RFK Jr. Loses It Over CNN Host Doing The Math On Meal Costs From His Cooking Show
from the make-believe dept
As you’ll recall, RFK Jr., who is totally not checked out of his job at HHS, has managed to sneak in hosting a government sponsored cooking show in between not doing anything about the country’s problems with measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough, and so on.
Well, two episodes are now out, and the reviews are not great. Some have referred the episodes as mere “long, boring political ads,” while others have simply pointed out that the meals so far taste like shit. But while those particular reviews may rely heavily on subjective matters of opinion, the main thrust of Kennedy’s show does not. And that thrust is the promise that American families can feed themselves fresh, wholesome meals for less than $5 a plate. CNN’s Tom Foreman appeared on Erin Burnett’s show and walked viewers through what buying ingredients at the grocery store to make one of Kennedy’s meals would actually cost.
When we started buying ingredients used in the show, even going for the lowest prices at a big competitive chain, the cost heated up fast. This was the cheapest frozen wild-caught sockeye salmon we could find. The closest to what they are using. They priced theirs at $8.99. The cheapest we could find, even with the deal from the store, was more than $24. Now the greens mix, that was about the same cost. So were the eggs on a per egg basis. But that’s the trick here, because they’re only pricing that one egg out of the carton. And that gets worse with other things.
For example, this red onion, they say they only spent eight cents on this because that’s how much they used. Getting the whole onion cost us more than a dollar. And look at this. This is the avocado mayonnaise. They priced this at 40 cents, because they were only using a couple of tablespoons to buy. The whole thing cost us more than $11. They’re only pricing parts of it. And grocery stores don’t sell things that way.
In other words, you can’t associate the cost of buying a meal by portioning out what ingredients you use and how much of it. The total cost of the ingredients has still left your bank account. We’re not talking about restaurants, where marginal costs per plate make all the sense in the world. Those are businesses that buy in bulk and have to calculate a profit into their pricing. These are families. Hungry families and the only profit they’re looking for is healthy caloric intake.
Well, Kennedy lost his shit on the internet over the segment, all because Burnett and Foreman refused to play his particular version of make believe. And, after accusing Burnett of having Trump Derangement Syndrome (does that come from vaccines and chemtrails too?), he did so in a way that perfectly illuminated the fact that he doesn’t understand that homes are not restaurants.
After the report aired, Kennedy hit back on X, trashing the host and accusing her of having “abandoned both common sense and basic arithmetic.”
“CNN wants us to incorporate the full package price of every ingredient, regardless of what is used in the recipe. If you put a squirt of ketchup on your burger, would you be surprised if the restaurant charged you for the whole bottle?” Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy argued his show uses “standard recipe costing,” saying “we count what the recipe actually uses,” while “the rest” of each purchased ingredient “stays in the kitchen.”
First off, this is a mostly misleading bit of pushback. While Foreman’s segment did tally up the grocery bill needed in order to make Kennedy’s meal, because that’s how shopping works, that wasn’t the only cost discrepancy he uncovered. For some items, the cost difference was in the marginal quantity of the ingredient used in each meal, that wasn’t the case with every ingredient, such as the fish itself.
So Kennedy’s claims in his show, like most everything he claims, are built on funny math and lies. It’s simply not how grocery shopping for a family works. It’s not how meal planning works. What could be interesting would be for the show to demonstrate from start to finish how to plan out a family’s meals for a week, shop for the ingredients for those meals in a way that you can double up on them to make full use of their cost, and build a recipe list around that and then see what the per-meal cost is.
But that would be way too much work for Kennedy and would place him way outside the cushy, entitled, wealthy experience he has had his entire life as a Kennedy.
Filed Under: cooking show, groceries, health & human services, rfk jr., shopping, tom foreman
Comments on “RFK Jr. Loses It Over CNN Host Doing The Math On Meal Costs From His Cooking Show”
No, no. It’s not that weekly meal planning is hard. It’s that it’s women’s work.
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That’s where Erica Schwartz step in.
Re: Good Comment
NOW we know you cant do Basic math.
Have you counted your Family yet?
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No, no. That’s why the math doesn’t matter. The show’s intended audience will just flick their hair and exclaim, “Math is hard. Let’s go shopping!” Math is for DOGE bros, who know how to cut costs to create greater costs.
