Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took aim at CNN anchor Erin Burnett this week after one of his “affordable” meal plans got a blistering price-check on TV.
Wednesday’s installment of CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” featured a segment on “The Real Food Show,” Kennedy’s new YouTube series that is purportedly aimed at making “healthy, affordable cooking simple and accessible for every American.”
In his report, CNN correspondent Tom Foreman found that the ingredients for one of the show’s featured recipes ― wild Alaskan salmon cakes with a white-bean salad, intended for a family of four ― cost $70.54 at a local grocery store. Kennedy, however, had touted the total cost at just $19.64 on his show.
“I do not see, having made this, how you could walk into a grocery store with $20 and come out with everything you need for this,” Foreman said.
On Thursday night, Kennedy blasted Burnett and CNN over the segment in a lengthy post on X.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome has so debilitated [Burnett] that she has abandoned both common sense and basic arithmetic,” he wrote. “CNN wants us to incorporate the full package price of every ingredient, regardless of what is used in the recipe.”
“The Real Food Show,” he explained, emphasizes “standard recipe costing, we count what the recipe actually uses. The rest stays in your kitchen for the next meal—and the meals after that.”
“Our goal is simple: help Americans reclaim their kitchens, cook healthy food without breaking the bank, and stock their pantries with high-quality ingredients they can use again and again,” he continued. “That’s how we Make America Healthy Again.”
Despite Kennedy’s claim, Foreman acknowledges “The Real Food Show” uses “standard recipe-costing methodology,” meaning that Kennedy and his cohorts were basing the estimated cost of each recipe on the amount of each specific ingredient used.
“They’re only pricing parts of it, and grocery stores don’t sell things that way,” he says in his report, before noting that Kennedy’s price claims would still be “very hard to swallow” for many consumers.
As of Friday morning, Kennedy’s X comments had drawn an assortment of snarky responses.
“You do realize I can’t just go to the grocery store and buy a single squirt of ketchup, right?” one person wrote.
Added another, “I don’t usually keep sockeye salmon in my pantry for future recipes.”
Kennedy is the second Trump administration official to embark on a foray into reality TV this summer, to particularly divisive results.
On Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy launched “The Great American Road Trip,” a YouTube series chronicling his seven-month trek across the U.S. with his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children.
The show, however, was met with accusations of “gift laundering,” given that some of the show’s sponsors ― including Toyota and United Airlines ― are overseen by Duffy’s department, creating a possible conflict of interest.
Duffy also drew criticism for an episode in which he urges his 18-year-old daughter, Paloma, to reconsider attending Boston’s Harvard University if she gets accepted. The Ivy League institution, he said, has been known to “take good young girls like you” and “corrupt their minds.”
