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President Donald Trump is right, at least about this:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wears the thinnest ties. He dons them, unfailingly, with button-down collars, a retro style. This comes as no surprise. After all, RFK is a Kennedy, whose father and uncle popularized the preppy Harvard look. And why wouldn’t RFK stick to it? Being a Kennedy is his charm.
Many kids might fall into drugs after their father dies. Many environmental lawyers might have won the first verdict against the Monsanto Company for Roundup. Many Americans are skeptical of vaccines. Not many are master falconers, but conceivably, they could be. However, not every American with such stories — like Aimee Wagstaff, one of RFK’s fellow attorneys in suing Monsanto — is nationally known or has the sticking power to be, because few of them are also Kennedy scions.
So, few could be a Kennedy hosting a cooking show. But RFK is.
Amid little fanfare, “The Real Food Show,” his cooking series, aired its third episode earlier this month. It received just 143,000 views, about three-fourths as many as the show’s second episode and half as many as its first. That slope is tragic.
It’s not day-spoiling, I admit, but I would like to see the show do well, which is why I was delighted to see the newest episode surpassed the first.
With a 20-minute runtime, the show is based on the premise that Americans eat poorly — true — but that alongside RFK, with the help of his revolving cast of special guest chefs — from restaurateurs to former White House chefs — we can eat better. This point is also true, I propose.
I, a philosophy major with only a trifling interest in figuring out what I should eat on a given day, have found it quite useful to that end. The first episode’s salmon cakes were a scrumptious and wholesome addition to my weekly menu, as I expect the second episode’s omelet will be.
The name “Real Food Show,” I admit, is a bit on the nose. In fact, it is glaringly so. And the parroting of President Donald Trump’s ressentiment while tossing salad is equally as ham-fisted. RFK Jr. does not miss the opportunity to tell us that President Joe Biden “put Fruit Loops at the top of the food pyramid.”
When one gets past these moments, however, the dishes that RFK learns to make alongside us, for only a little money, go a long way. Nutrients-wise, they beat feasting on another pizza this week, which, statistically, a sixth of college students will do, out of the water — salmon, remember? Pun intended.
Yes, you could learn to eat a fuller diet from a regular cooking show, but you’d miss the Kennedy fashion, the smile that RFK can’t help when former White House chef Andre Rush swings a knife into a cutting board and his salted-in factoids about uncle Ted Kennedy.
One wonders if RFK might have been better off staying away from the family business of politics and instead spent his efforts in starting this show in the private sector. But some amount of government intervention in the food world is unavoidable, with the existence of programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and a growing segment of the population that eyes government solutions. If the government must be in food, then, being on the side of good health is for the better.
Indeed, it’s commendable that RFK did something in the conservative movement which mainstream Democrats — he did run for the party’s nomination in 2024 — failed to do for years: get conservatives interested in health. Only recently, a politician putting arugula on a salad would have been quite liberal-coded. In fact, a decade ago, Republicans opposed Michelle Obama’s advocacy to bring healthier lunches into K–12 schools.
And that’s something only a Kennedy might have been capable of doing, especially the loose-cannon member of the family. Which is, dear college student, the crucial reason that you should stay tuned in to “The Real Food Show”: it’s a fun, charming introduction to new menu items hosted by one of contemporary American politics’ most interesting figures.
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a junior studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government. His column normally appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Never miss them or his other opinionated musings on X.
