RFK Jr. has chosen the hill he wants to die on, and it’s a squirt of ketchup.
Recently, Trump-era Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched his YouTube cooking series, The Real Food Show, where he tries to prove to Americans that they can eat nutritiously without breaking the bank, boasting that many of his meals can cost less than five bucks a serving, making healthy food “affordable for every family.”
The problem is, he’s full of shit — and CNN proved as much, leading Mr. Brain Worm to blow a gasket all over social media because how dare anyone make him look like a tone-deaf, out-of-touch asshole on live television.
Recently, Kennedy’s recipe for wild Alaskan salmon cakes with a side salad went viral, as he boasted a price of under $20 for a family of four to enjoy the meal.
This week, CNN journalist Tom Foreman put it to the test on OutFront with Erin Burnett and, wouldn’t you know, their bill came out to a whopping $70.54.
Kennedy lost whatever portion of his mind the worms didn’t eat when the CNN report went public, accusing Burnett and Foreman of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and abandoning “both common sense and basic arithmetic.”
“CNN wants us to incorporate the full package price of every ingredient, regardless of what is used in the recipe. If you put a squirt of ketchup on your burger, would you be surprised if the restaurant charged you for the whole bottle?” Kennedy fumed on X.
He argued that his cooking show uses “standard recipe costing,” trying to explain “we count what the recipe actually uses” while “the rest” of the purchased ingredients “stay in the kitchen.”
Trump Derangement Syndrome has so debilitated @ErinBurnett that she has abandoned both common sense and basic arithmetic.
CNN wants us to incorporate the full package price of every ingredient, regardless of what is used in the recipe.
If you put a squirt of ketchup on your… https://t.co/0vUy9yoJdC
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) August 21, 2026
But CNN wasn’t focusing on “standard recipe costing.” Instead, they showed what this recipe would actually cost to make from scratch for families who consistently face too much money at the end of the month under the Trump Administration.
The fact of the matter is, you cannot go to a grocery store and purchase single servings of any of these ingredients. That’s simply not how the world works.
Secretary Kennedy, do you buy ketchup one squirt at a time?
— El Coyote (@kbo_coyote) August 21, 2026
“When we started buying ingredients used in the show, even going for the lowest prices at a big, competitive chain, the cost heated up fast,” Foreman explained.
“This was the cheapest frozen wild-caught sockeye salmon we could find, the closest to what they are using. They price theirs at $8.99; the cheapest we could find – even with the deal from the store – was more than $24. Now the greens mix, that was about the same cost. So were the eggs on a per-egg basis. But that’s the trick here because they’re only pricing that one egg out of the carton.
And that gets worse with other things. For example, this red onion, they say they only spent $0.08 on this because that’s how much they used. Getting the whole onion cost us more than a dollar. And look at this: this is the avocado mayonnaise; they priced it at $0.40 because they were only using a couple of tablespoons. The whole thing cost us more than $11.
They’re only pricing parts of it, and grocery stores don’t sell things that way.”
Foreman tasted the meal and was happy to admit that it was healthy and enjoyable. Still, it was not affordable: “I do not see having made this, how you can walk into a grocery store with $20 and come out with everything you need for this, making that part of the claim from any consumers, I think, very hard to swallow.”
