Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the agency was talking about a plan to “teach people to cook,” noting that Americans “have forgotten how to cook.”
During a press conference on Wednesday, Kennedy, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, and Dr. Ben Carson, announced the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) “commencement of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Strategic Partnerships,” and gave an update on the “Stocking Standards final rule,” according to a press release from the USDA.
Kennedy spoke about how Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was taking the dietary guidelines and putting them into “military meals.” Kennedy explained that Hegseth “hired a dietician,” celebrity chef Robert Irvine, who is “changing the meals on all the military bases” in the United States so that they are “real food, fresh food, locally sourced, whole food.”
Roughly one-third of soldiers were eating at the cafeteria, Kennedy explained, adding that soldiers were instead spending their paychecks on fast food. Kennedy noted that after the change, “There’s lines around the block,” and soldiers have “stopped eating the local fast food.”
Kennedy shared that Irvine had stated that people “don’t need more money to eat good food, you just need to buy smarter.”
“Every American can feed themselves cheaper than fast food,” Kennedy said, adding that “one of the challenges” HHS was facing and working to solve was that “Americans have forgotten how to cook.”
“Well, the convenience of fast food is one of the things that attracts them. Many of them don’t have the cutlery, they don’t have the pots and pans, they don’t have the cutting boards, and they don’t know how to shop,” Kennedy added. “One of the things that we’re talking about now at HHS is to use the Commissioned Corps or other groups within our agency to go out and actually teach people to cook.”
Kennedy’s announcement comes as he said last week that HHS would ask companies such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks to provide “safety data” regarding their ingredients, the Hill reported.
“We’re going to ask Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks, ‘Show us the safety data that show that it’s OK for a teenage girl to drink an iced coffee with 115 grams of sugar in it,” Kennedy said during a rally.
As HHS secretary, Kennedy has also made good strides towards making Americans healthy again. In March 2025, Kennedy told the CEOs of several key food companies that one of the Trump administration’s “top” priorities was to remove artificial food dyes from the U.S. food supply.
Companies such as General Mills, Nestlé, Hershey, Kraft Heinz, and J.M. Smucker Co. have also announced that they will be working to eliminate artificial dyes and flavors from their products by either mid-2026 or 2027.
