On Monday afternoon, I stood outside for hours in the sweltering sun, waiting for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to teach me to cook. This struck me as worthwhile because the last time I saw him make food was on Instagram at Thanksgiving, when he popped outside—fully barefoot—and pulled a deep fried turkey from a vat of boiling beef tallow. “This is how we cook the MAHA way,” he’d said, and I found myself both terrified and intrigued.
You can imagine my excitement, then, when I got a press release advertising that RFK Jr. would host a live cooking demo at the US Department of Agriculture’s “Great American Farmers Market,” a weeklong celebration of our nation’s farmers to be held on the National Mall. The demo was part of “MAHA Monday,” highlighting the Make America Healthy Again movement. I went because I simply had to know what the secretary of Health and Human Services would cook: A day-old bear carcass? Tres leches with three raw milks?
I arrived on the Mall as the market was opening. Dozens of white-tented booths, arranged to flank a stage, were stocked with the fruits of American agriculture: Virginia honey. Wyoming beef. Utah garlic. Oklahoma pecans. I stopped and chatted with a Minnesota farmer slinging 14-ounce jars of beef tallow, then stared for a long time at “Freedom Pickles” (all-natural, veteran-owned) whose logo was a big green pickle dressed as a paratrooper firing smaller green pickles from a gun.
At this early hour, the crowd was sparse. Three women in TV makeup posed by a golden tractor. Cameramen lugged pelican cases to a platform by the stage. A woman with a MAHA inaugural ball tote flitted past some somber-looking teens in corduroy jackets from the Louisa, Virginia, chapter of the Future Farmers of America, all of whom seemed destined to melt. Traversing a gaggle of suits, I ran into a guy I knew—a lobbyist—who said I was currently surrounded by “everyone you’d want to know in the ag policy space”: Hill staffers, trade groups, USDA folks. One guy wore a ten-gallon hat, another a red ballcap that read “Make America Graze Again.” (“I like that one better,” a passer-by remarked.)
When Kennedy appeared onstage—innocuously, without fanfare, wearing a blue pinstripe suit—a pulse rippled through the crowd. But he didn’t address us. He and the secretary of agriculture were filming a Fox & Friends hit. For twenty or so minutes, a crowd of several hundred watched them chat—inaudibly—as cameras glided on dollies and PAs bustled just outside the shot. The crowd grew restive, eager for the cooking demo. I told a couple of strangers that I couldn’t wait to see what RFK Jr. would do. Overhearing me, a suited guy with a USDA badge passed me a palm-sized recipe card. It marked the day’s nadir.
“This is what he’s going to make?” I asked in disbelief. Yes, I was told: a blueberry smoothie, and also a salad. I faintly recalled a woman from Alaska who’d told me you could make ice cream from the fat of a bear, and a friend who’d eaten a rattlesnake sausage at a roadside tavern in the Rockies. I’d hoped, at the very least, for the shoeless preparation of deep-fried poultry or a trick to eating raw liver that would finally allow me to enjoy its purported healthful effects. Beside me, an impish white-haired man seemed to share my distress. “Is it really cooking to make a smoothie?” I began to say—but his issue was different. A lobbyist for the dairy industry, he pointed to the cup of almond milk on the ingredients list and, with great consternation, shook his head.
Now, I suppose, is the moment to address the slight awkwardness of the US Department of Agriculture sponsoring a “MAHA Monday” event, given that RFK Jr. is a strident critic of industrial farming. His MAHA Commission report, released in May, drew significant ire from the ag community, particularly over his claims that pesticides are causing disease. (Phrases like “deeply troubling,” “brazenly unscientific,” and “deeply misguided” spewed forth from various trade groups.) To make matters worse, Kennedy has also placed various agricultural commodities—corn syrup, seed oils, GMOs—into his crosshairs. At MAHA Monday, the displeasure was there, a current pulsing just below the surface: stray barbed comments, a sardonic air of morbid curiosity, vaguely halting applause.
