View Full Version : So I'm watching this Jamie Oliver's food revolution.
SW-Shooter
03-26-10, 21:03
And it makes me realize how stupid and ass backwards we as Americans teach our children.
Every bad habit is either taught in school or learned at home. The worse part is the school system spends more time with our children, and they aren't even teaching them the basics.
Sad state of affairs.
I have friends whose 9 and 5 year olds don't want to eat home-made food (my friend is actually really good cook). All they want to eat is chicken nuggets and similar crap they feed them at school. This is a battle that has to be fought on many fronts: at home, at school, in the restaurants and supermarkets.
Belmont31R
03-26-10, 22:14
I grew up in a home with mostly home cooked meals. I have twin boys, almost 4YO, and they will grow up knowing how to cook.
My wife on the other hand....to her cooking food is warming up something bought out of the freezer section at the grocery store. Ok though....I like to cook so I dont mind her not knowing, and Im teaching her.....
My mother cooked meals for us when I was little before she went to work, I didn't eat it of course, I was a candy eater and ate shit loads of the stuff.
Big shocker... I was skinny and healthy, amazing what running around for 6 hours a day will do for your health. And I'm diabetes free :P, today I still enjoy sweets but settle for fruit instead.
It's not the foods that kids eat, it's the level of activity and the parent's thinking ever pedo wants to kidnap their kids so they sit them in front of the tv, instead of having them burn off those calories.
Don't get me wrong, diet is important but lack of exercise is what makes you fat.
I haven't seen the show yet, but I live in Huntington, where it was filmed. I don't know how it compares to the rest of the country, but most of the kids here are beyond lazy. And the parents of course are to blame, because they aren't any better. Some people are upset about the show being filmed here because they think it makes us look bad. I couldn't care less, because they filmed the truth. Hopefully it wakes some of these people up.
The biggest problem is lack of money- cheap food is garbage, which is what they buy.
The school basically screwed him in the chicken vs pizza shootout. Whats next candy vs broccoli? Those lunch ladies do not want it to workout, if it did they would actually have to cook(work).
montanadave
03-27-10, 07:01
I've smelled a rat for a long time when it comes to the United States and our food supply. The federal government provides massive subsidies (tax dollars) to producers of corn, grain and sugar (among many other agricultural payoffs) and the majority of that money doesn't end up in the pockets of some poster-child American farmer sitting atop his grandfather's John Deere with a couple of tow-headed little boys in their OshKosh B'Gosh coveralls. The lion's share of federal farm subsidies ends up in the corporate coffers of the likes of ADM and Con-Agra.
I caught a bit of Oliver's show last night and saw the dismayed look on his face when the food services director for the school district sat him down and laid out about ten binders from the USDA which stipulated (down to the gram) what had to go into the meals for the school kids. And who do you think lobbies Congress (with the money we give them, no less) and, by extension, the USDA, to make sure those meals are chock full of the products they grow?
So where's the health care industry? Why aren't they raising Cain about the crap food the government subsidizes and mandates we eat--food that is literally poisoning us and our kids? With the exception of a few voices crying in the the wilderness, the health care industry in this country knows the money is in treating sick people, not preventing illness in the first place.
Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food) published a thought provoking op-ed piece in the New York Times last year suggesting the only way the consumer was ever going to win was if the corporate titans were eventually forced to battle one another, rather than acting in collusion. When health insurance companies are forced to cover everyone and are restricted from endlessly escalating their premiums to cover expenses, they are going to start pushing for better preventative care to reduce their long-term liabilities. According to Pollan, this may lead to a "battle royale" between food industry/agricultural lobbyists and their counterparts from the insurance industry.
Watch our elected officials squirm if they are forced to pass up campaign contributions from either of these two huge contributers in order to curry favor from the other.
Business_Casual
03-27-10, 08:03
I've smelled a rat for a long time when it comes to the United States and our food supply. The federal government provides massive subsidies (tax dollars) to producers of corn, grain and sugar (among many other agricultural payoffs) and the majority of that money doesn't end up in the pockets of some poster-child American farmer sitting atop his grandfather's John Deere with a couple of tow-headed little boys in their OshKosh B'Gosh coveralls. The lion's share of federal farm subsidies ends up in the corporate coffers of the likes of ADM and Con-Agra.
