Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
The Department of Health and Human Services launched RealFood.gov with all the fanfare an $8 million Super Bowl ad can buy and all the quality assurance of prison sushi. Within forty-eight hours of the commercial airing, the site’s chatbot was cheerfully advising visitors on the optimal produce for rectal insertion.
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The site works by redirecting every question to Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI and previously best known for generating sexualized deepfakes of women and children, styling itself “MechaHitler,” and insisting its creator would win hypothetical head-to-head matchups with everyone from Einstein to LeBron. A White House official confirmed to NextGov that Grok was an “approved government tool,” a phrase that appears to be accurate in at least two separate contexts.
One person told the chatbot they followed an “assitarian” diet, defined as consuming only foods that can be comfortably inserted into the rectum. Grok subsequently produced a ranked list of “Top Assitarian Staples,” recommending bananas as “the gold standard” while noting that slightly green ones offered superior structural integrity. Cucumbers placed second, which is a travesty, but I digress.
The website was built by the National Design Studio, led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, and originally stated “Use Grok to get real answers about real food” before administrators quietly changed the wording to “Use AI” after a reporter called to ask about it. The underlying chatbot, however, remained Grok, in the same way that putting a Hawaiian shirt on a bear does not make it a tourist.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the Super Bowl ad “the most important message in Super Bowl history,” a claim that arrived the same week investigators discovered that his commission’s landmark children’s health report cited at least seven scientific studies that do not exist. Researchers named in the bibliography told reporters they had never written the studies attributed to them, and in some cases, the conclusions described were the opposite of their actual findings. Although the latter has been an ongoing problem since well before the advent of AI.
The MAHA Center Inc., a nonprofit run by Kennedy ally Tony Lyons, funded the Super Bowl ad through anonymous billionaire donors. Lyons also runs Skyhorse Publishing, which published Kennedy’s anti-Fauci book, and the two organizations share a Manhattan office address. The ad was directed by Brett Ratner, who recently appeared in more than a dozen photos in the Epstein files and who is currently under renewed scrutiny for sexual misconduct allegations, making him a natural choice to helm a public health campaign asking Americans to trust the government about what to put in their bodies.
Kennedy, meanwhile, has threatened to ban government scientists from publishing in peer-reviewed journals he considers “corrupt,” proposing a state-run alternative. This from the man whose own flagship report couldn’t survive a basic fact-check and whose nutrition website spent its first week of existence ranking vegetables by rectal compatibility, and worst of all, got the rankings completely out of order. Cucumbers, man.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