Anyway, you think he gives a shit? Wimmins need to shut up and go make RFK Jr. a sammich, with lotsa leafy green lettuce to help him give a shit.
One of the first things the new Congress does, inshallah, is impeach and remove Kennedy. But this criticism is weird. You can’t cook without pantry staples.
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Avocado Mayonnaise is nobody’s pantry staple.
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Trying to quit, thanks.
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Plenty of people have avocado mayonnaise in their fridge. But more to the point, regular vegetable-oil based mayo works too.
That’s kind of a bullshit complaint, in that they’re being as pessimistic as possible on cost but not considering the benefit. Like, if you’re gonna call that a “$25 meal” or whatever, because that’s what the ingredients cost, you’d better also count the number of “free meals” that come from using the remaining portions. And if we’re talking about families, as is the case here, it’s absurd to deal in single servings and ignore the ubiquity of refrigerators and freezers and cupboards.
Okay, some stuff could go bad, but realistically not eggs. The date’s usually at least a month out, I (living alone) often use them a month or two past their dates, and they’re not some special-purpose ingredient that can’t be used elsewhere. A family of 3 or 4 people, if they eat eggs, will have absolutely no trouble amortizing the cost of 18 or 30.
I don’t know too many recipes that use avocado mayonnaise, but it’d probably make egg salad well enough, along with those “surplus” eggs. I’ve sometimes added onions too, and I’ve got about 80% of a cut onion in my fridge right now (along with the rest of the bag it came from; I’ll eat them over the next few weeks).
If you’re being picky, add the cost of electricity for the stove and fridge (not that anyone unplugs their fridge when empty, and nevermind that a full fridge wastes less power). But, hell, with frozen water bottles and occasionally commerical ice top-ups in a cooler, I’ve used ingredients like this even on week-long road trips. It’s no big deal. And, growing up, my mother would often plan meals based on “what’s in the fridge that needs to be used up soon?”
We don’t need to invent ridiculous things to accuse RFK of.
Re: That was my thought...
I’m with you on this. Even though you have to spend the money to buy the full container, what you get isn’t just one meal. It’s one meal plus ingredients that can be used for multiple other meals.
The problem is that just using the cost of the ingredients used isn’t completely fair either. There’s a fair chance you’ll have to throw out a portion of the leftover ingredients if you don’t use them before they go bad. And that waste is variable between families, subjective to estimate and complicates the topic too much for both a cooking show and a news show. The big problem with RFK’s estimate seems to be that they vastly underestimated the cost of the salmon, even for just a single portion.
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Maybe. I certainly did that when I was new to cooking, but I can’t remember the last time I discarded a container because its contents went bad. I do cut off significant moldy bits of potatoes; perhaps their cost should be inflated 10% or so for spoilage, although I should also note that I never pay full price for them. Sometimes I find spoiled parts on foods like apples and onions, but it’d be nowhere near 10% (maybe 1 or 2). I use dehydrated milk so I don’t have to worry about that.
Really, the important thing is to get cooking regularly; people with enough experience will figure the rest out (recipes, deals, managing inventory and waste).
Sure; that seems like a fair criticism, one that shouldn’t be lost among a bunch of bullshit complaints. It’s actually quite variable too, by area and season—but, you know what?: there’s a government agency, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose job it is to collect statistics like the cost of salmon by state, and also how much salmon the average person eats. Or, at least, there used to be an agency doing that—Trump’s already fired one head of that agency for producing statistics that didn’t fit the government narrative, so who the fuck knows whether trustworthy data still exists.
What might be useful is a government tool (or non-government, given the current situation) into which one can enter a recipe and zip code, and receive a cost estimate based on those collected statistics. It’d be even better with data on current sales and coupons.
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The complaint is that this show is doing the inverse and fooling anyone who takes it seriously into thinking they can buy only the amount of the ingredients in each meal for the price claimed in the show. I agree that it is a bit of a dumb thing to complain about, but it’s also right in line with the typical Trumpian practice of lying through one’s teeth about the state of the economy (and the more specific-to-Trump practice of not doing thing goddamn one about how grocery stores work). Pointing that out is never stupid.
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Eh… I didn’t see the show, so I can’t evaluate whether it gave such an impression, but that really is the most reasonable way to count the cost of food. Perhaps with the exception of ingredients that are both esoteric and highly perishable.
