RFK Jr. Promotes Meal Delivery Company That Serves Ultra-Processed Food
from the charlatan dept
Nobody who has read any of my posts about RFK Jr., particularly since his vulgar appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be under any misunderstandings about my opinion of the man. I have made it clear that I believe he is a health crackpot, dealing in wildly dangerous conspiratorial theories, the adoption of which will lead to sickness, misery, and death. I’ve called him plainly incompetent, ignorant of how science works, and incapable of leading the agency in which he’s been put in charge.
But what if all of that is wrong and he’s just a grifting charlatan? I have to wonder if that is the case, reading about his public admiration for Mom’s Meals, a company that delivers cheap, ready-made meals for people on Medicaid and Medicare.
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees.
He even thanked Mom’s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals “without additives” to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.
“This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company’s Oklahoma facility last week.
That whole “without additives” is doing a great deal of vague work for Kennedy. Look, as the saying goes, even a broken Kennedy is right twice a day, and his public and vocal crusade against ultra-processed foods is not without merit. He’s called such food “poison” in past weeks and, while he’s being a bit dramatic in saying so, he’s not wrong that American diets are generally trash and contribute to a bunch of health concerns. And, to the point, ultra-processed foods are a big part of the problem.
Which makes it more than a bit jarring to see him pimp this company that makes food which is, you guessed it, ultra-processed.
The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.
“It is perfectly possible to make meals like this with real foods and no ultra-processing additives but every one of the meals I looked at is loaded with such additives,” Nestle said. “What’s so sad is that they don’t have to be this way. Other companies are able to produce much better products, but of course they cost more.”
Now, to be clear, Mom’s Meals’ food products do not contain the artificial food coloring that Kennedy has also railed against. But that is a far cry from claiming that these meals don’t have any additives and aren’t processed foods. They absolutely are, though I expect Kennedy to play word games as to what “ultra-processed” means. It’s his way.
But the end result of all of this is we can believe one of two realities. Either Kennedy is a combination of so poor a communicator and so incompetent on matters of health to make all of this yet another blunder in his role at HHS…or he’s just completely full of shit and doesn’t actually care about any of this further than what it does for his own grasp on power and/or money.
Either way, well, it’s pretty freaking terrible and a flat-out lie to say this company makes the kind of food Kennedy himself has advocated for all these years.
Filed Under: health, health and human services, maha, medicaid, medicare, rfk jr., ultra processed foods
Companies: mom's meals
Comments on “RFK Jr. Promotes Meal Delivery Company That Serves Ultra-Processed Food”
What if we had an entire Presidential administration made up of grifting charlatans?
Well, what does it mean? I checked Wikipedia, which says “There is no simple definition”. It seems like a term more suited to outrage-creation than scientific understanding.
Sometimes I see a list of ingredients, and think “no human being would make that”. Especially if it’s like 15 things just to make a sauce or topping. But I don’t really know where the line is, if there even is a line.
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There is a scale that runs from “raw food”, via “just cooked” through “processed” into “ultra-processed”. There is no scientific consensus on where the optimum lies, but indications are that too much of (some) ultra-processed foods is bad. We need enough fibers in our diet.
It could very well be that the optimal diet varies with age. It certainly should be adapted to the person.
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That makes it seem like “ultra-processed” would just be really, really well cooked.
So… does “ultra-processed” mean “lacking in fiber”?
If we don’t first agree what it means, or what its “scale” measures, how can we research whether it’s bad, or understand statements saying it’s bad? Nevermind finding an “optimum”.
Honestly, it seems more of a slur—like “junk food” or “fast food”—than a meaningful descriptor. (While “fast-food restaurants” are a well-defined concept, the food itself is neither fast nor slow; slower restaurants often serve near-identical meals.)
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It is just a junk descriptor based on, and made to play on, the feels.
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No, it’s a descriptor used in nutritional science: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38776524/.
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Alright, here’s a copy of the paper, which on page 3 defines “ultra-processed foods” as being “NOVA4″, which according to an official publication quoted by Wikipedia is:
This has various vague terms, such as “small amounts”. The elided text talks about “processes enabling” their manufacture, and of what they’re “designed to” do, neither of which is definitionally helpful. The “no culinary use” list is outright bullshit. Gluten? That gives dough elasticity; I and other bakers sometimes add it when making certain types of bread, for that reason. Carbonation is in no way “cosmetic”; nor are “thickeners”, which are commonly added to soups and other foods by regular people. Many of these substances such as fructose and lactose are found naturally in normal culinary ingredients such as fruit, vegetables, and milk.
So, anything that has milk in it is “ultra-processed”—unless that milk has been industrially processed to remove the lactose. The same goes for apple, banana, onion, carrot, or corn, due to the fructose. Note that the “operationally distinguishable” text seems to ignore the earlier requirements for “industrial manufacture” and “small amounts” of “group 1”. So, depending on how one intreprets that, either almost everything I make in my kitchen or buy un-processed from a produce department is “ultra-processed”; or none of it is, but the exact same things would be if they passed through a factory.
That’s not scientific, even if it’s managed to fool some scientists.
