Jamie Oliver Hits America’s Shores for Healthy Eating

But crit­i­cism only goes so far. At some point in any bat­tle, action must be taken. Interestingly, this action has come from those who know food best: chefs. Culinary leg­end Alice Waters, cre­ator of California Cuisine, arrived in the late nineties with her Edible Schoolyard pro­gram. Chef Ann Cooper, the “Renegade Lunch Lady,” has been fight­ing for healthy school lunches now for ten years and is the sub­ject of a fea­ture in the May–June 2010 issue of Organic Connections. The French doc­u­men­tary Food Beware fol­lowed one vil­lage in France that con­verted all the local stu­dents to healthy and organic cui­sine. The com­mon­al­ity among all these sto­ries: the great taste of fresh, nutri­tious food, and the edu­ca­tion of chil­dren as well as par­ents about what it is and how to pre­pare it at a prac­ti­cal level. Education was fol­lowed by accep­tance and real change.

Now famed British chef Jamie Oliver has crossed the pond with guns blaz­ing to lend his voice to the cry for our children’s health and to fos­ter a grass­roots rev­o­lu­tion in the cafe­te­rias of American schools. His new tele­vi­sion real­ity show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, finds Jamie tack­ling the city rated high­est in the nation for obe­sity: Huntington, West Virginia.

Oliver is no stranger to this bat­tle. In 2005, he took to the air­waves in his native England to change what he viewed as the “rub­bish” chil­dren were being fed in schools. The whole while, he met with resis­tance from those who didn’t want to change the sta­tus quo—as is now hap­pen­ing here. But he per­se­vered and is now cred­ited with hav­ing cre­ated a mas­sive improve­ment in Britain’s school lunch program.

“This is not an English guy com­ing over here look­ing down at any­one,” Oliver said in a recent tele­con­fer­ence with reporters about the show. “It’s exactly the same back home. I mean, basi­cally, all humans hate change and it’s change that we need. You’re always going to get that kind of kickback.”

But Oliver shows early on, right in the first two episodes of the series, that he def­i­nitely knows how to reach out, demon­strate and get his ideas received. His modus operandi is appar­ent from the very start: he is get­ting in and meet­ing with ele­men­tary school stu­dents, edu­cat­ing them on veg­eta­bles (of which they were shock­ingly igno­rant and unable to name any by sight in a class­room demon­stra­tion); he picks out and takes on the diet of a local family—the mem­bers of which are all severely over­weight; then he opens up his own shop in down­town Huntington and invites any­one and every­one in to learn to cook properly.

“My gen­eral atti­tude, which is fairly pos­i­tive, is the key to get­ting these sto­ries across,” Oliver said. “You put your head down, you get in the com­mu­nity, start work­ing with fam­i­lies, start build­ing rela­tion­ships, and really let word of mouth get out there that this change is positive—it can help you. It can help you save money, it can help the health of your fam­ily, and as knowl­edge it should be and must be passed down to your kids and your kids’ kids.”

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

The diets of the stu­dents, and of the fam­ily he “adopts,” are almost exclu­sively frozen, fried and high in gra­tu­itous sugar. On Oliver’s first day at the school, they are serv­ing pizza for break­fast. Bread is the most plen­ti­ful food group on the stu­dents’ lunch trays. The copi­ous ovens in the cafe­te­ria, which Oliver points out would be the pride of any restau­rant kitchen, are not used for cook­ing but for warm­ing processed foods—and Oliver remarks that the list of ingre­di­ents for those foods would tongue-twist a scientist.

He def­i­nitely has his work cut out for him. But given his past suc­cess, and the dent he’s already made in the first two episodes of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, it’s doubt­ful that he will leave this town the same way he found it.

Oliver cred­its the power of the air­waves for the suc­cess he’s had in England, and hope­fully will have here. “Let’s be really frank about it: TV is still the pre­mier com­mu­ni­ca­tor in the coun­try,” he said. “Yes, the Internet, edi­to­ri­als and news­pa­pers are incred­i­bly impor­tant; but, together, all of those forces can be used as a won­der­ful force for good. When I got my cam­paign in England six years ago, there’s absolutely no way that, with­out our TV series, I would have got $1 bil­lion out of the British gov­ern­ment and changed the stan­dards in schools and banned the junk.”

His impact is already being felt. On his web­site, Oliver has posted a peti­tion for view­ers of the show—or anyone—to sign. The peti­tion is call­ing for the sav­ing of cook­ing skills and bet­ter school food for our chil­dren, and he plans to take it directly to the pres­i­dent and first lady at the con­clu­sion of the series. So far, tens of thou­sands of Americans have signed. You can also—the link is below.

Click here or on the image at the right to sign Jamie’s petition.

To find out more about Jamie, his tele­vi­sion shows, cook­books and many activ­i­ties, go to his web­site at www.jamieoliver.com.

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution runs weekly on ABC tele­vi­sion. Check your local list­ings for times.