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Helena
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Brooke Rollins is right about meal costs. It’s still not easy to eat healthy.
It’s been more than a week since Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins went mega viral for comments she made about how Americans can follow the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans affordably — and the controversy has only continued.
“We’ve run over 1,000 simulations. It can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla and one other thing,” Rollins said during a NewsNation segment at the White House last Wednesday. Those comments have since ricocheted across the internet, sparking a whole lot of mockery about being out of touch, with no shortage of references to Marie Antoinette.
Rollins this week tried to clear things up.
“I regret that I didn’t make it sound like a more robust plate,” Rollins said, when asked by a reporter at The Hill whether she had been flippant and perhaps regretted it. “Because that is what I meant to make it sound like — a real big piece of chicken, and I meant like big. … I’m a mom of four, and I cook broccoli a lot. For me, that’s a big head of broccoli, a baked potato, etc., a couple pieces of bread,” she added.
Rollins doubled down on her price point though — she said the economists at USDA had indeed run nearly 1,000 simulations, and between $3-4 per meal is “a fair number.” She said she’d just gotten new numbers from USDA staff who determined that an average day of eating according to the dietary guidelines — three meals and a snack — would run an individual $15.64 per day.
The secretary added that she “sort of cringed” at all the criticism she’d gotten. “It wasn’t what I meant. I grew up with a single mom in a really small town, and I certainly never meant to be flippant,” Rollins said. “But I also think that the left or those that were attacking me perhaps know that this is an issue that 90 percent of Americans agree on.”
Let them eat broccoli: Even with the added context from Rollins, Democrats have seized on this. Many lawmakers have posted about her comments, arguing that they illustrate that the Trump administration is out of touch and not taking food inflation seriously. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who’s long been a vocal anti-hunger advocate on Capitol Hill, posted on X yesterday a video of himself rolling his eyes.
“Oh my god — running over 1,000 computer simulations to figure out how close you can get to starving people? Who does that?” McGovern said. “These people have no clue how families struggle in this country right now.”
McGovern drove his point home by calling out that SNAP recipients on average get $2 per person per meal.
Meal math check: For what it’s worth, Rollins is correct. You can put together meals that follow the dietary guidelines for $3 a pop — and certainly for $5 a pop, as she later suggested. This whole deal went so viral that there were several fact checks on this claim, and most of the ones I saw backed Rollins up.
The Wall Street Journal put three reporters on this, hitting grocery stores in two cities, Boston and New Orleans. They concluded: “It was doable, but not necessarily very filling.” Over at Straight Arrow News, a reporter in Omaha actually went to Aldi, Hy-Vee and Whole Foods and did a very detailed breakdown that showed the math worked out. But the reporter noted that a consumer realistically has to spend more because you can’t just buy ingredients for one meal. (In other words, no one is walking out of the store for $3 with one dinner.)
Michael Jacobson, the longtime consumer advocate and founder of Center for Science in the Public Interest, sent me an email last week from his retirement to acknowledge that Rollins was correct.
“I, too (like my Trump-hating friends), questioned Rollins’ statement about a $3 meal, but when I went to Kroger’s and Walmart’s websites I found that she was correct,” Jacobson said.
Caveats, caveats: Of course, none of this analysis takes into account the time it takes to plan meals, shop for the ingredients and prepare them — all very real costs. We don’t have great data to help us measure and quantify these types of costs, according to William Masters, an economist at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition. Still, Masters also agrees that Rollins is correct about the low-cost meal combinations.
“Rollins is right. The problem is that it’s completely tone deaf,” Masters told me this week. “This is supposed to be the richest country in the world.”
“The comment resonates because it gets right to the question of ‘What do they think people deserve? What do they think Americans can afford?’”
Zooming out: The fact that this all hit such a nerve — and people are still talking about it more than a week later — may give us a taste of how food issues are going to play in the midterm elections.
Food inflation was a potent issue in 2024 — as was the whole “Make America Healthy Again” alliance, which we’ve discussed quite a bit in this newsletter (and also over at the podcast I co-host called Forked).
This election season we’re already seeing MAHA flex its political muscle. Just this week, activists raised so much concern over a pesticide liability protection bill in Tennessee that the measure got pulled despite strong backing from the farm bureau and other industry interests. MAHA PAC is also pledging $1 million to back a primary challenger to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the chair of the Senate HELP Committee, who was the pivotal vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to get confirmed as HHS Secretary but who has since raised concerns about Kennedy’s approach to the childhood vaccine schedule, among other things.
If you want a little preview of how the Trump administration is positioning itself, go watch Kennedy’s remarks in Harrisburg, Pa. from this week — sure, it was part of the admin’s “Take Back Your Health” tour, but it sounded more like a re-election campaign speech.
Food policy, it seems, has entered the election chat.