I’m sure the show also didn’t include the costs of pots, pans, utensils, and serving dishes. So, yeah, if someone’s unfamiliar with cooking, they might have a learning curve and some unexpected costs (and then after the meal: “I needed soap and a dish towel too‽”; of course, that dish towel will itself need to be washed and dried…). If that’s the audience this show is getting, perhaps the first episode should’ve been a “getting started” one about such things; easy to say in hindsight.
I’ll note that Jeff Potter’s book “Cooking for Geeks” does start with the chapters “Hello, Kitchen!” and “Initializing the Kitchen” about those things. Leanne Brown’s free “Good and Cheap” cookbook also has a brief introduction, including advice like “start building a pantry” and “always buy eggs”; that e-book is probably more useful to RFK’s audience than RFK’s show is. Browne does the math basically the same way as Kennedy, but I’m guessing is not as out-of-touch on actual prices.
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As you say, it’s ridiculous to say “we’re going to add the entire cost of the jar for this one spoonful we’re using.” And as you say, that’s especially silly with eggs. I would hazard a guess that most non-vegan families already have at least one egg in their house and would not have to buy any to make this recipe, and if they did have to buy a dozen, they could easily use the other 11.
But also… let’s do a Google search centered on Bethesda, Maryland, which is the city Tom Foreman lives in. Frozen wild caught sockeye salmon in that area? I found multiple places for $15 per pound. If “The cheapest we could find… was more than $24” then they weren’t looking very hard. You can of course get it even cheaper than $15 if it’s not specifically sockeye or wild-caught salmon. (Or if you’re not from a particularly wealthy suburb with a high cost of living, like Bethesda.)
Tim says RKF’s show’s claims are based on “funny math and lies”. Seems to me that the other side has the funny math, and the “lies” claim seems to rest soley on one store not being able to match RFK’s price on a specific kind of salmon. That’s weak. That’s really, really weak.
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It’s pretty clear you’ve never shopped while poor. What you think of as staple are luxuries to many. And if you dont have access to a credit card, if you don’t have the cash you dont get to buy it then.
And the fact that you mention using ice, an incredibly inefficient, expensive and time consuming method that also risks cross contamination is baffling.
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I have, and I know that, but what of it? The show is presumably aimed at people who want to cook, and if they can’t afford food, it’s a bit of a non-starter. How’s different math gonna fix anything?
What? Yes, commercial ice bags are expensive—although home-freezer ice is basically free, and a resourceful person can find a motel with an unguarded ice machine. Ice is, anyway, the cheapest way to eat on a road trip, road trips mostly being luxuries themselves. I don’t even know what you’re talking about with cross-contamination. The food goes in a cooler in zip-lock bags or its original packaging, with ice packed around it. It’s not rocket science.
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They clearly addressed your complaint in two different ways.
The other half of "ingredient margin pricing"...
Hmm… So I buy a container of Avocado Mayonnaise and use only a spoon-full of it in this recipe. Now I’ve got the rest of the Avocado Mayo in my refrigerator (presumably) for the rest of time, like my Jalapenos, capers, and every other ingredient-for-one-dish.
And I bet the Mayo doesn’t have the (refrigerated) shelf life of the capers.
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Always buy product a spoon at the time.
It’s RFK’s advice to be healthy.
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Come on. Avacado mayonnaise will work wherever any other mayonnaise is called for. Mix it with some past-prime chicken to make chicken salad (this works for turkey, too), or with eggs for egg salad, or pasta for macaroni salad…. Eat the resulting “salad” alone, or in sandwich form to use up some bread (if already stale, toast it first). And, good news!: capers and onions are common ingredients for these things, as are mustard, ketchup, relish, cheese, and various spices and vegetables, depending on what you’re looking to use up.
Or just use regular mayonnaise for RFK’s recipe, or a mayo substitute like Miracle Whip or its store-brand equivalents. Some of this stuff is good for 3-6 months officially, and can realistically be used as long as it doesn’t look, smell, or taste bad. And since the recipe was meant for a family, and most people re-use recipes, it’s neither “one spoon-full” nor “for the rest of time”.
