Food

RFK Jr. Wants the Government To Teach Everyone How To Cook Again

Can we trust the federal government and its ever-changing nutrition guidelines, to teach us how and what to cook?

Marc Oestreich | 7.13.2026 1:05 PM

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(Illustration: Midjourney)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a plan for your kitchen, and he has been unusually specific about it.

In a recent interview with U.S. News, the secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services laid it out. Medical students will take cooking classes, then "go out into the communities and teach people how to cook in a mobile unit." The roughly 5,000 uniformed officers of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps are "taking nutrition classes and developing teaching kitchens." A new federal platform will post recipes for eating well on $10 a day, plus videos on grocery shopping and—his words—"how to use cutlery and cutting boards." The diagnosis behind the whole program, offered at a conference in March: "people have forgotten how to cook."

Maybe some have. Americans could certainly stand to cook more. But the institution volunteering to teach them has spent 46 years issuing dietary instruction with total confidence, reversing much of it, and responding to each failure by extending its reach.

The current doctrine arrived on January 7, when Kennedy and Agriculture........

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