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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] How TV Superchef Jamie Oliver's 'Food Revolution' Flunked out
  • Date: Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:30:22 -0600


IMHO I don't think it was a waste at all. Jamie and ABC succeeded in getting
a message out to millions at home. Watching it I said you can't change what
they want at school when all they get at home is garbage. And I noticed not a
word in it about WHY the processed "food" with all the transfats, HFCS, MSG,
refined flour & sugar is making everybody sick. I'd have thrown in a couple
doctors and cameos of Michael Pollan too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How 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.
April 8, 2010 |
http://www.alternet.org/food/146354/how_tv_superchef_jamie_oliver%27s_%27food_revolution%27_flunked_out

You've never seen a school lunch like this one, made with hydroponic
vegetables and free-range chicken by a brash British superchef. Not that the
elementary schoolchildren care. Most sing-song "Pizza!" when given a choice
between the gourmet grub and the reheated factory-made frozen pizza. At the
end of the lunch period, a mound of chicken sits untouched, and even more is
dumped into the trash after a few wary nibbles.

That much we do know from watching Jamie Oliver's "Food Revolution" reality
TV series now airing on ABC. But we're not supposed to know that Jamie is
substituting high-end foodstuffs that normally grace three-star restaurants
for the cheap, institutional fare dished out in public schools like West
Virginia's Central City Elementary School, the setting for the first two
episodes.

At the end of one episode, we hear Rhonda McCoy, director of food services
for the local county, tell Jamie that he's over budget and did not meet the
fat content and calorie guidelines, but she's going to let him continue with
the "revolution" as long as he addresses these issues. What is not revealed
is that the "meal cost at Central City Elementary during television
production more than doubled with ABC Productions paying the excess expense,"
according to a document obtained by AlterNet from the West Virginia
Department of Education.

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.)

Ultimately, Jamie picked the wrong target. Dr. Carole Harris, who along with
Dr. Drew Bradlyn evaluated student responses at Central City Elementary to
the "Food Revolution" program, says factors such as sedentary lifestyles,
fast-food consumption, family meal patterns and junk-food advertising aimed
at children are "a much bigger problem than food served in schools."

Jan Poppendieck, author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America,
agrees that individual schools and districts are not the root of the problem.
She says children who participate in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP)
"are more likely to eat healthy food" than kids who don't. Participating
children are more likely to consume "low or nonfat milk, fruits, vegetables
and less likely to consume desserts, snack foods, juice drinks and carbonated
soda at lunch" than students who do not eat the federally subsidized lunches.





  • [Livingontheland] How TV Superchef Jamie Oliver's 'Food Revolution' Flunked out, Tradingpost, 04/08/2010

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