The most reasonable criticism here is that the recipes aren’t very good. In which case one’s got at least a few weeks to experiment, buy a cookbook, do an online recipe search, or ask one’s neighbor for suggestions on how to use up this stuff purchased based on RFK’s not-so-good cooking advice (the film Pulp Fiction suggests mayo can be used on french fries, and home fries are a cheap, easy, and family-friendly source of calories when made from 10-pound bags of potatoes). We’re not talking about absurd amounts of ingredients, like Marge Simpson saying “That’s a good price for twelve pounds of nutmeg!” at a warehouse-style store.
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If you know that you will never again use that avocado mayo, I would suggest not using this particular recipe. But if you really want to try it out, you could always buy the $3.98 small container instead of the $11 larger one.
(They sell avocado mayo, so presumably there are SOME people out there who use it regularly.)
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Or just use use regular mayo. They’re basically the same.
I mean, I get both views. Obviously if you don’t have the cash to buy the items, that’s a problem.
On the other side, I’ve always calculated out how many meals for my money I get. Costco pizza was great at 10 bucks for 4-6 meals.
How DARE you check my grocery maths Lupita our nanny assures me its right, and my personal assistant counts the change for me.
Accusing me of being some kind of out of touch crudite eater like the last right wing health quack; the nerve!
Ill have you know I harvest all my own blubber, and have worn the same pair of workout jeans for 30 years!
Signed in Sincerely,
Bobby’s Brainslug
It’s ridiculous because there are youtube channels that already do this but better. If you really want to get deep into meal planning and “using the whole onion” so to speak, you can find at least a dozen channels that talk exactly about that.
As an aside, personally, even for home cooks I would allow for some ingredients to fall in the category of “expected to have” and be excluded from the overall price. For example: table salt, flour, vegetable oil, etc. Yes it may cost $10-$15 to stock those necessities for most recipes you’re going to use a few pennies worth and most people will have them already. However, if you say it needs flaky finishing salt, barley flour, avocado oil, or similar then that shit needs added into the price.
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I’m in Canada, where my mother learned this in school in the early 1970s. In the 1990s, I don’t think it was taught anymore; I learned it from my mother but not from school. I wonder if the situation is similar in the U.S. Anyway, my parents’ kitchen still has the odd container from a company that went out of business before I was born, that’s gone through several moves and lives deep in the back of some cupboard; and I’ve got some pretty old spices and such, too, mostly from dollar stores for recipes that never became routine.
For perishable stuff, there are also now multiple sites and apps in the “here are the ingredients I have on hand; what can I make with them?” variety. We used to have to do that manually (for example, seven eggs and some milk that are getting old, and half a loaf of stale bread?—we’re likely to be having French toast for our next breakfast).
While none of that is in the “expected to have” category, it’s all basically non-perishable and can be managed on an amortized-cost basis (excepting that the oil will probably go rancid after a few years, and the flour might attract bugs if not in an air-tight container—old mayo jars are great for storing flour). It’s also very substitutable, in either direction.
So if someone buys that stuff and likes RFK’s recipe, they’ll use it up over the coming months as they re-make it. If they don’t like the recipe, they can use it to replace pretty much any other recipe’s salt, flour, or oil (plus, avocado oil is a neutral high-temperature oil that will work for any frying, or for seasoning cast iron). Or if they want to make the recipe more cheaply at first, they can substitute any “normal” ingredient that’s already on hand (canola oil is cheap). Anyone who’s any good in a kitchen will have done all of this stuff.
There is a skill to managing a kitchen’s stocks, and to substituting things, and perhaps RFK should have started with teaching people that—and having schools teach it—instead of assuming it and jumping right to recipes with esoteric ingredients. It might’ve been good to show the grocery bills, too. But in the scale of this person’s fuck-ups, this hardly qualifies at all.
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Stuff like salt and flour shouldn’t be excluded, but can reasonably be recorded at unit cost as RFK did. Flour, for example, does have a significant cost when used for baking bread; not a large cost, but hardly free.
I put eggs and onions in the same category: “easy to use up”, if not quite “expected to have”. If these television hosts can’t figure out what to do with leftover eggs and onions, that says more about them than RFK. Those ingredients are ubiquitous in recipes from almost every cultural background (excepting that vegans avoid eggs, and Jainists avoid root vegetables such as onions).
Since Bobby wants kids eating healthy, I’m curious if he’s advocating for schools to bring back home ec classes.
