Let us set the scene, because reality has once again outperformed satire and left the rest of us scrambling to catch up: the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man photographed chugging raw milk in a hot tub alongside Kid Rock like two frat brothers discovering unpasteurized dairy is a personality, has launched a cooking show.
“The Real Food Show.”
Five dollars a serving.
This is happening while a parasite has infected produce in forty-five states, measles is posting numbers America hasn’t seen since the Clinton administration, and public health funding — the actual, boring, unglamorous kind that keeps lettuce from giving your children diarrhea — has been gutted on this same man’s watch.
Gore Vidal once said the four most beautiful words in the English language are “I told you so.” I’d like to nominate a fifth category: “explosive diarrhea outbreak,” delivered with the full weight of federal irony.
Then there’s the matter of arithmetic, a subject the Secretary treats the way a bat treats sunlight.
Senator Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire) asked him, politely, whether grocery prices were making his beloved healthy eating harder to afford.
He said beef dropped 1% last quarter.
Reader, beef is up roughly 20%.
Cheese is up 6%.
Bananas — bananas, the fruit so cheap it’s practically a punchline — are up nearly 7%.
When cornered, the Secretary explained that the cattle herd shrank, which is true, and then, when pressed further, informed the Senator she was “blaming President Trump for something he didn’t do,” a sentence so magnificently unrelated to her actual question that I felt the hallucinatory tug of standing in a hotel room in Vegas watching the walls breathe.
RFK Jr. is a man answering questions from inside a different conversation entirely, possibly a different decade.
Wonderful. America is being prescribed filet-mignon morality on a macaroni budget.
Under the old food pyramid, bread formed the base. Under Kennedy’s version, the base appears to be a second mortgage and a frightened chicken wearing a Fitbit.
And here is the punchline: the new dietary guidelines this cooking show is supposedly explaining to the peasantry recommend nearly double the protein of the old ones — up to 146 grams a day of meat and animal fat, ancestral diets, beef tallow, the whole carnivorous cosplay — which according to actual market research adds about $1,012 a year to the average grocery bill.
That’s not a rounding error.
That’s a mortgage payment on protein.
The guidelines shave a couple bucks a month off grains as a consolation prize, like a mugger handing you back a stick of chewing gum after taking your wallet.
So here’s your Secretary of Health and Human Services: doesn’t know the price of beef, blames the president for facts, hosts a show teaching you to cook cheap while personally authoring the policy that makes cooking expensive, and somewhere between the raw milk and the roadkill, expects to be taken seriously as a nutritionist.
The administration’s genius is to convert material hardship into a personal defect.
Cannot afford fresh fish?
You lack discipline.
No nearby supermarket?
Walk farther.
Butter expensive?
Commune spiritually with the cattle cycle.
Hunger becomes a lifestyle error committed by people insufficiently devoted to the food pyramid.
If irony were a food group, this administration would meet its daily requirement before breakfast.
The rest of us, meanwhile, are just trying to afford dinner — and hoping the lettuce doesn’t kill us first.