The recent exchange between Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins over whether Americans can realistically eat three meals a day for roughly $15 sparked a predictable online firestorm. Gillibrand challenged the claim outright, daring the secretary to live on that budget herself. The internet applauded. Then something more revealing happened.
I demonstrated, as a chef and father of four, publicly and transparently, how three meals and two snacks a day can, in fact, be done for around $15 using ordinary grocery-store food and basic cooking techniques, and the outrage only intensified. See my post here.
My comments section turned into a burnt stew, a few of the comments were properly cooked, but most were inedible.
What surprised me wasn’t the disagreement over the math, it was the moral backlash. I was accused of wanting poor Americans to eat “bad food,” of promoting “prison meals,” of suggesting that people should be subjected to a life of rice, eggs, and secondary cuts of meat as some kind of austerity punishment. The anger wasn’t about affordability; it was about politics and only politics. Somewhere along the way, we decided that cooking real food is an insult.
That reaction exposes a deeper problem than food inflation or public food subsidies; it reveals how completely Americans have lost touch with food itself and instead rely on the government for direction and financial safety. Honestly, $15 a day isn’t a radical number. It’s not a luxury, but it’s not starvation either.
What it requires is something far more controversial: basic food knowledge. It requires knowing how to shop without branding goggles on, how to cook without a box telling you what to do, and how to use time, heat, and seasoning to turn simple ingredients into satisfying meals, meals that stretch for a large family but still taste good. Those skills used to be common; they were passed down through families and communities — taught in school, and respected as a foundation of having agency. They weren’t ideological by any means; they were practical.
We didn’t lose that knowledge accidentally. Over the decades, we outsourced cooking to food manufacturers, convenience culture, and delivery apps. We were trained to believe that boxed food is the responsible choice, that meal prep plans save valuable time, that DoorDash is a lifeline, and that McDonald’s menu prices should be used as a benchmark for the cost of living. As a result, many Americans now see cooking not as empowerment but as punishment.
That’s how we ended up in a place where eggs, rice, chicken, beans, yogurt, vegetables, and whole grains are dismissed as “poor people food,” while ultra-processed products loaded with stabilizers, gums, industrial oils, and additives are defended as humane and dignified because they come with a health claim on the label and have an advertisting budget bigger than some small countries. We have redefined real food as cruelty and industrial food as compassion, even though those fake meat factories arguably destroy the environment. That inversion didn’t come from science; it came from marketing, and in many cases, from within the four walls of government.
No one is denying that food prices have risen, that inflation is real, or that families aren’t under pressure. But pretending that convenience food is the solution while cooking is the problem guarantees permanent dependency. When people don’t know how to cook, every meal becomes a transaction, every hunger moment becomes an emergency, and every price increase becomes a political crisis instead of a solvable household challenge.
This debate was never really about $15 or defending a politician; it was about something far more uncomfortable: Americans haven’t just lost buying power, we’ve lost food literacy and the ability to live without the government. And until we confront that reality, no subsidy, no app, and no viral outrage cycle will fix it. Teaching people how to cook isn’t oppression, austerity, or punishment; it’s independence and agency, something that we have been slowly losing in America in exchange for a quick handout.
If policymakers are serious about lowering food costs, they should stop micromanaging prices and start restoring cooking skills. Teaching Americans the fundamentals of food, where it comes from and how it’s prepared, would do more to stabilize household budgets than any regulation, while breaking the cycle of dependence that benefits the corporate-government food machine.
That doesn’t mean turning the government into a nationalized cooking instructor; it means changing the incentive structure and rewarding self-empowerment. It looks like encouraging local purchasing through tax incentives, fostering public-private partnerships with chefs, farmers, and food experts, and reconnecting communities to the people who actually produce their food.
When Americans know how to cook and where their food comes from, they rely less on imported products and processed shortcuts. The real solution to our food crisis isn’t more control, it’s local competence. The real bounty has always been in our own backyard.
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