I have a modest proposal here.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins took heat on social media [recently] over a comment that Americans can eat healthily for $3 a meal by consuming “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla and one other thing.”
Rollins, a native Texan and former president of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, appeared on News Nation to promote the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, which advises Americans to eat more whole foods like meat and vegetables. That has drawn push back from Democrats that the diet is hard to achieve with the relatively high price of groceries.
“We’ve run over 1,000 simulations,” Rollins said. “So there is a way to do this that actually will save the average American consumer money.”
Social media users quickly pilloried the remarks, sharing pictures online of nearly empty plates with small pieces of chicken and broccoli.
Among them was U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat who wrote on X, “Due to Trump’s tariffs, last month was the largest spike in grocery prices in three years. So now this is what the Trump Administration suggests you can afford for a meal.”
The Department of Agriculture did not respond Thursday to a question about how many calories the meal described by Rollins would contain, according to their simulation.
I know we’ve moved on from this little tempest, but I had it in the queue and didn’t want to throw it away. Rollins is as noted an unqualified political hack in addition to being the kind of sociopathic ghoul one expects in Trump II. It’s fine to dunk on her on social media, but it would be better to challenge her to put her money where her mouth is and see if she can live for a month, even a week, on this $3 a meal diet. Document it on TikTok, along with daily weigh-ins to see how much one can expect to waste away doing so. We both know she won’t, in which case we can have a different conversation about chickens.
Due to modern fast-growing chicken breeds, your bit of chicken won’t have much flavor either. Older birds have more flavor, but nowadays chickens are bred to grow very fast, so they are much younger and less tasty for a given weight than they used to be.
So, that’s $9 / day, right? I think I could do that, but I only weigh 98 lbs. : )
I would also ask, what about toothpaste, dish detergent, laundry detergent, toilet paper, clear plastic wrap, aluminum foil, spray cleaner, soap, lotion, and on and on?