friend's quote: What'd you know - White Foodie Jebus can't fix it all with Shame. Who'd have thunk?
12:41 pm - 04/15/2010How TV Superchef Jamie Oliver's 'Food Revolution' Flunked Out:After two months, kids hated the new meals, milk consumption plummeted, and many students dropped out of the school lunch program altogether.
Jamie landed on America's shores with the self-anointed mission to remake our eating habits for the better. Ground zero is Huntington, West Virginia. In an opening montage we are told the city of 50,000 "was recently named the unhealthiest city in America ... where nearly half of the adults are considered obese" as we see lardy folk shuffle through the frame.
While Jamie's efforts touch on many problems of school food -- from overuse of processed foods to lack of funding to French fries being considered a vegetable -- the "Food Revolution" is a failure because the entertainment narrative is unable to deal with complexities or systemic issues. Instead, all problems are reduced to individual stories and choices. The series may sprinkle some facts and hot-button issues into the mix, but what keeps the viewer hungering for more is the personal dramas, conflicts and weepy moments that are the staples of reality TV.
Because Jamie is packaged as a one-man whirlwind, tangling with "lunch lady Alice" while "Stirn' things oop," there is no mention of the existing, deep-rooted movement for local, healthy food from the farm to the market to the table, as well as schools. It's also more fun and shocking to "slag off" a poor school district in Appalachia for serving pizza and flavored milk for breakfast than to examine how West Virginia has imposed some of the strictest school nutritional standards in the nation. But that's entertainment.
The reality behind "Food Revolution" is that after the first two months of the new meals, children were overwhelmingly unhappy with the food, milk consumption plummeted and many students dropped out of the school lunch program, which one school official called "staggering." On top of that food costs were way over budget, the school district was saddled with other unmanageable expenses, and Jamie's failure to meet nutritional guidelines had school officials worried they would lose federal funding and the state department of education would intervene.
In short, the "Food Revolution" has flunked out. At Central City Elementary, where Jamie burst in with loads of fanfare, expense and energy, the school has reintroduced the regular school menu and flavored milk because the "Food Revolution" meals were so unpopular. In what looks like a face-saving gesture, Jamie's menu remains as a lunchtime option, but given the negative student response, don't be surprised if it's quietly phased out by next school year. (You can see both menus here.)
...
To source, cook and get children to eat fresh, healthy local food we would need to double school food funding, get schoolchildren involved in growing and cooking their own food, ban junk-food advertising, slap a health tax on fast food, shift agribusiness subsidies to small, community-controlled farms, provide proper health care and nutrition education, and promote social and cultural changes in how American families exercise and approach, prepare and eat food. Then most children (and adults) would probably make healthy choices. But this would require a real revolution, not one manufactured for television....
These factors make choice more of a construct. Many people opt for flavor-intense, highly processed, calorie-dense food because it's cheaper, easier and more fulfilling than cooking healthy foods from scratch. And there's no one helping to educate them and help modify their behaviors and habits because there is much more profit in the huge diet industry and obesity-related diseases than in prevention.So why is West Virginia's school food system the way that it is?
The mantra of "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" is choice. But America's ever-expanding waistline is caused by systemic issues: widespread poverty, sedentary lifestyles, junk-food advertising, a lack of health care, corporate control of the food system, the prevalence of cheap fast food, food designed to be addictive, and subsidies and policies that make meats and sugars cheaper than whole fruits and vegetables.
There's a whole lot of fatshaming going on too, which is absolutely disgusting and not in the least helpful.
And apparently he pulled off the same thing in Britain three years ago?
Also : Article about Huntington, Jamie Oliver show angers locals
Fawn Boyer of West Virginia believes that targeting a town where the average income is below the poverty line is hitting under the belt. She is the creator of the Facebook group I Bet This Fizzy Drink Can Get More Fans Than Jamie Oliver. Boyer admits that there is a problem with fast food places in Huntington. Also, she says, poverty burdens many residents of the town. What she disagrees with is the article in the Daily Mail portraying her town as a bunch of hicks who don't care about their children. "The article in the Daily Mail was very unrealistic. It feels like an attack on Huntington. If you research the CDC you find that the state of Mississippi has a higher obesity rating," Boyer said during a phone interview.
