presenting a recipe on his new cooking show, which is centered on healthy, affordable meals.
Kennedy, the latest Trump Cabinet member to promote the administration’s agenda via a YouTube series, was recently joined by chef Andrew Gruel on the premiere episode of The Real Food Show.
The two made wild Alaskan salmon cakes with a white bean, apple and arugula salad for what they claimed was $4.91 per serving or $19.64 for a family of four.
Towards the end of the episode, a receipt showed how much each ingredient cost to use in the recipe. For example, the amount of avocado mayo in the recipe cost 40 cents. But as Maryland-based Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse pointed out in a new article, no one can walk into the grocery store and buy 40 cents' worth of mayo.
Hesse calculated that the true cost of all the ingredients if she only had pantry staples in her kitchen, such as oil and seasonings, would be $73.46, or $18 per person, at her nearest chain grocery store.
While Hesse said the health secretary’s math is “a perfectly standard practice in pricing out a recipe, and RFK Jr. has suggested we do what feels entirely reasonable to a financially flush shopper: Buy the $14 jar of avocado mayo, use one scoop to make salmon patties, save the rest for other recipes.”
She also acknowledged “that kind of practical thinking is not helpful to a parent who has $20 in cash to get them to tomorrow’s paycheck.
“Safeway does not let you walk in, scoop some mayo out of a jar and pay one dollar at the cash register. You have to buy the whole thing.”
The cost of groceries went up 2.7 percent in June from the year before, according to the Consumer Price Index, which the government uses to track the cost of goods and services over time.
Sixty percent of Americans said they are struggling with the rising cost of living, according to a new report by the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Of those respondents, nearly 90 percent cited groceries and food as their top cost concern.
Trump’s agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, was mocked earlier this year for suggesting that Americans eat “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla and one other thing” as a low-cost meal.
“Private jets and tax breaks for them and their rich friends, and one piece of broccoli *AND* a tortilla for you!” Chasten Glezman Buttigieg, the husband of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, wrote on X at the time.
The Trump administration’s meal suggestions are in line with new dietary guidelines that advise Americans to eat more protein and vegetables and less whole grains.
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