Agribusiness provide food to feed millions in the US and millions more outside the USA. This is not a conspiracy, the producers of corn do not force people to make it into Fritos and have them for breakfast.
Why is there always so much hate on this forum for businesses that create products and sell them? That is the basis of our economy.
M_P
i live close to charleston and i remember all the hell that was raised in huntington over the show...everyone has a choice to make at the store, whether it's walmart, kroger, or whatever grocery store you go to...look at the parents of these children, career welfare recipients, 20 somethings with 2 kids living at home with their parents, and the list goes on...you are responsible for your own actions, end of story...
not all parents are dipshits, but from what i see in my activity with the community, those in that under 30 crowd are some of the reasons to "eat their young" or would have been poster children for birth control...everyone wants to blame someone or something rather than taking responsibility for their choices in life...
just like people bitching about not having this, that or the other...nearly EVERYONE has the ability to go to school and learn...nearly EVERYONE has the ability to join the military or get some sort of education to be successful at gaining employment...you choose your career path, no one else chooses it for you...
my kids both eat home cooked meals that my wife or i prepare after working that will normally include fish/chicken/deer/beef, vegetables, potatoes or rice, and bread...they are quite active and not hooked to the tv/video game box...
i haven't watched the show, all i did was read about it months ago when it was filmed...all the fatasses in huntington were all bent out of shape about being classified as the most obese city in the nation or whatever...so i don't expect a good outcome out of the show anyway...
Agribusiness provide food to feed millions in the US and millions more outside the USA. This is not a conspiracy, the producers of corn do not force people to make it into Fritos and have them for breakfast.
Why is there always so much hate on this forum for businesses that create products and sell them? That is the basis of our economy.
M_P
Because it's welfare, my grandfather grew up on a farm, he had no love for farmers who got subsidies, how is it any different than bailing out banks?
Farmers have been getting bailed out for decades, and as far as choice to use high fructose in replace of sugar cane comes down to economics, how can a sugar cane farmer compete with corn prices when the government pays the corn farmer for his loss so he can sell his corn below market prices?
And who cares about feeding the world, why do we need to feed NK? Or Ghana? Stand on your own two feet or fall on your ass.
ForTehNguyen
03-27-10, 12:26
Agribusiness provide food to feed millions in the US and millions more outside the USA. This is not a conspiracy, the producers of corn do not force people to make it into Fritos and have them for breakfast.
Why is there always so much hate on this forum for businesses that create products and sell them? That is the basis of our economy.
M_P
subsidies greatly distort the supply and demand of the food market. We have so much corn we actually had to find new applications for it for the hell of it. Thats where we get ethanol and high fructose corn syrup from. These two things are only possible because of corn subsidies.
New Zealand eliminated its subsidies, and their farming output quadrupled after it. Unlike here where we are paying subsidies to farmers that make more than the average American family. Why are we subsidizing them. Theres more Dept of Ag workers than actual farmers
Check out Food, Inc and King Corn. Both are available instantly from Netflix.
Just wanted to throw in that the show is available on Hulu
http://www.hulu.com/jamie-olivers-food-revolution
I first noticed him after i caught a blurb on some blogs i follow that he won the TED Prize for 2010. http://www.tedprize.org/jamie-oliver/
So i went and look at his website and while his beliefs might not be perfectly in line with what i am pursuing for nutritional goals, him pushing real food over processed food is the major hurdle that must be overcome first.
Business_Casual
03-27-10, 15:00
subsidies greatly distort the supply and demand of the food market. We have so much corn we actually had to find new applications for it for the hell of it. Thats where we get ethanol and high fructose corn syrup from. These two things are only possible because of corn subsidies.
New Zealand eliminated its subsidies, and their farming output quadrupled after it. Unlike here where we are paying subsidies to farmers that make more than the average American family. Why are we subsidizing them. Theres more Dept of Ag workers than actual farmers
I'm all for free market competition, that's not at all what I am saying. I am not concerned with ADM or other large companies making food, but I agree that the government shouldn't distort the market either.
B_C
We're going on 50+ years now of TV dinners, fast food, and so forth. That's at least 3 generations where in many family's, nobody knows how to actually prepare a meal. I can't really find fault except in the most foolish circumstances... people go with what they are taught or grow up with, and often its a matter of what people can afford, or have time for, but its a sad state of affairs.
