RFK Jr. Is Launching The Real Food Show, a Cooking Series Built Around Fermented Foods and $5 Meals

The nation’s top health official is stepping into the kitchen, betting that a cooking show built around fermented foods and cheap home meals can nudge Americans toward better eating.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is launching The Real Food Show today, a cooking series meant to turn the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans into meals people can make at home for under $5 a serving whenever possible.

The Health and Human Services Secretary told USA TODAY the recipes lean on kimchi, sauerkraut and yogurt, the fermented foods he’s built a following around inside the Trump Cabinet.

He used to bring his own sauerkraut to restaurants until the complaints piled up, mostly from his wife, actor Cheryl Hines. “It’s hard to carry without spilling it. And when you spill it, it causes other problems,” he said. He now buys it store-bought and insists there’s a correct method: one bite of meat, one bite of sauerkraut.

Kennedy calls cooking a “sacred ritual that has been abandoned” and frames it as an answer to what he describes as an epidemic of isolation. He credits Hines as the far better cook, says his own steaks, meat and fish are the specialty, and learned his omelet from chef Andrew Gruel, who joins the first episode alongside Robert Irvine.

He’s tried going vegan more than once. It never held. “I just had a, a craving, an atavistic craving for protein,” he said, and by his wife’s telling he lasted all of 24 hours.

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