Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and Health Secretary, launched a new online cooking show last week called The Real Food Show. Kennedy insists that Americans can eat nutritious food for cheap, promising to feed people for under $5 per person. But the Washington Post ran the numbers, and the meal he cooks during episode one costs about $18 per person for a family of four.
who makes salmon cakes with egg, panko breadcrumbs, dijon mustard, chopped red onion, fresh chives, nutritional yeast, and avocado oil mayo. They also make an arugula salad with mustard, lemon, cider vinegar, apple, and white beans.
The Washington Post added up all the ingredients with the cheapest options available from their nearest chain grocery store, excluding pantry staples like cooking oil, salt, and pepper. But the total was well above the promised $5 per person.
Part of the problem is that people can’t buy a slice of onion. The show features an on-screen receipt that displays the cost for the amount of each ingredient that’s used in this recipe, which is incredibly deceptive. For example, you can’t buy $0.21 worth of olive oil, but that’s one of the itemized ingredients on the list. You also can’t buy $0.08 of an onion.
As the Washington Post puts it:
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. That parent needs to feed their family with a meal that actually costs $20, not $20-plus-an-additional-$53.
And I’m not sure that meal planning in advance is the solution: Yes, a mom with a $150-per-week grocery budget could afford the $73 grocery haul this meal requires. But then she’s left with $77 to spread out over 20 additional meals. The salmon, beans and arugula all got used up in the crispy salmon cakes, so now we’re in for one extremely healthy meal plus a whole bunch of peanut-butter-and-nutritional-yeast sandwiches.
Kennedy, who’s worth between $15 million and $30 million according to his financial disclosures, has enjoyed a life of immense privilege. The patriarch of the Kennedy family, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., was one of the wealthiest men in America during the mid-20th century. In his day, he had something like Larry Ellison money, but not quite Elon Musk money.
Kennedy’s life of luxury (presumably disrupted in some ways by the 14 years he spent addicted to heroin) has made him completely disconnected from the way that normal people have to budget. He has always had his inheritance to fall back on in some fashion. But it’s obviously not enough for him. Kennedy reported up to $1.2 million in credit card debt and has been peddling junk science with his books, which have fetched a pretty penny. He also reported between $1 million and $5 million in crypto, an industry that has excelled under Trump.
Kennedy isn’t alone in being disconnected from the economic hardships of many Americans. President Trump has appointed a record number of billionaires to his administration, including people like Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who’s worth around $3 billion, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who’s worth about $7.3 billion, and NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, who’s worth about $1.5 billion, just to name a few.
Even those who aren’t billionaires still hold enormous amounts of wealth while deciding how the U.S. economy should run. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is reportedly worth about $600 million, according to a Forbes estimate from 2025. Head of the Small Business Administration Kelly Loeffler is worth around $800 million as of 2020, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is worth “at least” $100 million according to Forbes.
Kennedy and the rest of the Trump regime have no idea what it feels like to live in the U.S. in 2026 when you have to work for a wage. Grocery prices are up 55.6% since 2020, according to Forbes. So unless your paycheck has risen 55% in the past six years, you are probably worse off than you were before.
There’s no question that it’s a good thing to cook at home to save money. But the Trump administration makes it sound like it’s easy to find savings on food in this economy, something that’s impossible with the rate of inflation. The U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, according to the latest figures released Friday. Inflation is at 3.7%, well above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%.
“Inflation is totally wiping out wage gains,” economist Heather Long wrote Friday on X. “The financial squeeze is real for many Americans right now.”
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