I wanted to like the show, but I found it extremely formulaic. All these “British People Fix Your Life” shows (Kitchen Nightmares, What Not to Wear, Supernanny, etc.) follow the same pattern. British expert observes the status of ignorant individual/family/restaurant/town and is horrified, accompanied by some appropriate dramatic music. British expert offers solution. British expert meets resistance and first attempt at fixing problem fails. British expert gains the faith of ignoramuses through a true heart-to-heart conversation (with tears of course). Second attempt looks like it might fail but there is a miraculous success pulled out at the last minute!
Well, the reason for that formula (British person attempts to fix things) is that all of those shows (Kitchen Nightmares, What Not to Wear and Supernanny as well as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution) is that all of those shows were imported from the UK with the same expert (except, I think, for What Not to Wear).
Yes, but that doesn’t explain why all those original shows follow the same formula. I mean, it’s tiresome when you’ve watched several episodes of a single show and found it to be repetitive and formulaic, but now there’s a whole class of shows in the same formula! It completely leeches all the drama out of the show when you know exactly what is going to happen next.
You’re surprised that the state sanctioned dietary menu served in schools was also served at home? It just seems logical that parents apply what they learn.
I’m curious why the schools serve breakfast in the first place. I never attended a school that did this.
It’s likely part of a low-income program. Family can’t afford to feed breakfast, so the schools provide it.
And, having recently worked in public schools, yes the food now is much, much worse than when I was a kid in the same area. Breakfast was sugary cereals, sausage on a stick wrapped in a pancake, banana breads, pre-packaged peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and pre-packaged bagels with cream cheese filling. With the exception of the cereal, all those foods came in at 15 to 20 grams of fat PER SERVING. For little kids!
Lunch was just as bad. When I was a kid, school lunches were prepared from fresh ingredients. The kids in today’s schools were eating pre-packaged hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and pizzas they picked from a warmer. All foods were floating in grease. There was, of course, the option of grabbing a hard, unripe, cold apple or orange, but guess how many kids just grabbed a couple of grease pizzas.
I was stunned that the kids couldn’t eat with a fork or recognize broccoli.
I was more stunned that the lunch lady wanted documentation that British kids knew how to use kitchen utensils.
That was embarrassing. She needed proof that kids knew how to use a knife and fork? We’re not talking about which fork to use in a formal dinner party or how to carve a pumpkin.
Dear lunch lady. My parents taught me that before I went to kindergarten as did all the other parents of my generation. Seriously WTH? It took a couple of adults walking around the lunchroom one day to bring the kids up to speed.
Huh? 
The school I work at has at least six pop machines. Although they have changed it all to sell just diet pops and zero calorie juices.
Just for the record, as a Brit, some of us are also tired to death of the (accurately described) formula 
The sauce they used for the burritos was much yellower, and much, much runnier than what they used for the nachos. Think watered down Velveeta. And it just didn’t go well with the too dry, too hard refried beans in the burritos.
Well we Brits won’t see the prog til much later but here’s some positive and perhaps unexpected results from his previous work in the UK with his healthier school dinners campaign.
What surprises me is that it doesn’t even seem to occur to them that they could add salads and fresh fruit to try to counteract some of the processed crap.
Well, after researching the lunch menu of a local school I think I can answer that. They charge $1.25 for breakfast. That would get you cereal or pancakes or “breakfast pizza”. Is it possible to wholesale in fresh fruit and vegetables at that price? pancakes are nothing but air and syrup with a little flour thrown in. Pizza is the same thing only instead of syrup you get the parts of animals nobody will eat sold as sausage and pepperoni.
The hairdresser version of kitchen nightmares has an Aussie.
It’s the Simon Cowell effect. People with an accent seem smarter than 'Mericans and have more authority.
You have to be realistic, and I’m afraid that any suggestion that some generally very low income people eat whole wheat pita, feta, and hummus, is more likely to get you reported to Homeland Security as some exotic terrist than it is to win any hearts and minds.
