The first episode of the new Secretary Kennedy Podcast, produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), opens with this quote from guest Robert Irvine, who creates meal plans for the US military: “We talk about food being expensive. If you’re buying expensive food, it’s expensive. But if you’re buying food and you know what to do with it, it’s not expensive.”
The episode is titled Fixing America’s Food System – Robert Irvine, and features a 45-minute conversation with the HHS secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the host of the show, and guest Irvine. Best known as a celebrity chef, Irvine has collaborated with the US military to launch Victory Fresh, a program that offers healthy grab-and-go meals on military bases, during the Biden administration. The program’s Biden-era origins are never acknowledged during the show.
Throughout their conversation, Irvine and Kennedy use examples from Irvine’s work negotiating vendor prices and creating meal plans to suggest that Americans could be eating healthier and more affordably if they were smarter about their grocery shopping.
“When you think about chicken wings, chicken wings used to be cat food, dog food, throw-away food. Now it’s more expensive than chicken breast. So why are we not using dark meat? Why are we not helping people understand those cheaper cuts of meat or cheaper vegetables?” Irvine says in the episode.
Later, he adds: “Because I grew up in England … I didn’t know about okra and avocados and all the other stuff. Now I do, obviously. So it’s about education, purchasing correctly, cooking correctly.”
Notably absent from the conversation is any mention of how Trump administration policies have contributed to rising grocery costs, including for healthier “whole foods”. Tariffs combined with immigration crackdown-related labor shortages have caused the price of food to surge.
Irvine shared with Kennedy some techniques he’s used to save money when preparing meals at scale. For example, he found it was more cost-effective to buy whole melons and have his staff chop them, rather than paying more for pre-chopped melons. Still, Kennedy and Irvine offer no specific advice for average families juggling both time and money who are looking to eat healthier.
In a statement to the Guardian, the HHS press secretary, Emily Hilliard, said the claim that food costs have risen under Trump is “ridiculous”, and blamed the Biden administration for rising inflation, adding that “shopping with savvy and intentionality, Americans will find the outer edges of their grocery stores replete with whole fruits and vegetables … These foods are covered by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [Snap] in every state and do not require ingredient lists – because whole foods do not contain ingredients, they are ingredients.”
Hilliard did not note that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act has been significantly reducing Snap benefits since the end of last year.
Kennedy and Irvine later lamented the typical US diet and the cost of treating what they see as diet-related conditions.
“The processed foods are making us sick. We now have the highest chronic disease burden in the entire world … We’ve gone from spending zero on chronic disease, when my uncle was president in 1960, to spending $4.3tn a year. It’s the biggest budget item in the federal government … The costs are ruinous. Forty cents out of every taxpayer dollar that we give to the federal government is going to treat diseases that are diet-related,” said Kennedy. A KFF analysis found that in 2024 only 27% of the federal budget was spent on healthcare programs and services, representing all health expenditures, not just those related to diet.
Kennedy also said at one point that bipolar and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder were caused by poor diets. While healthy diets can help with brain function, there is no evidence that sugar or diet causes or worsens ADHD, according to the Child Mind Institute.
Irvine and Kennedy then discussed messaging as part of the solution to these health problems, noting Kennedy’s “make America healthy again” Super Bowl ad, which featured Mike Tyson referring to Americans as “obese, fudgy people” and ended with the text “Processed Food Kills, Eat Real Food.”
The ad is part of a necessary message Kennedy is sending, Irvine suggested, adding: “I believe we can do better than what everybody else has done. Talking about making America healthy again, slap it in the face and do it just like you’re doing.”
You can watch and listen to the full podcast, which runs for nearly 48 minutes, on YouTube and elsewhere.