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If you read the thing you quoted it prefaces the list with *varieties of”. If you make a dough the traditional way it produces “normal” gluten, but there are processes which extracts gluten and process it for later use in industrialized breadmaking because it shortens the time the dough has to rise since they can just inject air or carbon monoxide together with the industrial variant of gluten.
A lot of things that are extracted from different raw food resources are often accomplished through a chemical process that can leave chemical residue in the finished product. For example, some vegetable oils are extracted from already pressed rapeseed or olives by adding solvents like benzene which are later removed in the chemical process but that process can’t remove 100% of those solvents.
If people actually knew and understood how some ingredients used in many foodstuffs are made and what kind of chemicals are involved they would never buy the shit they do.
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That’s the list of sugars, “fructose” and “invert sugar” being some of the varieties. It’s not clear whether the prefix grammatically applies to the protein source list, but it also doesn’t matter: “gluten” is one such variety, “casein” is another, and so on.
Perhaps you think “varieties” has the meaning of “deviations”, but I don’t see any basis for such a reading. Either way, if we can’t agree on what it means, it’s a problematic definition for something we intend to use in hard science.
Anyway, they specifically talk about the mere “presence of food substances” as listed; whether gluten develops on its own or is added as you describe, it’s present, thereby meeting the NOVA4 criterion for “ultra-processed”. Nevermind that we have no real basis for assuming that “ultra-processed” generally means “NOVA4”.
I note that your oil example doesn’t seem to have any implication under the NOVA4 definition. That you mentioned it in the context of “ultra-processed food” seems to support the view that people are using the term based on personal feelings.
Sure. One type of food coloring is made from ground-up insects. It’s gross whether it counts as “ultra-processed” or not, and I doubt any home cook would ever get a mortar and pestle and some insects to adjust the color of their food.
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TBH, I thought we already do.
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Yeah, we’re in Finding Out Town now.
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I think that was the joke.
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I think that sometimes precise definitions are necessary to prevent people to treat something like a vaguely scary boogeyman, (or like an infinitely good thing).
I don’t have a clear definition either, but to use a concrete example, I can see some difference between, say, if you squeeze out some milk from a cow, if you pasteurize and homogenize such milk,
or if you literally assemble “milk” from lactose, protein, and some other stuff you isolated or created in a lab + some conservants and various crap to make it look normal.
(And I wouldn’t feel good drinking that. Even though, this statement only reinforces the statement of someone here that the “ultraprocessed” label is used mainly to play on the feelings of people, I guess. Though I would use a different label: “A bunch of artificial crap”)
I’m sorry but Marion Nestle is simply too on the nose
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Nominative determinism strikes again!
Given that he doesn’t believe in germs, his understanding of anything is going to be wrong at best.
The worms really did a number on his brain. Far-right talking points did a number on what was left.
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Which definition of “left” would that be?
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Yes.
You still don't get current-breed Republicans?
Why choose? If the Republican Party has learnt anything, it is to have their cake and eat it too, preferably both on somebody else’s tab and shitting on their floor.
Follow the money
What’s the odds that Kennedy has an investment in the company? I’d say, given the current regime of adminis-grifters, the odds are significant.
I’m going to go listen to some Dead Kennedys now.
What is the over under on him thinking because it’s called Mom’s Meals he thinks a mom is making each meal and its not just mass produced crap?
I mean he is dumber than a box of rocks.
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When Futurama’s “MomCorp Old-Fashioned Jams” becomes reality.
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Careful here. A box of rocks can assume a multitude of states. I mean, an abacus is essentially a well-lined-up box of rocks.
Grifting?
Is there any question about that? He DID apparently make millions by promoting anti-vaccine conspiracies.
I hope RFK will never read or watch “Soylent Green”, he would say “This is really the best solution for making our country healthy again”
yellow 5, also known as
trisodium 1-(4-sulfonatophenyl)-4-(4-sulfonatophenylazo)-5-pyrazolone-3-carboxylate
The only bright side of Trump installing incompetent people in positions of power is even many in the MAGA crowd are going to find it hard to ignore. Although, to be fair, they have done a fabulous job of ignoring Trump’s lies, crimes and word salad responses, so…
Wow! *continues to eat Doritos
What if we had an entire Presidential administration made up of grifting charlatans?
The thing that’s “special” about this one is that the clown at the top has been pretending that he isn’t one for so long and so hard that he’s under the impression that nobody can tell.
Even he doesn't believe his own crap
By and large you can eat healthy, or you can eat cheaply, because the cheaper something is the less expensive it’s likely to be since fresh ingredients are costly and are only going to get more so in the US.
If RFK Jr. actually wanted to get healthy food to people he should have fought back hard against the Big Blunder of a Bill and it’s cuts to programs like SNAP, as well as fighting against any cuts to programs that will leave people with less money to spend on things like food since an inevitable outcome of such cuts is buying the cheapest food you can get, no matter how unhealthy or ‘processed’ it might be.
RFK Jr makes ~$1M/y
All on his anti-vax, massive FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) on Autism. He promotes fear because he leverages the guilt that many parents of autistic children share. Which is nonsense, once it was understood (not by dead brain worm guy) that it was affected by 50-60 genes (last I heard)
To think he actually believed he would fit in the Harris/Walz cabinet too
Let us not forget he takes phoned in cancer cases as well. What a guy