I hate government control and micromanagement as much as the next guy, but trying to blame the government or farmers or the ag industry for the pile of fat asses this country has become is silly. The reason we are fat asses is because we refuse to accept responsibility for our actions. PERIOD. Last I checked our grocery stores are stocked full of good, nutritious foods that can be prepared into wonderful meals. We just choose to leave them there and go to the pre cooked isles on a consistent basis. Heck if you do the math you will find that buying raw materials and preparing a meal yourself is often cheaper than buying pre cooked stuff. We are just too lazy to do the work.
Same thing goes for the kids. Were just too lazy to do the work and accept responsibility for our offspring. Nothing says that your kids must eat the cafeteria food, which EVERYONE knows sucks. Get your fat ass up 10 minutes early and make your kid a healthy lunch. Not effing rocket science, just takes some personal responsibility, a thing rarer than a prom night virgin these days. Same effers that cant for the life of them be bothered to take their damned offspring to school, but want me to pay extra taxes for a shuttle service. See them every day, standing out by the school bus stop in their PJ's sucking on a cancer stick... yeah they are really going to be late for Oprah or whatever if they took 5 minutes and walked their kids down the street to school.
I hate government control and micromanagement as much as the next guy, but trying to blame the government or farmers or the ag industry for the pile of fat asses this country has become is silly.
You can blame .gov for making unhealthy foods much cheaper than healthier foods. And you can blame .gov for putting small farmers out of business in favor of the large corporate farms.
I was trying to remember what food we were served in school, was quite a while ago but as much as I can remember we got the same crap they get now. I remember cardboard pizza and fries, hot dogs and tater tots, soup that came from a can.
But we also had recess and gym, after school we would drop off our books do some chores and be outside until dark playing. There was nothing good to watch on tv, we had atari but were not allowed to play much because we only had 1 tv, no computers. The only times I really watched tv was if it was raining and saturday mornings, we didnt have 24 hour cartoon channels.
The only exercise some kids get is walking from the bus stop to their house, they also have a tv, video games, computer in their rooms. Seems thats a bigger problem now since I grew up eating the same crap.
You can blame .gov for making unhealthy foods much cheaper than healthier foods. And you can blame .gov for putting small farmers out of business in favor of the large corporate farms.
Not sure about your AO, but around here fast food and pre-processed foods aside from maybe Ramen noodles and potted meats are not cheaper than raw materials. I can go I to any grocery store and buy fresh veggies, meat... at a cheaper price than the alternatives. That includes going out to eat. You don't have to go to Whole Foods or some other exotic high mark up grocery stores to get good fresh ingredients for a healthy meal. We all choose to go the other route because of time and lazyness. We just don't want to stand in the kitchen making dinner after an 8+ hour work day. We just want to come home and spend some quality time with the family and appearently being in the kitchen cooking and talking isn't as good a quality as sitting in front of the TV or XBOX. I am just as guilty of this as the rest of the fat asses in the country.
I don't k ow enough about the farming industry to know why small farmers went bu the way side so you may be correct there. All I know is that be it small farmers or ag business, the food is there,readily available, and very cost effective we just choose to
walk on by.
As far as exercise goes, I agree 100%. We all sit around to much playing video games instead of real games. Parents are too lazy to go out and watch their kids play, even though almost every neighborhood has some sort of park near by. I wouldn't let my kid roam the neighborhood unsupervised, but I take him to the park and let him go nuts and vent some energy.
Basically we are just lazy bastards as a whole.
Not sure about your AO, but around here fast food and pre-processed foods aside from maybe Ramen noodles and potted meats are not cheaper than raw materials. I can go I to any grocery store and buy fresh veggies, meat... at a cheaper price than the alternatives. That includes going out to eat.
Do you factor in the time it takes you to shop, prep and cook the meal with the cost of purchasing the food? A Mcdonald's cheeseburger is usually far cheaper at $1 than going to a store buying ground beef, patties, cheese, and returning home and cooking it. It probably will take you 20-30 minutes to cook with prep time, and 20 - 30 minutes to shop for the food.