Oliver tries really hard not to be patronizing, not to be a food nazi, and to be realistic about what a very . . . demotic student population is realistically going to accept (Oliver got his start making high-end pub grub, I think, so it’s not as though he’s advocating a vegan menu or tofurkey or any other absolute non-starter choices). He thought his message of tasty-but-freshly-made would be easy to communicate. He wanted to pick the statistically unhealthiest place to communicate this message. He clearly bit off more than he could chew. In one of the episodes, I think he was brought to tears by the virulent resistance he encountered.
But you know what? Forget West Va. hillbillies – people are remarkably resistant to simple changes when they’ve gotten used to cheap, lazy food. Contrary to one characterization of the Brit shows, they don’t always end in magical success, at least Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares – I’ve seen any number of episodes where it appears clear that the professional chefs he’s working with will fight him tooth and claw after bringing him in to fix their flagging business. Time and again Ramsay chides them for using frozen chicken fingers or tater tots or burgers, time and again he shows them (same mantra as Oliver) simple, fresh alternatives, time and again they backslide.
Processed foods are cheaper and easier, when you factor in preparation costs, than the fresh equivalent. Popping five pounds of chicken nuggets in a deep fryer is clearly more appealing to a minimum wage school kitchen worker than roasting 40 chicken breasts. You could theoretically run an entire school kitchen with just a deepfryer and microwaves. Good fresh food requires ovens, lots of cutlery, blenders, etc. I’m gonna need to see some numbers from Spurlock for how fresh food is as easy and cheap as using processed.
As for the larger habits that lead kids to eat this way – obviously we should slam the parents. (We should probably also slam the free lunch program – what rational parent is going to pack a fresh lunch when the school provides lunch for free? In my school-days, the underclass kids were generally the black students, and I am trying really hard to remember a black classmate with a sack lunch). It cuts across races and classes – juice drink boxes are the ubiquitous accompanier of yuppies’ toddlers, and I’ll just about guarantee that in this day and age, there aren’t many single mothers coming home from their shift at the Huntington Wal-Mart to make a salad or casserole or fresh fish, the way many of our mothers would have.
By the way – ISTR that when Oliver did this in Britain, mothers rebelled en masse and were sneaking up to the playground fence to slip bags of crisps and candy to their little tubsters.
Oliver’s intentions and execution were about as good as they could be. It’s just a losing battle, at the moment. And it’s on your head, Americans. Can you imagine the tax bill we’re going to face for socializing medicine without any effective way to coerce the masses into not contracting extremely expensive nutrition-related diseases like type II diabetes??
Well, if that implies keeping the processed crap in the mix, it’s not going to work. Processed food appeals to the lowest common denominator, and there’s no way the average kid (or adult), once habituated to high carb/HFCS/processed snack food is going to spontaenously, or even with encouragement, choose a salad, or chicken breast, or whole grain bread, or a serving of nuts, if the processed food is still alongside. It’s shock therapy or nothing (or, taking a tough line/never introducing your kids to processed, dumbed-down food in the first place – the one guy I know who just determined in the first years of his kids life that they weren’t going to eat string cheez, or juice boxes, or chicken fingers, now has middle-school-aged kids who demand fish, brussels sprouts, tripe, etc. and would be aghast if someone proposed eating a frozen burrito or Twinkie).
Preparing fresh good food takes a bit of time (you can cut down on how much time at the expense of a certain monotony in your weekly diet, or you can spend a bit more time over a weekend and whip up three or four things that will see you through the week). When I was really disciplined about not eating anything at all processed or “beige,” I’d say it took me – 45 mins. to an hour to prepare five days worth of breakfasts and lunches for the week.
Oh. Weird.
We took all of them out years ago, as did nearly every district around here. I could have sworn they were removed by law.
I don’t see anything about it now I’m Googling it, though.
What’s wrong with string cheese? It’s just mozzarella, and if you get the low-fat version, you’ve got a healthy snack of lean protein.
And I had to look up “demotic” from your last post. 
I like the “no crap” from the start approach.
I remember, though, bringing my own fresh chow to my cousin’s house whenever I watched her kids, because all they had there was a bunch of crap. The kids saw me with a box of blueberries and asked if they could try them. They ate every single one of those berries as if they’d never seen them before…which they probably hadn’t.
Even kids can change.
Good point, I probably meant to say American cheez/Velveeta, I had forgotten that most string cheese was, well, real cheese.