Our scene unfolds in a kitchen worthy of a Nancy Meyers movie: Monochrome dishes stacked neatly in open shelving, tasteful beige-y tile backsplash with a hint of opalescence, stark white range hood with decorative tone-on-tone molding…so many lemons. Who needs that many lemons within arm’s reach at a given moment?
Both Meghan Markle and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., newly minted YouTube cooking show host, apparently.
Yes, Kennedy, MAHA maestro and secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under Donald Trump, has taken his culinary talents to the streaming space, releasing the first episode of The Real Food Show on Thursday. Andrew Gruel, a chef and member of the Huntington Beach City Council in California, guested on the first episode, where the duo made salmon cakes and arugula salad, a meal that they claimed would cost under $5 a portion for a family of four, and which Kennedy declared “amazing” after taking a single bite on camera.
“I’m traveling across America connecting with renowned chefs to show families how to cook delicious, nutritious meals with real ingredients at all affordable prices,” Kennedy says at the beginning of the video, which clocks in at just under 20 minutes. “America, it’s time to eat real food.”
From here, Kennedy takes more than just visual cues from the Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix series, With Love, Meghan: Both feature our celebrity host and a friend chatting while cooking together, while promoting their personal agendas. For Meghan, her message is one of normalcy: She’s just a mom, a gal with gal pals and a busy life, albeit one that comes with a noble title, and moms gotta eat. (They must also play mah-jongg, natch.) Kennedy, on the other hand, is donning a tasteful neutral apron (manly khaki, don’t get it wrong) to get the word out about his upside-down food-pyramid overhaul and to prove that men can get into the kitchen and eat a protein that isn’t red meat without being a sissy.
“We have a lot of seafood in this country, and we’re used to eating meat, and think of that as our protein,” he said in the video. “Today we have the lowest level of cattle herds in history, in at least 100 years. The cost of meat has gone up, we’re doing everything that we can in the administration to bring that down and increase the size of the herd. But until that happens, this is a fantastic option.”
In an interview with USA Today promoting the project, Kennedy claimed that home cooking is a “sacred ritual that has been abandoned,” despite data showing that more than half of American men and three-quarters of women regularly cook at home. He said in the same interview that his own culinary specialties include steak, burgers, fish, and omelets, the last of which he credited Gruel with teaching him to cook.
Throughout the episode, both Gruel and Kennedy employ dog whistles of varying overtness: Gruel assures viewers that he’ll be using “a couple chef tricks, but nothing overly intellectual” (none of that namby-pamby liberal glasses-polishing here) to pack in flavor, while Kennedy knocked old nutritional guidelines, claiming that “the government had been lying to us and telling us that protein caused heart attacks. There was no science that supported that.” Source, please?
The siren song of MAHA’s love affair with protein-maxxing is also well-represented in this first episode, with noted animal-lover Kennedy grimly intoning, “one of the things we found when we started looking at the real science was that when you don’t eat protein, you eat something else, and it was ultra-processed foods.”
As for Gruel, he doesn’t seem too worried about viewers cooking well. “Now don’t worry if you overcook this,” he says of his dish. He also focuses on the cost of ingredients without noting the trade-offs that might come with choices that will lower the grocery bill, such as nutritional differences between a fish fillet and canned fish, or the difference between different types of eggs. He recommends using panko as a binder in the cakes, assuring the audience that it’s “really just a lightened breadcrumb.” Is it any wonder that multiple commenters on the video suggested using pork rinds, which are high in fat and sodium and not a good source of vitamins, in the place of panko?
The Department of Health and Human Services had not responded to Vanity Fair’s request for comment at publication time, and has not shared plans for the frequency of new episodes.
Gruel, throughout the episode, stands alongside recovering-addict Kennedy and claims to be addicted to many things: Seafood (positive), salad dressing (negative), condiments (negative), and seed oils (negative). Another stab at humor falls similarly awkwardly: Gruel mentions involving his four children in food prep, claiming that if they help cook the food, they’re more likely to eat it, common enough advice in parenting articles about picky eating, but then adds, “we’ve got restaurants and labor cost is high, so I keep having more kids so we have free labor.”
Kennedy, who positioned his food-pyramid overhaul as finding top nutritionists and then “lock[ing] them into a room for 11 months,” replied: “Good plan.” And, hey, the pronatalism comes free of charge.
Another upside from Gruel: “I’ve also learned in California, kids can’t sue you, so that’s helpful.”
Lifestyle guru, indeed. Whatever Kennedy’s future as a celebrity chef holds, he’ll be able to choke it down, he assured USA Today, saying, “I will literally eat anything because I don’t have a gag reflex.”
Bon appétit, America.
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