McDonald's drive through should be 5 minutes or less, are located nearly every mile to half a mile and you can eat your hamburger while driving. And the same goes with most fast food items. It's extremely cheap calories, and it's designed to make people enjoy eating it even if it's total shit. If that hamburger cost me $45 at McDonald's, I wouldn't touch the thing, but to make myself one, even if it's a little nicer does cost me nearly that... You have to include the cost of your time as well not just the initial cost of the groceries.
It's like I said. The raw materials are ther and are cost effective, we just choose to go another route. You can drive through McDonalds and be done in 5 minutes, consume crap calories and have some quality time with your family in front of the TV or Xbox or whatever. Or you can go to the groceries store once a week and stock up on basics and spend some quality time with your family talking and interacting while you cook that meal. Heck if it's nice outside you can grill a steak and play catch with your kid. What a concept.
I don't do it often enough with my family, but when I do it's fun. Much like every one else I am too lazy, but I'm trying to be better about it so my son gets a decent example. Going out to eat or driving through McDonalds once in a while if OK, it's just bad when you do it all the darned time.
I went through the rationalization routine of gee I make $35/hr and my wife makes $20/hr so that's a $55/hr burden rate for cooking a meal plus raw materials. It made that $50 bill at Chilis go down smoother, but when you think about it the wasted time waiting for the table, getting served... Even if it's realistic to add a burden rate to cooking meals, which IMO is a rationalization, don't you suppose that it's time better spent especially given the long term health benefits associated with eatine healthier meals? I have often wonders if people who like to offer up burdeon rates for cooking do so for watching TV? $55/hr to watch a 35 min episode of your favorite reality TV and 25 minutes of mindless commercials... doesnt sound so appealing anymore.
John_Wayne777
03-29-10, 15:40
I'm always wary of do-gooders whose notion of bettering society involves going to government and demanding money as Oliver has done.
kaiservontexas
03-29-10, 15:48
The lunch ladies are lazy. I remember his remark about professional kitchens in England wishing they had that much equipment in a kitchen, and he is right. They are well equipped to truly cook for the students or masses of people in general.
The same applies to most people running around, and starting late last year I started changing this for myself. I am skinny but with a belly. (You know the type that looks like a snake that ate a basketball.) Well that has been going down since I switched to mostly, I do not do it everyday, since I started making my own meals. I already do light exercise, so, switching up the food is the big factor.
Yes processed pre-packaged foods are easier to fix. They do not taste as good as fresh squash, peppers, onions, and potatoes in a stir fry done on the grill next to the steaks. A ham sandwich with leafy greens, tomatoes, and onions on wheat is way tastier then a big mac. Hell even the beer taste better with such things . . . and I love fresh spinach . . . not a new discovery, but I just wanted to share.
After at least a dozen failed attempts by the Food Network to foist this lisping twit on decent Americans, he's now on ABC??!!
He must have photos of someone...
His old shows were good, the naked chef and olivers twist.
ForTehNguyen
03-30-10, 08:56
i didnt bother to watch the show, the commercial screamed food nazi police propaganda. Is this an incorrect assumption?
I grew up in a home with mostly home cooked meals. I have twin boys, almost 4YO, and they will grow up knowing how to cook.
My wife on the other hand....to her cooking food is warming up something bought out of the freezer section at the grocery store. Ok though....I like to cook so I dont mind her not knowing, and Im teaching her.....
Sweet deal. She can do the dishes :)
Littlelebowski
03-30-10, 09:22
The always excellent Reason.com has a writeup on this fool.
Article (http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/25/jamie-olivers-ministry-of-food)
Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food Control
The nannying British chef brings reality TV to West Virginia
Baylen Linnekin | March 25, 2010
By at least one measure England’s Jamie Oliver is the most popular chef in the world. Such an accomplishment is no small feat for a dyslexic 34-year-old son of publicans nor for someone who dropped out of school at 16 to attend catering college. Today Oliver can boast of having launched several restaurants, authored at least a dozen cookbooks, created the O-like magazine Jamie, starred in countless TV series, served as a pitchman for British grocery giant Sainsbury’s, and amassed a personal fortune estimated at more than $60 million.
This week Oliver will host his first American network television show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, a Ryan Seacrest-produced reality series debuting Friday evening on ABC. In a departure from Oliver’s previous American shows, which focused on teaching people who want to cook how do so, Food Revolution is a bold attempt by Oliver to begin forcing every American to cook and buy only the foods he thinks we should eat.
