The first episode of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s new cooking show earned lukewarm reviews on Wednesday.
Kennedy announced the premiere of his new show, "The Real Food Show," on YouTube last week and debuted alongside chef Andrew Gruel from the MAGA-friendly Huntington Beach, California area. Amy McCarthy, a journalist for Ravenous, watched the show and noted that the episode, and the show itself, seemed to be a bigger ploy the Trump administration is undertaking.
In the episode, Gruel walks the audience through a seemingly harmless recipe of crispy salmon cakes with a salad of apple, white beans, and greens. Gruel does throw in some expected praise for Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again agenda and other "dietary obsessions," as McCarthy noted.
But the real "off the rails" part of the show was that it seemed to serve no other purpose than to be boring.
"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," McCarthy wrote. "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," she added. "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 is 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."
