The US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has got his work cut out for him. A cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce has the entire country playing salad roulette: one bad leaf and you could become very unwell. The condition isn’t normally deadly, but, on Monday, officials in Michigan confirmed the first two fatalities. Meanwhile, it’s the worst year for measles in the US since 1991. A disease that was once eliminated now looks as though it’s back with a vengeance – thanks in part, according to experts, to anti-vaxxers such as Kennedy himself. And this week New York officials are warning about a rare tick-borne illness called rabbit fever (tularemia).
Still, despite having rather a lot on his plate, Kennedy has found the time to front a new cooking show, hosted on YouTube. It’s called The Real Food Show and it’s supposed to help Americans prepare healthy, affordable meals at home. The first episode features the chef and TV personality Andrew Gruel (perfect name) teaching the US to prepare crispy salmon cakes with … salad. Which is certainly a bold way to kick things off.
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Of all the things that the health secretary is doing, hosting a cookery show is probably the least offensive. Still, I can’t say that the idea of Kennedy as an affordable food influencer is particularly appetising. This is a man who has boasted that he will “literally eat anything” because he doesn’t “have a gag reflex”. A man who has had to publicly clarify that the skeleton he was gnawing in a viral photo belonged to a goat and not a barbecued dog. A man who once dumped a dead bear in Central Park (after deciding not to skin it and freeze it), reportedly cut the penis off a roadkill raccoon and is said to have been obsessed with seagull skulls. And who can forget the worm that “ate a portion of” his brain? Experts believe he may have contracted the tapeworm larva from eating undercooked pork. In short, I wouldn’t want Kennedy anywhere near my own kitchen.
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Kennedy, who also has a new podcast, is not the only Trump official who is fond of the cameras. The transportation secretary Sean Duffy (a former reality TV star) recently spent seven months filming a show called The Great American Road Trip, despite various crises hitting his department – including a partial government shutdown that led to Transportation Security Administration agents leaving in droves after not being paid. Duffy travelled across the US with his Fox News host wife and their nine children for the show, which was sponsored by companies his department regulates, such as Boeing and Shell. It seems that many Trump officials don’t really want to do the hard work that comes with being a government official; they’d rather play one on TV.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
