The hypocrisy of RFK Jr. preaching “real food”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to make America healthy again.

That phrase-turned-slogan has become a tentpole of the health secretary’s political ethos — one that places a righteous halo around “real food.” Clean. Unprocessed. Additive-free. In the MAHA worldview, whole foods aren’t just a diet; they’re a doctrine. But only, it seems, if you can afford them.

So it was a curious pivot, then, when Kennedy — fresh off a tour of an industrial food facility in Oklahoma — applauded the company Mom’s Meals for delivering “additive-free” trays to sick and elderly Americans on Medicare and Medicaid. The offerings he praised? Chicken bacon ranch pasta. French toast sticks. Ham patties. Meals that, while technically low on petroleum dyes, are otherwise textbook examples of the ultraprocessed fare Kennedy has spent years denouncing.

As the Associated Press reported, the company’s menu doesn’t exactly scream “clean eating.” In fact, many of the heat-and-eat meals contain the very additives Kennedy has publicly blamed for making Americans sick. According to Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and food policy expert who reviewed the menu for the AP, several items are high in sodium, sugar or saturated fat — far from what most people would consider health food. And they’re not just heavily processed. They’re industrially processed, built with emulsifiers, stabilizers and preservatives you couldn’t buy at a supermarket, let alone cook with at home.

Kennedy has built his political brand on the idea that food is medicine, going as far as to call processed foods “poison.” But as anyone paying attention to American healthcare knows, that promise plays out along a fault line. We live in a two-tiered system: one kind of care for the haves, another for the have-nots. And Republicans, by and large, are comfortable with that. If food is medicine, it follows that “real” food — the kind Kennedy lionizes — should be reserved for those who can afford it. Sick, poor people? Serve them chicken bacon ranch pasta.

There will always be the argument: Isn’t it better that they’re fed? That’s the same logic used to defend the current state of the school lunch system — a system I’ve reported on, and which can best be described as a mess of underfunded mandates and prepackaged compromises.

In 2022, The Lancet, a peer-reviewed journal focused on global public health, published a short article titled “Unhealthy school meals: A solution to hunger or a problem for health?” It’s a fair question. Nearly 30 million American children rely on free or reduced-price school meals as their main source of nutrition. And while those meals technically meet federal nutrition guidelines, they’re often composed of heavily processed foods: breakfast cereal, fruit juice, chicken nuggets, frozen pizza, corn dogs. Add a fruit cup and a carton of milk, and the USDA is satisfied.

As the article notes, the official dietary guidelines don’t actually discourage schools from serving items like corn dogs or pizza, so long as they fall within the acceptable ranges for calories, fat, sugar and salt. But those targets don’t account for processing — and that’s where the real health concerns lie. In recent years, new research has emerged linking the consumption of certain types of ultra-processed food to a slew of chronic illnesses, from heart disease to certain types of cancer.

There’s no precise data yet on how much of the average American school lunch is considered ultra-processed, but the numbers are likely grim. A 2022 study in the U.K. found that about 75% of the calories in school lunches came from ultra-processed foods. Meanwhile, a recent report from Northwestern University estimated that 73% of the U.S. food supply falls into the same category.

The reasons behind this are complex: budget constraints, logistical limitations, kitchen staffing shortages. But the result is the same. When we talk about feeding the most vulnerable people in this country, like children, the elderly and the sick, we’re often talking about feeding them food that’s nutritionally compromised from the start.

All of this — the cafeteria corn dogs, the medically tailored bacon ranch pasta — points to a larger, quieter truth: we’ve learned to dress up processed food in the language of wellness. It’s not just about feeding people anymore; it’s about how the feeding looks. And this isn’t new. In the 1990s and 2000s, “health food” was often the most processed food on the shelf: SnackWell’s cookies, SlimFast shakes, Olestra chips that came with a warning label.

Entire grocery aisles were built around the promise of control — sugar-free, fat-free, guilt-free — delivered via individually wrapped, shelf-stable, microwaveable trays. Meals like meatloaf with mashed potatoes and peas, capped off with a dollop of pudding, were rebranded as virtuous not because they changed, but because they came in a Smart Ones box with less fat and smaller portions.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

It’s the Lean Cuisine-ification of nutrition: comfort food made to look like care. And we’ve been trained to believe it. Trained to squint past the stabilizers and emulsifiers and see a health halo instead, because the label says “balanced,” or “heart-healthy,” or simply because it was portioned and frozen and sold under the banner of choice.

The Mom’s Meals menu is full of familiar comforts engineered to be legible as “healthy.” But what it really reflects is a national tendency to prioritize optics over outcomes — to hunger for the illusion of care, not the cost of it.

And that’s the hypocrisy at the heart of RFK Jr.’s “real food” crusade. He’s built a platform railing against processed food, calling it poison and preaching the gospel of clean eating. But when it comes to the country’s most vulnerable, he’s more than willing to make an exception. Suddenly, heat-and-eat trays packed with additives become part of the solution.

Suddenly, this is what making America healthy again looks like.

Zoom out and the picture becomes painfully clear. We’ve created a culture where health is treated like a performance — something to be signaled, not sustained. Where ultraprocessed food can be repackaged as medicine, as long as the branding is soft enough. Where the sick and the poor are offered faux solutions, shrink-wrapped in words like “balanced” and “approved.”

A country that serves Lunchables to its kids and heat-and-eat pasta to its sick isn’t trying to make anyone healthy.

It’s just trying to look like it cares.