RFK Jr.’s Offal Advice

ICE agents have kidnapped street vendors in Los Angeles, leaving hot dogs sizzling on unattended griddles. As of this writing, American attacks on Iran make fertilizer much more expensive for American farmers, since not just oil but also fertilizer ingredients must transit the Strait of Hormuz. And, of course, food prices in American supermarkets continue to climb, in part due to tariffs whose legality and constitutionality seems dubious. Between January 2025 and January 2026, the average cost of ground beef went up from 5.54 per pound to 6.75, even as Donald Trump, in his State of the Union address, insisted that the price of beef is going down. This is the most Americans have ever paid for their hamburgers, and yet Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is urging all Americans to eat more meat. The Trump administration seems to break new things every week. The things Kennedy has helped to break so far include our collective herd immunity by vaccination, and the Center for Disease Control itself, firing thousands of employees there. He has now moved on to breaking our understanding of the relationship between food, personal health, and collective health. Kennedy's interest in meat—he has stated that he eats a carnivore diet consisting of meat and fermented foods like sauerkraut, fasts intermittently, and touches no processed foods—is so larded with symbolism and minimally marbled with facts that it deserves special attention. Insisting on meat, to the point of recommending offal if we cannot buy steak, RFK Jr. has also unearthed that well-known diagram, the food pyramid, which was abandoned under the Obama administration in 2011 and replaced with a plate subdivided into types of foods. But this new pyramid is flipped: Grains are at the pyramid’s tiny pointed bottom, and meat, along with vegetables, is at the broad top. If Kennedy's offal advice is a comic turn, the inverted food pyramid attempts to institutionalize the MAHA dietary agenda with potentially serious consequences.