Let me tell you something. I spend a not-insignificant portion of my life standing in a grocery store aisle reading labels while one of my kids tries to smuggle Lucky Charms into the cart. I do this because I care what goes into their bodies. So when the Secretary of State of the United States sits on a podcast and calls the Health Secretary’s whole-foods diet “crazy” while defending Pop-Tarts as “one of the great American innovations in the history of the world,” I have questions.
Marco Rubio said that. Out loud. On Katie Miller’s podcast this week. He called Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s meat-and-fermented-foods plan “ridiculous” because Kennedy travels with coolers of sauerkraut. “I’m not gonna travel the world with a cooler full of sauerkraut,” Rubio declared, like a man who has never once packed a snack bag for a road trip to his mother-in-law’s house.
Florida House of Representatives (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsHere is what I know. RFK Jr. is the one person in this administration actually trying to fix the food supply. He’s talking about dyes and seed oils and the fact that American children are swimming in ultra-processed garbage that’s banned in half of Europe. The Wall Street Journal reported back in June that JD Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy have all started following versions of the diet. Whether you think the sauerkraut cooler is weird or not, at least these people are trying.
And then there’s Rubio. His own wife, Jeanette, sitting right next to him, blew him up on the spot. When he said he supports MAHA, she said, “No, he is not. He is completely not.” She told the host he eats “all the things you should not be eating. Every single thing.” She said he loves fast food. He loves it all. This is not me speculating. This is his wife, under oath of marriage, on tape.
Rubio’s defense of the Pop-Tart was genuinely something to behold. “It comes in this beautiful foil pack,” he said. Beautiful. He used the word beautiful. I have four kids and I have seen a lot of Pop-Tart packaging in my day, and I would not describe it as beautiful. I would describe it as the thing I find crushed into my minivan floorboard.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsHe also admitted he tried keto once and it was a “near-psychotic event.” He said if he’d done it while secretary of state, he would have told Trump to bomb Paraguay because he was “just really mad.” Ha ha. Funny. Except this man is fourth in line for the presidency, and he’s telling you on camera that removing sugar from his diet makes him want to start a war. With Paraguay. A country that has never done anything to us.
Look, I’m not saying every Cabinet member needs to eat fermented cabbage out of a Yeti cooler at the G7. Cheryl Hines apparently carries RFK’s sauerkraut in designer handbags, and yes, that is a sentence I just typed. The whole thing has a weird vibe. I get it.
But the choice here isn’t between sauerkraut in a Prada bag and a foil-wrapped Pop-Tart. The choice is between an administration that takes the chronic disease crisis seriously and one that thinks processed food is a punchline. Rubio wants credit for saying “people should be healthy” while his own wife is sitting there calling him a liar in real time.
Gage Skidmore (BY-SA) via wikimediaI’ve done my research. I’ve read the labels. And I can spot a man who’s pretending to care about your kids’ health while he’s got frosting in his teeth from across any room in this country.