u/chiangku

The government cut the program that taught poor families to cook and replaced it with a YouTube show. Who is this administration actually trying to make healthy?

You are at the grocery store, stretching a budget across dinner for your family while food prices sit at record highs. You get home, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on YouTube, making salmon cakes and talking about cattle herds and microbiomes.

This is "The Real Food Show," which premiered July 30 on the HHS website. Kennedy spends most of it inserting talking points about why Americans do not eat enough seafood and what might be good for their microbiome. A chef named Andrew Gruel, a conservative Fox News commentator recently appointed to the Huntington Beach City Council, stands alongside him. Among the affordable alternatives Gruel suggested was canned abalone, which runs around $15 to $30 a can on average.

The program that actually taught lower-income families to cook affordable meals is gone. SNAP-Ed, a six-decade-old federal nutrition education initiative, funded practical recipe videos produced by universities like Purdue and offered hands-on cooking instruction to families on food assistance. Purdue produced a recipe video for tilapia with tomato-mango relish, a full meal for a few dollars. SNAP-Ed lost its funding under Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill.

In its place, HHS is producing YouTube content about salmon cakes with nutritional yeast. The real power to shape what Americans eat sits with the USDA, which funds food assistance, but Kennedy has not touched that.