But actually, the day’s worst tension was not between MAHA and ag—it was between the secretary of agriculture and her staff. As the Fox & Friends segment rolled, a couple dozen protesters in bright federal union shirts stood across from the stage with handmade signs. They objected to the reorganization of USDA, which Secretary Brooke Rollins announced in late July: More than half of the agency’s DC-based employees (2,600 or more) will be relocated to regional hubs across the country, which some staffers believe could weaken the agency and hurt the farmers it serves. “You can’t spell MAGA without AG,” one sign read. Another: “Drain the swamp? You just gutted the farm.”
When Fox & Friends wrapped, an illustrious bundle of public officials assembled onstage: three cabinet secretaries (Kennedy, Rollins, and Sean Duffy of Transportation), plus the FDA commissioner and the governors of Iowa and West Virginia, the latter of whom RFK Jr. recently called fat. (“You look like you ate Governor Morrissey,” he said at a MAHA event in March. “Raise your hand if you want Governor Morrissey to do a public weigh-in once a month.”)
Wearing a dark denim top and brown pants of either leather or pleather (no cattle lobbyist stepped forth to weigh in), Rollins began to address the crowd, causing the unions to boo. Then, as the crowd chanted “USA,” the unions chanted “USDA.” Afterwards, the FDA commissioner called MAHA “literally the most non-political thing ever to hit this country,” and Duffy waxed poetic about the wiles of RFK (thin, handsome, smart). Before exiting the stage, these leaders all awkwardly put their hands on a cowbell and rang it together. A DJ in a Tractor Supply Co. trucker hat played hip-hop while staffers reset for the demo. Leaning over the barricade toward the stage, a gray-haired woman in a yellow bandanna was filming—livestreaming, possibly—with some kind of red-white-and-blue iPhone rig, her eyes gleaming as she described what was still to come.
We can whirl through the rest: RFK Jr. reappeared onstage, picked up a tub of Chobani yogurt, and appeared to read the label. Then two women from a nutrition education nonprofit taught him and Rollins to assemble a salad. He chopped vegetables and herbs, then whisked a dressing, looking studious and perhaps a little bemused. When finished, he held up the bowl to the crowd. The salad was colorful and pretty. He tossed it with tongs.
The smoothie came together posthaste, and that was when things took off: RFK Jr. was ushered onto a stationary bike that would power a blender that was strapped to the front. He took off his jacket and began to pedal. But the blender wouldn’t blend. The crowd began shouting “Give it a shake!” and “Plug it in!” Still biking fruitlessly, Kennedy leaned forward to peer around the blades. Finally, someone jiggled it enough that it worked. “Go Bobby!” cried members of the crowd as he rode the smoothie to a pulp. From ten feet away, I could see his leathery orange skin and clear, cerulean eyes. He and Rollins drank a few sips of smoothie, clinking their reusable cups. And that was it. The demo was done.
As staffers cleared the stage, Kennedy remained at the table, chewing his salad with a spinach leaf hanging from his mouth. For a moment, I deflated. Three cabinet secretaries and the FDA commissioner really believed I needed to be taught to make a smoothie? To be lectured about the health benefits of cooking, and how kids who eat meals with their families are less likely to drink or do drugs? Didn’t the US government, with its myriad crises and dysfunctions, have something better to do on a Monday night than chop peaches before a tiny crowd?
But as I drifted from the stage, the energy had changed. The once-empty Mall was now bustling: parents with strollers, groups of teens, elderly tourists, all browsing the tents. Milkshake the USDA cow—a heavily costumed human who must have been dying of heat—danced with schoolchildren to the beats of “YMCA.” Protestors were chatting, their signs on the ground. When I turned, I noticed a girl in a purple sundress taking selfies with a miniature goat, one of 30 that had been hauled out for goat yoga. And then it happened, the agricultural miracle I’d been waiting for: someone handed me a goat, too.
Her name was Raquel, a four-month-old black-and-white fainting goat, whom I held for far too long. She was small in my arms, soft with tiny little hooves and two nubby horns poking out of the tufted crown of her head. The sun cut across the grass with its wheat-gold light, and I stroked Raquel and breathed the air and watched families browsing the farmers market, lugging home bags of bread and corn and cheese. Briefly, I felt overcome. Wow, I thought, forgetting the smoothie, the MAHA, the heat. I love American farmers and their adorable livestock and the nutrient-rich bounties that they coax each season from this nation’s fruited plain.