In a town where many of the state employees are making so little income that they qualify for welfare, it's unrealistic to expect people to be able to shop at the higher line supermarkets that offer organic foods, she says. "The truth is for many fast food and a big can of Spagettios is the only way a family can afford to feed their family."
Boyer thinks Oliver's ideals are wonderful; after all he is for promoting better health and diet for children. She mused that it would be great if the schools could serve organic lunches to students but knows that with the funding that is in place for West Virginia's schools, that is a pipe dream. Boyer also said that the city's YMCA is too expensive for most of the residents. "The city should create gyms so that everyone would have a place to go to exercise." In West Virgina there is talk in the government about a fat tax allowing insurance premiums to be higher for those who are overweight instead of funding for helping its citizens become healthier.
Boyer has not been to Huntington's Kitchen. She fears that Oliver's show will portray the town's people in a negative manner. "It seems like the show is exploiting the town." Still Boyer's beef isn't with Oliver, whose ideas she supports, but with creating a program that just may not be sustainable for the town. The overall message she agrees with is basic common sense but it shouldn't come at the cost of shaming one group of people. MORE
Um, yes, you would have to. And? BAWWWW IT WOULD COST SOOOO MUCHHHH MONEYYYyy. Alright - let's keep helping people dying of obesity (and related problems) and poor lifestyle choices then. Problem solved! Yes, unfortunately, you have to pay to fix these sorts of things. You have to pay for more and better options. You have to put time, energy and money into actually fixing the problem (as entertaining as I found Jamie Oliver's show...) Boo-fucking-hoo.
Edited at 2010-04-15 04:48 pm (UTC)
And again, it seems all of these obesity issues come back to accessibility of & education about good food choices to lower income people. This is why i keep asking, why hasn't someone asked the government to subsidize organic choices and support more local farming?
Someone needs to sit their ass down and do some math: why IS it cheaper to get a crap-tastic hamburger with a single slice of plastic-no-nutrient tomato and pickle from a place that brings it's ingredient from some other part of the world, than it is to get a piece of meat from your local butcher? It's a corporate controlled monopoly on affordable options. How do we change this?
I'm not so generous. In the history of reformers, there been a nasty habit of people being classist, narrowminded pricks who believe they know it all, and instead of listening to and cooperating with the community, march and and shame and dictate to the community. I am not happy with the whole lets bash fat poor people schtick for the entertainment of the rest of the country. It's nasty.
And lol at it would cost too much money to eat well >.<
And I love what he did here in the UK, at least here locally the schools now offer a wider range of healthy options.
Plus his sainsburys 'feed a family of five for a fiver' shows eating well can be cheap too!
i.e. I hate money sometimes.
But even then there's no guarantee that it's going to make people less fat. More healthy, yes. But a lot of them will remain obese. Is Foodie Jesus going to go around to schools and homes slicing fat off people's bodies?
Exactly. I mean yeah, if you're going from fast food diet to more wholesome diet, you will probably lose weight. But plenty of fatties eat just fine.
I like Jamie Oliver, and I hate the food system he's trying to change.
To source, cook and get children to eat fresh, healthy local food we would need to double school food funding... We need to do this anyway. Public schools are cutting recess and PE programs from their curriculums to save money. I had no idea letting kids chase a ball around a field for an hour was so expensive.
...get schoolchildren involved in growing and cooking their own food Yep. If kids have an interest and invested time in their own vegetable gardens, they're going to be more likely to eat what they produce.
...ban junk food advertising They've been talking about doing this since my day and before (I was a kid in the 1970s), and personally I don't believe it'll help much. It's not about advertising as much as it's about parenting, AND as a parent, being able to provide a healthy, appealing alternative to that Happy Meal along with the means to buy and cook it. Once again, poorer areas are left out in the cold here.
...slap a health tax on fast food Oh good, another tax that'll affect the poor more than any other group! Woot! Hey, instead of doing this, why not try prevention instead? Oh wait, now I'm talking about making foods, health, and nutrition a part of basic public school education for the umpteenth time and that costs money.
...shift agribusiness subsidies to small, community-controlled farms A nice idea (especially if one pretends all the legislative power that agribusiness has right now simply doesn't exist), but can it actually work? Would every community be able to support small farms to begin with?
...provide proper health care and nutrition education DING DING DING, but there's still a problem. While providing basic nutritional education would go a long way in preventing health problems down the road, there's still the problem of many poorer communities not having access to cheaper, nutritious food (to say nothing of decent public schools where this basic education should come from in the first place).