If this had come under a democratic administration, it would be wall to talk talks about out of touch elites from fake working class populists who built million dollar businesses with only their pulled up bootstraps and inheriting their their daddy’s $999,999.99 business. Fancy mustard, am I right folks?
Math is woke!
“Doing the Math” on their claims is pretty much a guaranteed way to enrage just about anyone in this admnstration.
They’re as math adverse as flat earthers.
Let me get this straight: he has this “show” …where he talks …? Will wonders never cease.
Honestly my attitude at this point is that focusing on any single particular fuckaround is missing the exponentially expanding forest to zero in on one tree.
The problem is the House and Senate.
Blame the Republicans in the House and Senate for all of the shit happening. Including dumb and fairly inconsequential little shit like this. The unacceptable levels of unaccountability leading to corruption and stupidity running wild is entirely on them.
Talk about the news, it’s a news site, but please consider making the editorial decision to first always blame the House and Senate.
Nothing can start getting better until the Republican ‘representatives’ are replaced.
Unfortunately for Brain rot Bob, the worms were the only thing left that could do math and he killed them off with Ivermectin.
Viewership question
Who would voluntarily choose to listen to RFKjr speak for any amount of time?
We already knew old boy is here for making up math.
“who is totally not checked out of his job at HHS”
should be:
“who is totally checked out of reality”
"the meals so far taste like shit"
How do you know what shit tastes like?
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He kisses your mom.
Its called Prep and setup.
YEP, there are Stores that can sell Bulk item, mostly the Seasonings that are OVER priced in the bottles. But you need the Bottles to store them or its a Mess.
Lets ask him about 1 pound of beef. how many serving are you going to get??
Then ask How Big of a serving to Growing Teens, Or a Person that Works manual Labor?
Can you live on 1 pound of Food per day? Thats 2-3 meals.
$15 x 30 days is $450 for 1 person. Family of 4 is $1800. Who can afford that?
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If you mean the stores where you can put any amount you like in your own bottle, and pay based on its exact weight, yeah, that’s one option—and maybe a good one for “experimental” ingredients. But, in my experience, most things in those stores are overpriced, and the same goes for many items sold by weight in regular grocery stores. Once the experiment has proved successful and a person will be regularly using an ingredient, it’s often better to buy large packages—whether that’s the 10-pound bags of potatoes and 3-pound bags of onions that can be found anywhere, or the large spice containers that are mostly seen in warehouse-type stores.
Dollar stores are good for experimenting, too, particularly with spices. The containers are reasonably sized for a spice drawer, and whichever ones get used up quickly can be refilled from larger containers later.
Since you mention affordability, I’ll link a free PDF book about it:
Leanne Brown – Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day. That was $4 in 2013, which could well be 6-8 now; anyway, it’s made to be affordable to people receiving government nutritional assistance (“food stamps”).
Mayo
It’s also pretty easy to MAKE mayonnaise, but of course a COOKING SHOW featuring RFK Junior only has you BUYING ingredients because he’s NO CHEF. In fact, what IS he, exactly? I mean, besides being an insane nepo baby?
What the hell...
Kennedy is a ridiculous fool, and for me personally–as a disabled person–the most dangerous man in the government. Trust me: you do not hate him as much as I hate him.
We do not need to make up bullshit to criticize him for.
Per meal costs are about the amount you use not the amount you buy. 11 eggs don’t leap out of your fridge while you sleep because you only used a single egg in a recipe.
Get it together. You lose credibility when you push this kind of nonsense.
A Calculus of Integral Diagnosis
Wait, are you reporting that RFK Jr. has cyclosporiasis? And it’s his secret to sourcing inexpensive meal ingredients, just as it is to his acumen for intelligent discourse?
I shudder to imagine what the meals will taste like if he gets Ebola, then bleeds out of his nipples on the Internet.
No one — absolutely NO ONE — thinks of salmon as a “low-cost” or “inexpensive” meal. That’s all you need to hear from Bobby Brainworm to know that he is completely batshit insane and out of touch with reality.
All this back-and-forth about how many pennies-per-whatever something should or shouldn’t cost is just distraction — it’s what they want us to be talking about.
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What about people who like to go fishing? It’s apparently not an easy fish to catch, and will take time, but there are lots of guides online.