WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance lost thirty pounds this year, and on Thursday he told the briefing room exactly how he did it. He did not do it with a program. He did not do it with a supplement. He did it by making a phone call, and the person on the other end, as reported by Fox News, was Bobby Kennedy.

The Vice President has, in his own telling, been “on his weight-loss journey since Lent in February,” and the method, as he described it, is a diet his health secretary recommended, the one that is, in the specific, mostly fermented vegetables. A reporter from Fox, Peter Doocy, asked the question that was going to be asked: “How much sauerkraut do you eat every day?” The Vice President laughed. The room laughed. The sauerkraut, which had, up to that moment, been a condiment, was now, in the specific, a national health story.

"It all started when JD Vance called Bobby Kennedy and told him he was thinking about giving up sugar. Now the Vice President is a couple of pounds down, and the sauerkraut is, per the sauerkraut, a policy position."

This is the part of the story that is hardest to explain to a person who is not in it. The Vice President, in a USA Today account of the briefing, said he lost the weight “organically,” without what he called the “fat shot,” and credited the advice of the man who has described his own weight loss as the product of a “carnivore diet” that shed twenty pounds in thirty days. The two men, it turns out, are on roughly the same journey, in opposite directions, with sauerkraut as the common denominator. The administration has not, in the specific, released the meal plan. The meal plan, per the meal plan, is a phone call away.

THE DIET: A TIMELINE

  • February, Lent: The Vice President begins a weight-loss journey. The journey has no name yet.
  • Spring: The Vice President calls Bobby Kennedy. The call, per the call, is the start.
  • Summer: The Vice President loses weight. The sauerkraut, per the sauerkraut, does a lot of the work.
  • Thursday: The Vice President, in a trimmed-down frame, tells the briefing room the whole thing was organic. Rubio, when asked, rejects the "crazy" diet. The cabinet is, in the specific, split.

There is a tradition, in Washington, of a single food item becoming a proxy for an entire administration. The coffee in the Oval Office. The steak at the state dinner. The sauerkraut, this week, has arrived on the list. It is a proxy for something the administration has not named: that the health secretary’s dietary views have, in the specific, become the de facto national weight-loss program, and that the person in charge of running the country is, as of this morning, a success story for it. The sauerkraut has a waiting list. The waiting list is a phone tree.

Secretary Rubio, in a separate Fox account, rejected the “crazy” diet, which is the phrase a cabinet member uses to mean “I am not calling Bobby.” The two Vice-Presidential colleagues are, in the specific, on the same diet timeline, and one of them is a success story and the other is a cautionary tale, and the only difference between them is a phone call that one of them made.

At press time, the administration had not said whether the sauerkraut diet would become a formal initiative, and the Vice President had not said whether “Call Bobby” was a suggestion or a protocol, and the sauerkraut, for all that has happened to it, was still, in every way that mattered, just sauerkraut.