...and promote social and cultural changes in how American families exercise and approach, prepare and eat food. Agreed. But please, can we not try to shame people into doing it, because clearly, that DOES NOT WORK, and reeks of classism and privelege.
...But this would require a real revolution, not one manufactured for television. Word. It would require a lot of money, too, so sadly, it's not likely to happen any time soon.
*eyeroll*
People were against it before it even started. Give me fries or give me death!, ect.
/rage.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see why "the kids have to like it" is one of the rules for what can be part of school lunches. Yes, I was a kid who wanted more junk food and "good stuff" like pizza and chicken nuggets at school myself, but as an adult? Even as an adult who's basically fighting an addiction to sweets and processed crap, I'm horrified by school lunches these days (and memories of what we had in MY day).
Frankly, our job is to know better than the kids do. We aren't supposed to be their friends - we're their guardians and caretakers.
Don't like the menu? Fine. Don't eat lunches from school - bring your own or go hungry. I know it sounds callous, but I think for those that don't have the first option due to financial constraints, a day or two of going hungry will make them re-think whether or not they want to hold out for the opportunity to go back to greasy pizza for lunch. They'll either cave and start eating proper lunches, or they'll find a way to go on eating as they have been, which is their choice. At least they aren't getting it from the cafeteria.
Yes, I realize there are even bigger obstacles here - cost being the 900-lb gorilla in the room. I'm not going to disagree with the idea that our whole friggin' agricultural/food system is completely fucked. This comment is just aimed at the idea that we have to cater to kids. Just because they like something, that doesn't mean we have to serve it.
Just because my kid says, "I don't want veg, I want a pizza", doesn't mean I'm going to give it to him/her. It's ridiculous to be all, Oh gawd, the kids don't like the healthy food, it fails. It's not the food that flunks, but rather the habits of the children to reach for a nugget over a carrot.
ALL the chocolate milk I ever saw served in schools was 1% milk, not whole. I'm guessing he wants them to drink skim instead, but that's really somewhat counter productive. some vitamins are fat soluble. You need to consume SOME fat with them to extract the maximum nutritional value from vegetables. It's easier to have them drink 1% milk with the meal than load stuff down with fish or nuts, which are frequent allergy triggers. (and those allergic to milk can more easily omit it from the meal this way)
Now, depending on how much SUGAR is in the chocolate milk, that can be an issue. But the bulk of milk's "sugar" content on the nutrition label is going to come from the MILK. Lactose is a sugar! Oxalate in chocolate can also interfere with calcium absorbtion, but the amount of oxalate in chocolate milk is going to be so low as to be a nonissue.
Considering that it adds minimal calories and sugar, comparatively, while greatly upping the number of kids that actually consume it and thus get a big dose of calcium, Vitamin D, and Vitamin A, I'm not sure why he's down on flavored milk. Unless the dairy they were getting it from was absolutely loading it down with sugar, it shouldn't be bad for kids.
Hence why the show is really rather pointless.
Working from the bottom of the totem pole doesn't work.
Not all kids have this advantage and it's very sad. I am also lucky to live close to the local co-op and their prices are reasonable. I can get local dairy meat and veggies at a good price.
I would love to see Community Gardens I would love to see kids grow their own produce, but it's not always possible.
And again...it saddens me.
Edited at 2010-04-15 07:44 pm (UTC)
I'm far more interested in what Michelle Obama is doing, uncombative problem solving at the top. *____* DO WANT.
The article in the Daily Mail was very unrealistic.
LOL.
i lived in france for a while and was able to feed myself the healthiest food i ever ate as a student on a tiny, bad exchange rate budget (fresh baguettes, butter and tea for breakfast, a salad for lunch, chicken breast, rice and spinach for dinner most days). when i came back from my study abroad and went back to my regular university, i tried replicating my paris diet only to find it was FAR too expensive.
A reality TV show being aired on a corporate-controlled network channel isn't solving the food crisis in American schools that has been caused by decades of corporate, big-Ag control of government? How fucking shocking. A celebrity chef is using the only tools he has (TV, media, and actual cooking) to promote a different way of approaching food, and he doesn't manage to change the food culture of a community with one season of a TV show? Again, how shocking. Oliver didn't go around telling people to start shopping solely at Whole Foods; the point is to change the way one looks at foods. One can buy plenty of fresh and/or frozen fruits and veg and dried grains and legumes at a discount, non-organic grocery chain and still eat pretty fucking healthy on the cheap, for just a few dollars a meal. It's not an either-or choice where you either eat junk alone or who spend your paycheck on pricey fresh herbs and that hunk of locallly produced organic hormone-free bleu cheese, which is the way a lot of comments here are trying to frame the issue.