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What I’m reading
FDA releases 2026 deliverables for Human Foods Program (FDA). “Today, FDA’s Human Foods Program (HFP) released its priority deliverables for 2026, as HFP continues to advance its mission, vision, and implementation of its Make America Healthy Again agenda…At a high level, a few of our planned activities include: Food Chemical Safety: Improving the safety of food ingredients by systematically reviewing and, where appropriate, banning additives from the food supply. Nutrition: Helping to reduce the prevalence of diet-related chronic disease by increasing transparency and empowering consumers to make informed choices through enhanced food labeling, such as front-of-package nutrition labeling; and expanding options for safe, reliable, and nutritious infant formula for American families through Operation Stork Speed initiatives. Microbiological Food Safety: Enhancing food safety by advancing strategies and best practices for preventing contamination in human foods, strengthening protection by leveraging state oversight to complement FDA’s resources, and improving transparency of FDA’s regulatory and enforcement decisions.”
FDA moves to tighten food label rules to warn about gluten (Bloomberg). “US regulators are taking initial steps to improve food labels to make them safer for consumers with celiac disease or those following a gluten-free diet,” reports Madison Muller. “On Wednesday, the US Food and Drug Administration initiated what’s known as a Request for Information asking the public for input on how often the presence of grains like rye and barley are disclosed on food labels. It’s also looking for information on the gluten content in oats due to cross-contamination. Currently, US law requires that companies disclose nine major allergens on food labels: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and sesame. However, that often leaves people with celiac disease scouring ingredient lists for grains like rye and barley, which aren’t required unless a product is specifically labeled as ‘gluten free.’”
RFK Jr. says heavy metals in baby formula study coming in April (Bloomberg). “The Food and Drug Administration is planning to release results from its ‘Operation Stork Speed’ review of infant formula products in April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday,” reports Skye Witley. “Kennedy, speaking at a health-themed rally in Harrisburg, Pa., said the studies set to publish in April will focus on the presence of contaminants including cadmium, mercury, and lead in baby formula. ‘We’re going to be regulating baby formula companies so they’re giving you something that is as close to mother’s milk as we can get,’ Kennedy said.”
Plastics are everywhere in agriculture. Why researchers are worried. (Foodprint). “‘It’s like we’ve forgotten how to cut fruit,’ says Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator and founder of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics. Enck is referring to the pre-sliced and -diced melons and kiwis and pineapples — all packaged in sparklingly clear plastic containers — that proliferate in supermarket produce aisles,” writes Lela Nargi. “An estimated 37 million tons of plastic food packaging is used globally every year and production is only expected to rise. As a 2025 report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) lays out, the widespread use of plastics in agriculture has become ‘a serious environmental issue with measurable impacts on soil health, crop productivity, and ecosystem function.’ Unless it’s stanched, it may soon come to threaten both food security and human health.”
New dietary guidelines don’t exactly ‘make America healthy again’ | Opinion (USA Today). “Earlier this month, Americans were gifted a new food pyramid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with a slim 10-pager that urges us to ‘eat real food,’” Tania Fabo writes. “The new food pyramid does make some important points. We should generally be avoiding ultra-processed foods, especially as research has illuminated links to rising colon cancer rates in young people. But in boiling down the national nutritional message to ‘eat real food,’ the guidelines oversimplify the complexities of metabolism, ignoring the importance of how foods are broken down and ultimately stored in the body. The goal should not be to create shame around certain choices, but to have open, informed dialogue on what choices are best for our health and how to make them. Creating an environment where everyone is able to make healthier choices every day is ultimately what is going to make America healthier than ever.”
The surprising alliance powering RFK Jr’s food fight (UnHerd). “The air inside the Harrisburg, PA kickoff for Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s “Eat Real Food” tour was thick with a chaotic kind of American energy. Looking around the State Capitol rotunda, nearly every part of the political compass was represented,” writes Ryan Zickgraf. “There were young MAGA diehards in awkwardly fitting three-piece suits and broccoli-head haircuts, and older rural Republicans who were likely at the Pennsylvania Farm Show held there last week. This is the paradox of the Make America Healthy Again movement. It’s a big-tent political project which represents an uneasy, even volatile, fit for both major parties in a time of hyper-partisanship.”
‘It’s not going to be easy’: Food industry faces uphill growth battle in 2026 (FoodDive). “Higher costs and slowing consumer spending are setting up a challenging 2026 for food manufacturers, leaving them with little choice but to downsize, cut prices, or rethink their approach to innovation to remain relevant,” writes Christopher Doering. “The gloomy outlook for the new year comes after a bruising 2025 pushed many food and beverage companies to cut jobs, close manufacturing plants or sell off underperforming brands. With many of the same headwinds still in place, the industry is preparing for further contraction while remaining open to any pockets of opportunity for growth. ‘It’s going to be a much more difficult operating environment on all different fronts,’ said Brian Choi, a managing partner and CEO of The Food Institute. ‘It’s hard to see an area in food and beverage that really has a long runway. It’s not going to be easy.’”
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