If this were just the story of a marginal chef with some vague ideas, that might be the end of it. But Oliver and his powerful acolytes have used television to ravage the wallets of too many British taxpayers to take him lightly.
Despite, or perhaps because of, Oliver’s immense and growing visibility, critics are divided over the chef. To some, Oliver is a “national treasure.” But others see Oliver as little more than a “fat-tongued twat.”
The surprising root of this debate has little if anything to do with Oliver's cooking or his successes in the culinary marketplace. Oliver’s notoriety stems more from his surprising victories as Great Britain’s most successful food lobbyist. Oliver appears to believe there is something deeply wrong with those who don’t dine in his restaurants, buy his publications, watch his TV shows, or think of food as he does. To him, this deficit of character is so egregious and so widespread that only hugely expensive government re-education programs can rectify it.
From the pork protectionism of Jamie Saves Our Bacon to Jamie’s School Dinners, his exposé on “how little government was spending” on school lunches, Oliver has lately taken to Britain’s airwaves to urge government to regulate and spend at a much higher clip. And the British government has responded, adding a billion dollars to its school-meals budget in response to Jamie’s School Dinners.
The “Naked” Days
Oliver first rose to worldwide fame as The Naked Chef, a boisterous hipster everyman who tossed around words like "pukka" with the emphatic and gratuitous self-assurance his American peers let fly "bam" and “yum-o,” and who scooted about late Cool Britannia London from home to fishmonger to ethnic grocer to indie cheese shop and back home to the kitchen. There, Oliver would cook up something wonderful for a requisite stable of attractive fellow twentysomethings who served as the show’s eye candy, studio audience, and fortunate tasters. What was naked about The Naked Chef? With one known exception, naked referred to cooking without embellishing food.
The Naked Chef, which first aired in America in 1999 on the Food Network, quickly and simultaneously went neon and downhill. But for people like me who watched the show, bought Oliver’s books, and went to one of his live demonstrations, The Naked Chef was all one needed to go from culinary imbecile to capable cook in mere months.
The Naked Chef is one example of the good Oliver the entrepreneur has done. Another is Fifteen, a charitable enterprise and restaurant concept Oliver launched in the early 2000s in London (and later franchised in Australia and the Netherlands), in which Oliver hires and trains as cooks young adults who have been homeless, jobless, or struggled with substance abuse. Oliver has also starred in several TV series based on Fifteen.
Oliver’s “Feed Me Better” & “Ministry of Food” Campaigns
A less savory Oliver emerged in the middle part of the last decade, by which time he was clearly no longer satisfied with changing only the lives of people who sought his help. Oliver launched the Feed Me Better campaign, which he designed with the admirable goal of getting British school kids to eat healthier food. But while he could have argued in favor of parents or kids packing the cheap, easy, and tried-and-true alternative to school food—brown bag lunches—Oliver opted instead to urge more government control and increased spending on big-ticket items.
“Ovens, grills, and cooks drive up costs tremendously,” former Reason Editor in Chief Virginia Postrel wrote in a 1995 piece on school lunches. Oliver did just that, seeking and then winning hundreds of millions of dollars in new British government spending on school lunches, cafeteria-worker training, and kitchen equipment.
Negative reaction to the British government’s nationwide implementation of Oliver’s school-lunch recommendations was swift and widespread. Parents, some of whom labeled Oliver’s food “low-fat rubbish,” pulled 400,000 kids from the school-lunch rolls, choosing to brown bag it rather than have their kids eat Oliver’s “healthier” options. Parents opposed to Oliver’s scheme handed food to their kids through the gates of schoolyards. Some vendors and parents set up shop outside schools and sold food to students. Enterprising students, in turn, sold food to peers in schools, which led to suspensions for pupil transgressions as absurd as “crisp dealing.”
After a particularly vocal revolt against his meals program in the central English city of Rotherham, Oliver decided to fight back. He launched a walk-in training center, which he dubbed his “Ministry of Food,” in Rotherham. Oliver took his cue from Britain’s World War II-era Ministry of Food, the British government agency in charge of food rationing that also led a training campaign to show Brits with fewer food choices how to do more with less. (The agency, which was originally dubbed the Ministry of Food Control, continued to ration food until nearly a decade after the war.)