And lol forever at, "Kids hate vegetables, and won't drink milk that isn't colored hot pink and flavored with ~froot essence~, so therefore the program is a failure." More like our culture around food and our parenting and educational paradigms are a failure.
I live in the south. I live in a reasonably poor town. Obesity is disportionately associated with the poor because it is fuckloads cheaper and faster to head to Micky D's and get a meal than it is to cook one yourself.
Poor people work more, have less money, and find it difficult, frustrating, and upsetting to try to cook healthy foods that are fast when they don't know what the fuck they are doing.
If you look at what was going on in Huntington you see that a lot of the food issues trace back to ignorance of the food product they are eating, what it does to their bodies, and how full it really makes them.
Did you watch the episode where he went to the kindergarten class and they didn't know what a potato was? That is not because they are stupid. That is because their parents are not using those vegetables at home or they are not being taught at home or school what they are eating.
Did you see the episode when he was talking with the lady who is charge for the food for the school district? Did you see that manual that has to do with the qualifications of what food has to fullfill in order to be in the school food program. The USDA (which is agri-bussiness lobbying run) makes guidelines of what counts as being part of the food pyramid and what can be considered healthy. According to the USDA (not Huntington, it's the fucking federal government guidelines) French Fries are considered a vegtable, ketchup is considered a vegetable, pizza is considered as two grains/bread and a 7 vegetable rice dish is considered less healthy than pizza because it doesn't fit the "guidelines."
This isn't just about fixing Huntington's school food system. It is about educating people on what the system is, how fucking impssible it is to get real meaningful change with theway the "guidelines" are written and the USDA is runing things, and about teaching people to cook a small meal can help them eat better.
Have you seen what is going on in Congress? There is real talk about CHANGING things. There are students in schools DEMANDING to be served healthier foods. There is movement to get junk food out of the easy reach of schoolchildren in school and being considered as 'healthy' snacks. There is movement to get P.E. and mandatory recess back into our school systems.
This isn't just about Jamie Oliver's tv show. This is about a food revolution that is being run on many fronts and Jamie Oliver's just bringing all this information to us by showing what is happening in just one town that could be any town in America. And it's being broadcast everyweek on a national channel that is seen in tens of millons of households. He is bringing awareness of the problem and solutions to the public.
Agri-business has fucked us up so badly that it will take a genuine act of Congress to fix this so more children won't die of obesity and other health related illness due to eating shitty food because they are poor and the food they are given are contaminated with drugs, pesticides, chemicals, horomones that companies like Monsanto forefeed down our fucking throats.
Instead of just bitching about the system why not try to do something. Write to your Congressman and DEMAND something be done about the way our food system is run.
Just the other day it was released that the USDA has been allowing food that is considered too toxic to be sold in other countries like Mexico to be sold here. That companies tht have violations in their inspections are still able to sell their tainted meat.
That is just one aspect of the USDA fucking us. Our public school lunch program is another.
Jamie Oliver is just bringing his expertise of the work he did in the U.K. to help us. And he's not the only one. He's just the one on national tv that is frightening the food lobbyists.
You mean so my letter can be read by an unpaid student who picks a boilerplate response letter, and is then signed by a "signature machine?"
Give me a break. Writing a letter to your congresscritter very very rarely gets any action or even a legitimate response.
The only reason that unhealthy food is less expensive is because of government subsidies of business.
Jamie Oliver is a -jerk-. He means well, but he's got absolutely zero skill in engaging people. He's totally correct on all points, but you cant expect to tell someone 'everything you are doing is wrong and you are killing your kids!' and not expect some defensiveness. He has no skill in rallying a community or convincing people.
British snark does -not- work on defensive Americans, regardless of how true it is.
Heres the libertarian part of my comment. The reason they use the national lunch program is because its -required- for them to do so to get federal funding. If they dropped the school lunch program (brought to you by the us government, sodexho, and monsato), they would lose funding.
Its a bribe.