The Mockery Came Fast
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that Americans on tight budgets might consider buying liver or cheaper cuts of beef instead of premium steak, and within hours the political press had turned it into a gaffe. Headlines ran with the condescension angle. Social media lit up with pearl-clutching about whether the health secretary understands hardship. A man who has spent years crusading against industrial food processing and seed oil hegemony — which is to say, against the actual dietary catastrophe that's killing working-class Americans — got dunked on for recommending offal.
Let me be direct about what's happening here. The people doing the mocking are not the ones who have to choose between ground beef and ground turkey at the Walmart meat counter. They are not the people whose kids eat what's on sale this week. They are writers and commentators and political operatives who have never had to stretch a grocery budget, and their mockery of Kennedy's nutritional pragmatism tells you everything about who actually gets heard in American public health debates.
Kennedy was right. Not partially right. Right.
What Cheap Cuts Actually Are
Liver has more vitamin B12 than almost any food on earth. A 3-ounce serving of beef liver contains roughly 70 micrograms — nearly 3,000 percent of the daily recommended value. It's loaded with vitamin A, folate, copper, riboflavin. It's cheap, shelf-stable when frozen, and available at virtually every grocery store in America. A pound of beef liver in most markets costs between $2 and $4.
My grandmother made liver and onions every other Thursday. This wasn't a statement about health consciousness. It was how you fed a family of five on a mill worker's income in 1970s North Carolina. She didn't need a Harvard nutritionist to tell her it was good food. She knew because it was what their people had always eaten before processed food companies convinced America that nutrition came in a box.
The same goes for other cheap cuts Kennedy gestured toward — chuck roast, oxtail, short ribs, chicken thighs, pork shoulder. These are not consolation prizes for people who can't afford the good stuff. They are, in many cases, nutritionally superior to lean premium cuts. They're higher in collagen, in fat-soluble vitamins, in minerals. The nose-to-tail eating that Kennedy is implicitly endorsing is what every traditional food culture practiced before the mid-20th century industrialized the American diet and taught everyone to value the boneless skinless chicken breast above all else.
The dietary establishment that produced sixty years of low-fat dogma, the food pyramid, and the seed oil revolution is responsible for an obesity and metabolic disease crisis that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans annually. Kennedy is trying to push back against that establishment. And the people who defended that establishment — who called its critics cranks and quacks — are now mocking him for suggesting people eat liver.
The Class Dimension Nobody Wants to Name
Here's what the mockery reveals about race, class, and who gets to dispense nutritional wisdom in America.
For the past decade, a certain strain of food culture has celebrated "nose-to-tail" eating, offal, fermented foods, organ meats, and traditional preparation methods. It's been written up in the New York Times. Celebrated in upscale restaurants. Anthony Bourdain built a career on it. When a Brooklyn restaurant puts bone marrow on the menu for $22, it's adventurous. When RFK Jr. suggests a struggling family buy the same bones at their grocery store for $3, it's out of touch.
This is not a contradiction that can survive scrutiny. The nutritional advice is identical. The reaction is completely different. The only variable is who's giving it and in what context. Trendy food culture celebrating organ meats is fine. A Trump cabinet member suggesting them as an affordable option is a scandal.
There's a specific progressive politics at work here. The left has spent years arguing that food deserts, dietary health disparities, and processed food dependency are racial justice issues — which they are. The data on diet-related disease rates across racial and income lines is stark. Black Americans die at significantly higher rates from diet-related conditions than white Americans. The working poor eat worse than the wealthy not because they have bad values but because the food system was engineered to make cheap food expensive in terms of long-term health outcomes.
Kennedy is trying to address exactly that problem. He's trying to redirect federal food policy toward whole foods, toward traditional diets, toward the cheap nutritious foods that kept working-class communities healthy before the junk food industry captured the USDA's dietary guidelines. And he's being mocked for it by the same professional class that built the failed dietary establishment he's challenging.
The Real Issue With American Food Policy
The USDA simultaneously issues dietary guidelines and subsidizes the commodity crops — corn, soy, wheat — that go into the ultra-processed foods those guidelines have historically promoted. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's agricultural policy operating exactly as the lobbying that shapes it intends. Beef liver competes with none of those subsidy-dependent industries. It is, in a sense, the perfectly disruptive food — nutritious, cheap, traditional, and entirely outside the industrial food processing system.
Kennedy's broader MAHA agenda has serious critics on matters of vaccine policy, and those criticisms deserve to be heard on their own terms. But on food? He's more aligned with the actual nutritional science than the processed food industry's defenders in the political press. The people mocking him for recommending liver are the same people who've never questioned why the federal government spent forty years telling Americans to replace saturated fat with vegetable oil — a recommendation that may have contributed to the very chronic disease epidemic Kennedy is now trying to address.
Eat the liver. Buy the cheap cuts. Your grandmother already knew this. It took a cabinet secretary to say it out loud, and the people who profit from your not knowing are the loudest voices calling him ridiculous.