Spinning the Ministry’s effort like the master propagandist Dr. Carrot, Oliver explained that due to “this incredibly valuable service, people knew how to use their food rations properly and were able to eat—and live—better, even during the war! As a result the British public had one of the healthiest diets of any time in history.” (Oliver’s better-eating-and-living-through-wartime-rationing cant doesn’t hold up to common sense or hard wartime truths, which in addition to food rationing included the quite unhealthy consequences of more than one-half-million British war dead and lengthy periods of nightly Nazi bombing raids on London and other British cities.)
The Ministry of Food, like seemingly every Oliver idea, launched both an eponymous TV series and cookbook. But unlike Oliver’s school lunch scheme, the Ministry has not spread beyond the city limits of Rotherham. This is not for lack of effort on Oliver’s part. The chef authored an eight-page “manifesto” in 2008 to help pressure the national government to provide “proper funding” to set up a Ministry of Food center in every British town. Launching such an enormous program would cost an estimated half-billion dollars—while training the “girls” Oliver seeks to staff the centers, creating mobile food buses, implementing programs to train adults to cook, and a host of other related spending projects Oliver outlines would cost British taxpayers at least $65 million more.
Last month, in recognition of his combined efforts, Oliver was awarded the 2010 TED Prize. TED, the nonprofit that bills itself as the home of “[i]deas worth spreading,” honored Oliver for his work as a “standard-bearer in the fight against obesity and other diet related diseases,” and for having “pressured the UK government to invest $1 billion to overhaul school lunches to improve nutrition.”
Yet in spite of his zeal for government to thrust its hands ever more into the food business, Oliver told the Guardian that he doesn’t believe such involvement—which lies at the heart of all his schemes—will make much of a difference.
“The reason the Ministry is working... is because we went up there and interviewed 30 local boys and girls, and we’re not ****ing stupid,” he said. “If they [local government] did it, can you imagine what the staff would look like? You could have anyone getting a ****ing job! You’ve got to understand food, love food, and understand people skills.”
The value of what Oliver brought to Rotherham is questionable, to say the least. The Guardian notes that Oliver’s Ministry effort in Rotherham is led by “a non-cook,” Lisa, who together with her fellow teachers is doing little more than “running what used to be called home economics lessons.”
Oliver’s School Lunch Failures
The Ministry of Food is but one of Oliver’s dubious endeavors. When Oliver’s zeal combines with his inclination toward questionable judgment, the results can be comically incongruous.
For example, Oliver recently claimed—while discussing his newfound understanding of racism and the plight of immigrants—that he is “sixth generation Sudanese,” and that he is one of “quite a few Olivers” who “are a bit swarthy and have got curly hair.” The Daily Mail, reporting the story, hinted politely “some might see [this] as an attempt to improve his street credibility.” And before Oliver was turning Sudanese, he once appeared on one of his shows wearing a shirt adorned with the logo of the Tamil Tigers terrorist group.
Sometimes his gaffes hit at the edges of his programmatic work. Several years ago, for example, Oliver donned a fat suit and posed on a scooter—complete with a wheel broken just for the cameras—to highlight the problem of obesity. To many this looked more like Oliver was instead mocking the obese. Months later the press ridiculed Oliver, whose weight had ballooned since the stunt, saying he no longer needed the fat suit.
Sometimes, though, Oliver’s blunders—like the detestable “Lamb Curry Song” or his role in the televised autopsy of an obese man by a controversial surgeon—strike at the heart of both his work and his credibility. And for all his purported expertise in combating obesity—it was his work in this area that won him the TED Prize after all—there exists a very real question whether Oliver really understands healthy eating or even believes his own most basic dietary recommendations.
The current issue of his magazine Jamie (Feb./Mar. 2010) recommends several school lunch recipes the magazine bills as “wholesome meals to take to school.” The magazine’s suggested meal for Thursday is a tuna Waldorf pita with hot vanilla milk, an oaty biscuit, and a banana. According to the nutrition information provided in Jamie, this youngster’s lunch contains an astonishing 1,183 calories, 55 grams of fat (20 of them saturated), and 65 grams of sugar. That’s 73 calories, 12 grams of fat (11.5 saturated), and 3 grams of sugar more than the same student would get from eating both a McDonald’s hamburger Happy Meal (hamburger, fries, Sprite) and a Chicken McNuggets Happy Meal (McNuggets, fries, Sprite).
