Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution
March 28, 2010 by Anna
Filed under Recent Posts
This new series is set in Huntington, West Virginia, where 50% of the population is obese and poor eating habits seem to be a badge of honor among it’s inhabitants. Jamie Oliver, well know British chef, attempts to get a local school to change their meal program to reflect a healthier standard. He is confronted with resistance, outright hatred, and overall, dismal results. The impishly charming Brit aims to shock and shock he does as we see children being served gooey, deep dish pizza for breakfast and sugar coated cereal topped with chocolate or strawberry flavored milk.
Their lunch menu is no better with items such as hamburgers, corn dogs, chicken nuggets and French fries as daily staples. In fact, meals are designed to be eaten with either hands or spoons and forks and knives aren’t even available for the children to use to cut and eat a meal of whole chicken, brown rice and vegetables that Jamie prepares for them.
The drama is captivating as tensions escalate between kitchen staff incensed that an outsider is usurping their authority and townspeople, most notably, a local radio personality, fuel the perception that this ‘foreigner’ is aiming to replace our way of life with a bunch of lettuce. What is astonishing to me is that the people portrayed seem to honestly believe that their diet is just fine and that the high rate of obesity and juvenile diabetes are entirely unrelated to their extraordinary caloric consumption
Jamie seems to fare no better in his attempts to get the kids on his side. The first graders seem unable to identify common vegetables such as potato, tomato, broccoli and eggplant in their unprocessed form. A graphic demonstration of how chicken nuggets are made using the most unsavory bits of the whole chicken and piles of unhealthy filler, fails utterly to dissuade the children from their favorite meal. And, in the end, is it really any surprise? If you’ve been given nothing but highly refined and processed food, saturated with fat, sugar, salt and artificial flavoring – brown rice is going to taste like, well, brown rice or slightly more palatable than small bits of cardboard.
Eating healthy is not something that can be mandated in a country where individual freedoms are cherished and staunchly defended. But the untold story is how we were first sold this diet by the corporations that profit obscenely from these processed and artificial meals. They know that a child is likely to continue to eat the foods he is raised on so getting schools to serve up their fare has been a brilliant tactic to create lifetime addicts to fast food. Americans didn’t eat this way 50 years ago and all the evidence abundantly shows we were healthier when we ate home cooked meals of whole foods.
The terms of the challenge Jamie Oliver is facing in this reality style documentary are similar to the challenges given characters in fairy tales to slay the fearsome dragon, rescue the princess and restore a missing treasure; only Jamie has to do it according to a 300 page manual of requirements, on a tight budget and in a couple of weeks. But if passion and belief in a cause can win in the end, one can only hope that this fairy tale will have a happy ending. America needs to listen to this wake up call before it is too late.
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