Fellow Americans, if you have you ever thought Sure, our culture has produced some great TV over the decades, but it has never created a cooking show hosted by a cokehead rich dilettante who looks like a canned ham someone left out in the sun, then today is your lucky day.
Such a show now exists, and it is hosted by none other than roadkill aficionado Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The nation’s Secretary of Health and Human Services has started posting episodes of the cleverly titled The Real Food Show on YouTube. Unfortunately, the first two episodes do not teach us the best way to cook raccoon penis, but maybe he’ll get to that in the future.
RFK Jr has long harped on how Americans can eat healthy food that is also inexpensive. That is the thrust of the first episode, in which RFK Jr and a professional chef with the ironic last name of Gruel cook up some salmon cakes and an arugula salad. The gimmick: the secretary asked the chef to keep the cost at under $5 per serving.
You’ve heard about the suspension of disbelief in movies and TV? Well, it also applies to RFK Jr.’s cooking show, if you are looking for advice on buying cheap. The show includes a breakdown of costs for all the ingredients, and to say the numbers don’t add up is like saying that RFK Jr’s voice sounds like someone is running a lawnmower over a gravel driveway. As in, it’s mind-bogglingly obvious. A CNN reporter unsurprisingly found out when he tried to recreate the meal:
It’s true, the two men are cooking wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, and if you are wondering where you can buy enough wild Alaskan sockeye salmon for a family of four for $8.99, uh, we don’t know. Maybe your local Dollar Tree has a seafood section? We checked, and we can’t get even frozen, pre-packaged sockeye that cheap at our local Aldi’s or Costco or even Walmart.
But “family of four” is the standard by which RFK Jr and Gruel are calculating the cost of this meal, as you can see in the picture up top. So that is the standard by which we are judging this absurd garbage.
RFK Jr mentions using canned salmon at one point. Even the canned stuff is $9 or $10 bucks for one 6-ounce can of sockeye. You are not making enough salmon cakes for a family of four with one 6-ounce can.
Of course, you can buy cheap tins of Chicken by the Sea Pink Salmon, but that’s not wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, is it? This is consistent with past statements from RFK Jr, who has suggested that if you can’t afford beef and you need protein, you can substitute cheap organ meat. Great, we’ll let you know when we figure out how to make chicken liver burgers.
That entire list of costs is hilarious. Sure, you might only use 21 cents worth of olive oil to cook your salmon cakes. Unfortunately, grocery stores don’t sell olive oil in small enough increments to cost 21 cents. And if you can find eggs that cost 25 cents per, where are you shopping? 1971?
In between all these incredibly unhelpful shopping tips, you get the usual blast of RFK Jr bullshit. For example, he once again repeats his old lie that Froot Loops used to be at the top of the food pyramid. What was actually at the top of the food pyramid was “fats, oils and sweets,” and the reason that stuff was at the top was that it was because you were supposed to eat it sparingly. Food categories got healthier as you went down the pyramid, so the message that healthy stuff should make up the base of your diet got across.
RFK Jr is very proud that under his guidance, the government flipped the food pyramid. But all that really did is invert a handy-dandy nutrition guide so it now looks like sugar and fat are the tiny point supporting the rest of your diet. Our government is pushing nutrition information this way because the Health and Human Services secretary does not understand how shapes work.
And all of this was moot, since the FDA replaced the food pyramid with something called MyPlate in 2011. But that was when godless communist Barack Hussein Obama was in office and his wife was trying to shove healthy lifestyles down our throats. This is totally different, for reasons.
RFK Jr now becomes the second Cabinet member to host a reality show on the taxpayer dime, following Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and his family taking a road trip like a religious remake of National Lampoon’s Vacation. It was supposed to run before America’s Big 250th Birthday, but instead was unceremoniously dumped onto YouTube this week.
Who’ll be next? Maybe Todd Blanche will resurrect The People’s Court. We can already hear the ghost of Judge Wapner screaming in protest.
[YouTube]
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Pretty picture time. A spicebush swallowtail butterfly on ironweed.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-319051396?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
Just stumbled across this.
Sinéad O'Connor/Roger Waters - "Mother"
https://youtu.be/-6rNEeGQJas?si=QIEyG980Oc1ZUXHG
If I was aware of this concert before, I have since forgotten it and covid zapped it out of my brain. I must find it. And if i know Wonkette like I know Wonkette some helpful person will suddenly appear with a link.
"On June 17, 1981, at Earls Court in London, Pink Floyd performed The Wall for the last time. At the time, few imagined anyone would have the cash nor the cojones to restage the show, but in 1990, Roger Waters – who left the band in 1985 – rallied an impressive array of celebrated guests and performed the entire thing again in Berlin.
The show took place on Potsdamer Platz, a former public square that had been bisected by The Berlin Wall. Local heroes The Scorpions opened the show with In the Flesh?, while some of the more unlikely turns included Joni Mitchell (Goodbye Blue Sky), a version of Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 led by Cyndi Lauper, and a version of The Trial featuring contributions from a cast that included Marianne Faithfull and actor Albert Finney.
Perhaps the most moving moment was when the late Sinéad O'Connor stepped forward to sing a haunting version of Mother. Flanked by Waters as well as The Band's Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson, she looks tiny, but the performance is huge, poignancy personified, although Helm and Danko’s harmonies are a little clunky. Hudson's accordion solo is better."
https://www.loudersound.com/bands-artists/roger-waters-sinead-oconnor-pink-floyd-mother-berlin