Let the Man Cook
RFK Jr's latest proposal might be his most quietly radical yet
At a USDA event on Wednesday, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he had plans to teach Americans how to cook, so they can wean themselves off their addiction to the ultra-processed foods that are responsible, in large part, for the chronic-disease epidemic ravaging the nation. A full 70% of American adults are now overweight or obese; 1 in 31 children has an autism diagnosis; and rates of diabetes, digestive conditions, neurodegenerative diseases and cancers are all rising sharply, especially among young people.
“One of the challenges we’re facing and that we’re working on—all kinds of innovative devices to solve—is that Americans have forgotten how to cook,” Kennedy told the audience.
He said Americans could feed themselves better food for less—if only they knew how.
“The convenience of fast food is one of the things that attracts them. And many of them don’t have cutlery, they don’t have pots and pans, they don’t have cutting boards, and they don’t know how to shop.
“And one of the things that we’re talking about now to HHS is to use the Commission Corps or other groups within our agency to go out and actually teach people to cook.”
That’s quite the idea: sending government workers out into American communities to teach them how to cook.
Kennedy continued: Cooking and eating together as a family is a “sacred ritual,” one that has even greater importance as families break apart and we all spend more and more time staring at screens instead of engaging with one another.
“It’s something that brings families together for an hour or two hours a day where they talk, where they interact, where they work together on an act of creation, and then they eat together in this wonderful ritual that brings families together and reconnects them to each other,” Kennedy said.
“We need to figure out ways to bring us all back together, and food is the way to do that. It is opening the door to bring all Americans back together to give them good food to eat and reteach them that ritual of cooking.”
It’s no surprise America lags significantly behind European countries in terms of the number of people who regularly cook food for themselves. Americans make fewer meals for themselves and their loved ones than the average Western European, in France or Italy especially.
But it’s not just that Americans cook less, or indeed that they cook food that isn’t as nutritious as food in European countries—which I think is also, obviously, true. The entire food culture and the norms that surround eating are different in America. Kennedy is right that convenience is king, and it’s a common feeling that people are just “too busy” or have “better things to do” than taking time to prepare and cook something fresh, and, just as importantly, to sit down and eat it with the same love and attention that went in to making it.
Although there have been significant changes to the way even the French and Italians eat—ultraprocessed food has made enormous inroads in every nation of the Developed World—real food is still an integral part of national and local identity, and for that reason fiercely guarded. It’s an old chestnut that every Italian nonna has her own special ragu and every French village has a different recipe for pot au feu or coq au vin, but like most chestnuts there’s something banging around inside the shell. A kernel of truth. In France and Italy food is something that brings together friends and loved ones all the time, and commensality has a quasi-sacred character setting it apart from any considerations and calculations of expediency and utility.
The good news is in recent years there seems to have been an uptick in the number of Americans who are prepared to make food at home on a regular basis, largely thanks to food-preparation apps and services that provide recipes and fresh ingredients delivered directly to your door.
Still, there’s a long way to go.
Learning to cook is one of the best ways you can take control of your health, alongside exercise, a proper sleep schedule and reducing your exposure to harmful chemicals as much as possible.
It’s one of the first things I tell people to do when they ask me questions like, “What are three things I can do to improve my health?”
That’s why my very first published book as the Raw Egg Nationalist was a cookbook: Raw Egg Nationalism in Theory and Practice: Cook Good with the Raw Egg Nationalist.
I thought to myself, what could be a better way to spread the new doctrine of raw-egg nationalism than by showing people how to make delicious healthy food? Eggs raw and cooked. Steak and steak sauces. Restaurant quality no-churn ice cream, and brioche eggy-bread stacks.
Imagine going to a friend’s house and while you’re hanging around you see a cool-looking cookbook on the table, so you pick it up and it’s full of great recipes but then you start reading about how the Agricultural Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race and how the same forces that are destroying Western nations are also destroying the food supply and making us all sick…
I was a chef, very briefly; although I have no formal training, other than being a pretty good home cook. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family where we always sat down to eat nutritious homemade meals. Mum would cook every evening—I remember her spaghetti bolognese, cottage pie, stews, pork chops, ratatouille with vegetables from the garden—and Dad would usually handle the Sunday roast. I learned to cook from both of them, and I went with them to the butcher, the greengrocer and farm shops to buy the ingredients.
When I thought I’d like a change of direction after I finished my doctorate at Oxford, I decided to become a chef at a local hipster diner. The realities of slaving away over a hotplate all day and coming home stinking of clarified butter soon disabused me of that notion, but that did nothing to kill my love of food.
Not a single day passes when I don’t cook something, even if I’m just reheating a portion of my favourite gelatin-rich oxtail stew.
The best thing is: I know exactly what goes in my body and where it came from.
I’d be the first to tell you this is a luxury, enabled by modest wealth and living in a part of the world—the Westcountry—where high-quality food exists in abundance.
One goal of an administration that really cares about health should be to spread some of that luxury around, and in doing so make it commonplace.