Unsurprisingly, this “wholesome” lunch by Oliver falls well outside accepted dietary norms. The USDA, for example, recommends a moderately active 9-13 year-old child average 1,900 calories per day. Even without breakfast or dinner factored in, Oliver’s tuna Waldorf pita lunch accounts for 62 percent of an adolescent’s recommended calories for the entire day. But don’t take the USDA’s word for it: Oliver himself recommends that “a lunchtime school meal should provide a growing child with one third of their daily nutritional intake.”
Reaching a conclusion dramatically antithetical to Oliver's own rarely takes little more than a second look. For example, a new working paper by two academics lauds the impact of Oliver’s Feed Me Better campaign. The paper’s authors, economists Michéle Belot of the University of Oxford and Jonathan James of the University of Essex, looked at “the causal effects of diet on educational outcomes” in Greenwich, England that resulted from a 2004-05 pilot program for Oliver’s billion-dollar school meals program in Great Britain.
Unsurprisingly, Oliver predicted a positive causal effect. “It’s proven that real food promotes more effective learning,” Oliver writes at his website. Switching to healthier foods, has said, will result in “improved concentration and better performance in the classroom.” Belot and James conclude, based on the data, that Feed Me Better “improved educational achievements” in the aggregate.
Fair enough. But the same data also shows, disturbingly, that students from lower-income families who received an Oliver-inspired free school meal (FSM) actually saw their academic performance drop or stagnate compared to the non-FSM students. My own analysis of the data, which Belot confirmed to be correct, shows that Oliver’s program—which cost the Greenwich school district an additional $1 million to implement—increased the academic disparity between the FSM kids who had to eat Oliver’s food (and whose academic performance did not improve) and the more well-to-do kids (based on their non-FSM status) who otherwise had a choice.
Limiting dietary choices, it seems, turns out to be a recipe for failure. Which brings us to Oliver’s current experiment in America.
Oliver Brings His “Revolution” to West Virginia
For his new ABC show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Oliver imported elements of both Feed Me Better and his Ministry of Food to Huntington, West Virginia, which has been billed as the fattest city in America. With cameras rolling, Oliver established a Ministry-like training center downtown and sought to change public school menus and re-educate school kids about food.
As in Great Britain, Oliver’s preferences were not to everyone’s liking. A series of promotional videos for the show depict Oliver trying vainly to remake resistant West Virginians in his image. One promo shows a bewildered Oliver as he tries (and fails) to get a room of healthy-looking elementary students to correctly identify tomatoes, a beet, an eggplant, and a cauliflower. (Never mind that the latter three are obvious ringers many healthy adults couldn’t identify in their raw forms, that British kids think that bacon comes from sheep, or that decades of Ministry of Food training last century couldn’t keep adult Brits from falling for a 1957 British mockumentary on Switzerland’s annual “spaghetti harvest.”)
A second promo shows Oliver facing stiff resistance from a squad of hardened school lunch ladies. Still another shows Oliver taking part in a Wok-and-spoon-wielding flash mob on the Marshall University campus in Huntington. A fourth shows Oliver sobbing. “They don’t understand me,” he cries. “They don’t know why I’m here.”
These men, women, and children of the Mountaineer State may or may not understand Oliver and his British accent and order of chivalry, but they no doubt understand why he is there. They’ve read the same things I have—that Oliver would like nothing more than an invitation to the White House to make policy with healthy-eating Czarina Michelle Obama.
Though not everyone on the left is a believer, it would be a serious mistake to underestimate Oliver’s present and potential influence here in America. Thanks to TED, Oliver already has the ears of heavyweights at Google, YouTube, and Amazon. The same week Oliver won his TED Prize, Michelle Obama launched a $1 billion campaign to battle childhood obesity in America. That money will likely flow in spite of the fact childhood obesity rates in America stopped rising in 2008, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
But data be damned. If Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution is a hit, then Great Britain’s so-called national treasure may find an Obama White House invitation is just the first step in one chef’s quest to subjugate the American diet.
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