‘I Couldn’t Make It Work!’ CNN Correspondent Price-Checks RFK Jr’s Cooking Show

CNN’s Tom Foreman took on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cooking challenge to make nutritious meals at budget-friendly prices, but said he just “couldn’t make” the math work.

Foreman attempted to recreate one of two recipes so far released by Kennedy on his new YouTube project, “The Real Food Show,” which promises examples of, “real food at affordable prices.”

“What I found was, I think what a lot of people are finding who watch this show — with the cost of groceries up, some of these claims are hard to swallow,” Foreman said before playing a clip of Kennedy and his guest chef whipping up
a dish of crispy salmon cakes with apple white beans and green salad.

“So the servings of each of these, we asked to keep it under $5,” Kennedy said of the recipe.

“That’s the pitch, and prices fly by, backing the idea of a family-sized meal for a bite-sized budget,” Foreman said before embarking on a grocery run.

“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 said.

He continued:

This was the cheapest frozen wild-caught sockeye salmon we could find. The closest to what they are using. They priced 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 eight cents 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 this at 40 cents, because they were only using a couple of tablespoons to buy. The whole thing cost us more than $11. They’re only pricing parts of it. And grocery stores don’t sell things that way.

“HHS insists this is standard recipe costing methodology, and they want to help Americans stock up on high-quality ingredients they can use across many meals,” Foreman added.

Following the cooking instructions, Foreman said the meal “came out at home pretty much as it looks online.”

“But while the show repeatedly says this dish will cost less than $20 to feed a family of four, just getting all those ingredients into our kitchen cost a whopping $70.54. Nobody is against helping people save money. Nobody is against people trying to eat in a more healthy way. But I’m telling you, Boris, I tried. I couldn’t make it work,” Foreman said to host Boris Sanchez.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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