Let them eat cake

The privileged elitists on Trump’s cabinet can’t help themselves. They broadcast how, like Trump himself, they’re out of touch.

“Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made waves this week with claims that the Trump administration’s revamped food pyramid leaves plenty of room for Americans to maintain a healthy diet for as little as $3 a meal.

 

“In an interview Wednesday with News Nation, Rollins said her agency came up with plenty of low-cost meals that conform with the new dietary guidelines, which call for Americans to eat more red meat and butter, and less processed food. “Are we asking them to spend more on their diet? And the answer to that is no.”

 

“She said the agency ran “over 1,000 simulations” and found that “it can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, you know, a corn tortilla and one other thing.”

How big a “piece.” What is “one other thing?”

Here’s a reality check:

““Is it possible to cook one healthy meal for $3? Yes, it is. Is it easy to live a lifestyle where you consistently are able to put together healthy balanced meals for $3? No, it is not,” said Joel Berg, CEO of the organization Hunger Free America. Eating cheaply and healthily requires effort, he said, such as buying food in bulk (which generally means having a car to transport it and a pantry large enough to store it), or shopping at multiple grocery stores to get the best deals.

 

“Most low-income people are busy working and raising their children, he said, and often traveling long distances by public transportation. “Healthier food is generally more expensive, but it is also critical to know that it usually takes a lot more time.”

 

“Then there’s the broader issue of affordability, he noted. “The top reason people can’t afford food isn’t, counterintuitively, the price of food. It’s the price of everything else.”

 

“Every penny that you have to pay for health care, every penny that you have to pay for child care, every penny that you have to pay for prescription drugs is less money that you have for food,” he said. “You can buy less healthy food. And that’s what happens on a daily basis.”

 

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/16/lifestyle/brooke-rollins-3-dollar-healthy-meal/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yes, the CDC can change its mind

The Nobel Laureate economist Paul Samuelson famously acknowledged in a Meet the Press interview: “Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?” This observation applies to the advice from medical authorities such as the CDC and WHO during the COVID pandemic. Some members of the public are fond of pillorying these agencies for having published different guidelines at different times, as though health officials are in the business of issuing ex cathedra dogma rather than responding to incomplete and ambiguous information. Science doesn’t deal in proof, it deals with the weight of evidence. A scientific hypothesis is one that is capable of being tested and falsified by experiment. I get it. I used to teach problem-based learning to first year medical students, and they often struggled with what to do with incomplete and ambiguous information, which is what physicians in clinics do every day. Sometimes, one cannot wait for all the tests to be completed and all the data analyz...
Read more

About that Trump lawsuit

So Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch for defamation because of the release of a salacious doodle. Nothing remarkable about Donald J. Trump weaponizing the legal system against his opponents, I know. But there are some things that do bear remark here: “ . . . he's suing Rupert Murdoch personally. But you know who he's not suing? Lachlan Murdoch, who's actually the chairperson of News Corp and Fox, who's actually the decision-maker. Rupert Murdoch has no official role there anymore. He's an adviser.   “So, I thought that was revealing in a lot of ways, because it isn't just about going after the entity. It's sort of this expansion spillover, trying to send as much of a message as you possibly can. He's sort of hitting every potential lever, not just against Murdoch and that empire, but then all the other media properties in the future. It's also about sending an example.” “HAYES: Yeah. That, to me, is the point here, is that these lawsuits are not lawsuits...
Read more

I agree with RFK Jr.

Though it feels weird to say it, RFK Jr and I agree on something: curtailing direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals. “ The Trump administration is discussing policies that would make it harder and more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients, in a move that could disrupt more than $10 billion in annual ad spending.   Although the US is the only place, besides New Zealand, where pharma companies can directly advertise, banning pharma ads outright could make the administration vulnerable to lawsuits, so it’s instead focusing on cutting down on the practice by adding legal and financial hurdles, according to people familiar with the plans who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.   “The two policies the administration has focused in on would be to require greater disclosures of side effects of a drug within each ad — likely making broadcast ads much longer and prohibitively expensive — or removing the industry’s ability to d...
Read more