Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is trying to take America back to a time when food ingredient lists didn’t read like a chemistry set. That’s what he says, at least. He’s staked a big part of his political cache on fighting ultraprocessed foods, so it’s kind of strange that he recently praised Mom’s Meals, a company slinging $7 microwave dinners to Medicaid and Medicare enrollees, as a “solution for making our country healthy again.”
The problem doesn’t really lie with the meals themselves; eat what you want. It’s the fact that those meals are loaded with the exact ultraprocessed ingredients RFK Jr.’s been railing against.
The company’s menu, filled with the same kind of dishes you find in a frozen Lean Cuisine, is exactly the sort of convenient calorie-bombs Kennedy is supposedly firmly against. According to an AP review and experts like NYU food policy expert Marion Nestle, these are ultraprocessed meals loaded with additives, salt, and sugar, despite claims to the contrary.
“Every one of the meals I looked at is loaded with such additives,” Nestle said, noting they could be made from scratch with real food…but aren’t. Mom’s Meals insists they avoid some stuff, like synthetic dyes and high fructose corn syrup, but that doesn’t magically make a reheatable Ham Patty with Cheesy Potatoes and Cinnamon Apples a superfood. It’s just a TV dinner re-branded as something healthier than it actually is.
Still, the meals are federally funded and targeted at vulnerable groups like older folks, people with chronic illness, people recently discharged from the hospital, and all covered by Medicaid and some Medicare plans. That’s potentially millions and millions of taxpayer dollars going to meals that aren’t what they claim to be, and definitely not what RFK Jr. claims them to be.
And therein lies the problem with most ready-made meals. You cannot reasonably expect to create prepackaged, ready-to-eat microwavable meals without including at least some, if not several, shelf-stable ingredients that are only shelf-stable because they are ultraprocessed.
In this war against ultraprocessed foods, people tend to forget that without them, food would rot at a much faster rate, leading to enormous waste. Promoting something as a perfect example of a solution in your crusade against ultraprocessed foods when it is, in fact, an ultraprocessed food product demonstrates how little attention to detail you are giving your job.
This was not at all surprising given how many health reports Trump and RFK Jr’s administration has released that cited studies that do not exist, which suggests they were AI-generated and weren’t even fact-checked after that to make sure it was all on the up and up. Pure laziness.
RFK Jr. claims he cares, that he wants to make a difference, but that’s all talk. His actions (or lack thereof) say otherwise. When it comes to putting in the work necessary to demonstrate that he cares, he falls woefully short.
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