Has anyone figured out what the actual point of contention has been in this thread?
As far as I can discern, although some posters don’t like Oliver’s approach or perhaps the formulaic nature of the series, most agree that the current breakfasts and lunches served in the Huntington schools are not nutritious or desirable, although they are certainly popular.
Then came the condemnation of Oliver’s offerings as snake oil or propaganda.
Some of us then got into it over fresh food vs. processed food, different types of sugars (I still maintain that the sugar in Twinkies and the sugar in fresh fruit is not quite the same thing), and then some rather subjective disagreements over what constitutes a tasty meal.
Oh, and Jamie Oliver is bad and stupid and wrong and dishonest because he’s British. (So we are told.)
For those of you playing along at home, the blog in question is What’s For School Lunch? At the time I wrote that, the top lunch was this: French fries, Sun Chips, and strawberry milk. The fries are counted as a vegetable, the chips are grains, and the milk of course is milk - so the kid took three of the five components offered, and it’s a reimbursable school lunch! Well, the milk has protein and calcium and such, of course, but otherwise I’m seeing a lot of low-nutrient starches there. I’d call that lunch “crud”.
Further down on the page are two examples, from US schools, of chicken nuggets, with either fries or tater tots as the “vegetable”. I’m sure the kids love it, but is that alone good enough reason to serve that? And with taxpayers’ money, no less?
And yeah, what is a “deconstructivist POV” in this case, anyway? Yeah, it’s all food. It all provides calories. Is that good enough?
French fries are veggies now? Sheesh. Should I stir fry them from now on?
That’s a big point of contention on Jamie’s show- the school folks are constantly justifying their horrible food by saying that french fries are veggies and pizza is two, healthy servings of grain.
Did anybody watch the latest episode? I have to wonder if the radio DJ’s attitude was put on to get attention or something. I can sort of understand the frustration of being the subject of a reality show that has a nonzero chance of painting you and your town as brain-dead hicks, but the DJ isn’t exactly doing anything to ameliorate that possibility by acting like a giant tool for no real reason.
Jamie is kind of annoying, but I do have to admire the sheer amount of work he’s putting into this project. And it seems much-needed; the size of some of these people is extremely sad. Huntington reminds me a lot of my hometown in that respect; many of my former high school classmates have utterly ballooned in the years since graduation.
Under that sort of “logic,” they could call strawberry Pop-Tarts “fruit” and a fried, cream cheese won-ton “a dairy serving.”
Chinese Hashbrowns (Zuan La Tu Do Zhi)
More fat in stirfried potatoes than a tater tot.
(And I still mantain that the fructose in dipping sauce is the same as the fructose in fresh fruit.)
That’s one recipe. One recipe. It does not mean you cannot make stir fried potatos healthier than tater tots or french fries or vice versa for that matter. You have to know how something is made, the portion size and the ingredients in it before determining how healthy something is. You understand there’s a wide variability in those right? That you can go into 20 different restaurants and order the same lunch and that the caloric/fat etc. values are going to be all over the map?
Eyeballing something doesn’t count. Without a breakdown of the nutrional content you simply cannot say that X lunch must be healthier than Y lunch or X lunch is the same as Y lunch (the little voices in your head don’t count as a cite.).
Not if it is processed. You have a very uniform nutritional product that varies very little. In a median average of home (stir) fried potatoes (zhuan la tu do shi) I will bet that serving for serving it contains more fat than an equal seving size of baked tater tots served in an American School.
The key words being “I will bet.” :rolleyes:
Ok, I have an educated guess… a hypothesis, if you will, based on the notoriously deceptive, yet high fat, stir fry. The Chinese aren’t skimpin’.
And get this… they might actually eat Chuanla tudou shi with white processed sticky rice.
You know, I’m starting to sense a pattern here.
When we’re talking about what the school was serving before Jamie’n’Crew showed up, as long as a less healthy alternative exists, then the school could be doing worse and shouldn’t be criticized.
But when we’re talking about JO’s proposed alternative, if a more healthy alternative exists, then it’s not good enough and brings the whole package under deep suspicion.
This is something of a no-win situation.
I don’t believe vivalostwages was trying to claim that stir-frying tater tots would magically make them more healthy (and I hope he’ll correct me if I’m wrong here), but rather that if TTs count as a vegetable, he should treat them as a vegetable - for instance by stir-frying them. Of course you can stir-fry potatoes, but try to imagine someone tossing 'tots around in a wok - it’s a pretty funny mental picture, although I’ll admit it sounds like something some of my old college buddies might have tried, if they’d owned a wok.
Neither fries nor tater tots are Teh Evol, but serving them regularly and declaring that they count as the vegetable serving is a problem. The fact that serving something else regularly and declaring that it counted as the vegetable serving would also be a problem doesn’t change that.
But again, since you don’t know how a given meal is prepared and you don’t know it’s nutritional content then you can’t determine much of anything. I’ll give you that the Chinese food you find in those trashy buffet style places or mall courts is usually terribly unhealthy but if you are saying that all stir frys (picked solely as an example) are all like that, than you’re being willfully obtuse. You cannot determine how healthy something is or isn’t by looking at it or reading its name off of a menu. Life isn’t that simple and generalizing one way to prepare a given entree as the only way to prepare a given entree is inane.
Of course! A Chinese dude over in China eats some white rice. The wind from the movement of his chopsticks causes a butterfly to flap its wings which in turn makes American school lunches incredibly healthy! Oh yeah and Jamie Oliver is an ignorant c*** and he should really go back where he came from. Thanks for clearing that up. :rolleyes:
I got the sense that for drama, they needed an enemy of the project. He did seem to come around awfully fast in this episode for someone who was so anti Jamie.
An ignorant, provincial c*** who should go back to where he came from!
It’s like we’re dealing with the curlcoat of food.
I’m a she. 
I was being sarcastic about the fries since a stir-fry, as I have always had it or prepared it, involves a blend of veggies (not potatoes) and tofu or assorted meats.
As has been discussed extensively, there is no prohibition against the use of the word “cunt” against a non-member, even in Cafe Society; thus my request that devilsknew should have been taken as a request, and not as an Official Instruction. I have thus removed the warning.
My apologies to him for my overreaction to what he said.