During an event to promote nutritious school meals from local farmers on Monday, Dr. Ben Carson talked about teaching children where their food comes from and having them taste veggies straight from the soil.
“I remember not too many months ago, [Agriculture] Secretary [Brooke] Rollins and I went to a school, and we were giving the children whole milk. They were just so amazed. They said, ‘I didn’t know milk could taste this good!’
“And what if we introduced them to food fresh from the ground? Teaching them — making these relationships with the farmers so they learn about the soil. They learn about irrigation. They learn about the effect that it has on their crop,” Carson said.
Carson then listed some examples of food children could eat on these farms, with one processed meat catching the audience’s attention.
“They get an opportunity to eat a tomato fresh off the vine. It’s a different food than you get in the store, quite frankly. Fresh sweet corn and hot dogs,” Carson said to laughter. “But what a difference it makes when they can taste these things. They won’t have a craving for the unhealthy foods that are so prevalent in our society.”
Carson, a former neurosurgeon and an opponent of Trump during the 2016 presidential election, was sworn in as the national advisor for nutrition, health and housing at the Department of Agriculture last September. He also served as Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary during his first presidential term.
His comment about feeding children hot dogs for a nutritious lunch is the latest flub from a Trump official attempting to carry out the goals of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, which scrutinizes ultra-processed foods .
In late July, Kennedy grossly underestimated ingredient costs while presenting a recipe on his cooking show, The Real Food Show , which is focused on healthy, affordable meals. Instead of calculating how much it costs to buy the whole ingredient, just the price of each serving of the ingredient needed for the recipe was shown.
As Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse noted in an article , “that kind of practical thinking is not helpful to a parent who has $20 in cash to get them to tomorrow’s paycheck.
“Safeway does not let you walk in, scoop some mayo out of a jar and pay one dollar at the cash register. You have to buy the whole thing.”
Rollins was also roasted earlier this year for suggesting Americans eat “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla and one other thing” as a budget meal.
“‘You should eat prison meals’ prob not the best message,” Variety ’s Chief Correspondent Marlow Stern wrote on X at the time.
Carson was at the Agriculture Department’s Washington, D.C. headquarters on Monday to support Rollins and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ’s new “Harvest to Hallways” initiative as part of the administration’s MAHA agenda.
The initiative will include a $50 million investment in school cafeterias, which, in part, will help pay for new equipment and up to $25 million in grants for schools to provide kids with locally grown foods.
These investments in healthy school lunches come at a time when a packed lunch for children costs more than $6 , and Americans struggle to pay for their grocery bills.
While many school districts do offer some kind of cafeteria lunch for free, or at a reduced price, fewer children automatically qualify due to changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program made under the Trump administration.
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