Celebrity chefs are easily recognisable from a few select attributes. Julia Child had a homely warble to her tone. Gordon Ramsay has his swearing. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr has a husky voice and stories about the Saltonstall-Kennedy fisheries Act. No, that last one is not a mistake: RFK Jr is now an unlikely presenter, gracing our YouTube feeds to promote the United States Department of Health and Human Services food pyramid and other policies.

Kennedy’s new Real Food Show opens with his aim: to get Americans to eat real, good, nutritious and affordable food. Fine. His partner for episode one is Andrew Gruel, a California city councillor, chef, Fox News personality and self-described “seafood junkie”, there to prepare a salmon dish for under $5 per person. So far, so unexciting.

They’ve set themselves a big challenge. We’re told that the average American, especially children, is “addicted” to ultra-processed foods (UPFs), and that, understandably, this needs to change. The presenters vow there will be no “chef tricks” and “nothing intellectual”, and that by the end viewers will be “addicted” to “sticky” fishcakes instead. But it’s not long before the whole thing derails.

Gruel, supposedly a seafood specialist, overcooks the salmon twice. He’s shown on camera oiling the wrong side, with an autopsy of dry salmon scraps sitting devastated in a tray, and insists that it doesn’t matter if it’s this badly overdone. Next, he mystifyingly informs viewers that he had to leave university due to his diet; after trying antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, he says he cured himself by cutting seed oils out of his food. And despite promising no “chef tricks”, he provides a lesson in how to sharpen a knife. The only problem? He does so over the food they are about to eat. Yum: a garnish of steel shards, anyone?

Before the 20 torturous minutes are up, the presenters have discussed omega-3s and -6s, the evils of pasta, carbon steel pans and the crushing cost of salad dressing, as well as making a fairly good joke about child slave labour. They also construct a grim salad, and when Kennedy rather uncomfortably tastes all this, he turns to Gruel — creepily staring at the camera — and gives him a thumbs up, before the episode ends abruptly.

As diverting as it is to rubberneck a car crash, it remains perplexing who this is meant to be for. There is some standard political point-scoring: Joe Biden’s food pyramid was 453 pages long, and its “mercantile impulses put fruit loops at the top” of it, so instead Kennedy locked some experts in a room for 11 months, and their bright idea was to flip the pyramid upside down. But why would someone desperately addicted to Krispy Kreme and Subway then start making their own vinaigrette?

If Kennedy wants to break the grip of UPFs, he needs much more than a YouTube show. Showing viewers a pyramid, no matter how upside down it is, won’t convince them of the virtues of a good diet. Almost no one seriously designs their meals in the way public health experts hope they do: around ratios, food groups and micronutrients. We have an instinctual understanding of what we enjoy eating, how to balance things sensibly, and how not to overindulge. You must taste things, enjoy them, and want more of them, rather than whipping out a spreadsheet to get a certain percentage of protein versus “vegetal”, which can only lead to the crime of a white bean, apple, and rocket salad with a mustard dressing. It’s thin gruel from Gruel.

Put another way: if you woke up and saw Yvette Cooper, the new UK Health Secretary, cooking a seafood paella on Sunday Brunch, would you be inspired? Nobody wants that. She would be rightly told to stick to the day job. And that’s exactly what RFK Jr should do.