His stupid and hokey grandstanding Food Propaganda is worse than their collective diet. This man is a mouthpiece for every errant and misguided diet snake oil there is. There is no truth to any of his stunts…
-Make Chicken patties, as so often force meats are mixed and fortified. A common pate with grains or bread is not at all uncommon nor unhealthy.
-Dump a season of food consumption, undigested, into a canvas. That’s nothing scientific or profound… it means absolutely nothing nutritionally, what purpose does it serve rather than grossing people out? I guarantee the seasons consumption from this board would look much worse.
Jamie, Jamie, Jamie… why’d you go and get involved with stupid Ryan Seacrest and make yourself a gimmickboy. Stupid cunt.
Many 6 year olds worldwide aren’t familiar with food and their names or their nuances and what is made from what- the specifics, they also can’t recite shakespeare, nor cook a full course dinner… no surprise.
Notice that he didn’t have the Kindnergartners identify a banana, a watermelon, or a strawberry. Really, I think Mr. Oliver is provincial and racist. He is hugely prejudiced as an Englishman.
That’s your point of view, I believe, because you aren’t familiar with where they come from. Those programs all began on British TV, where the expert and the public have the same accent. They are wildly successful here, so they were exported with the original presenters, - the ‘authority’ comes from expertise/celebrity. From my British point of view, it’s nothing about the accent at all, it’s about British TV companies making money. Any perception that an English accent has gravitas is entirely in the ears of those perceiving it - I promise you, we’re as dumb as you are.
Jamie Oliver’s school food campaign in the UK was met with enormous and very angry resistance from the schools and parents he tried to help, too. Famously some of the parents at one of the schools would stand outside the fence of the school distributing pizza to the kids. But he was clearly very sincere. The project was also government-supported (my brother worked on collating its success when he worked for Ofsted). But his message began working, slowly, way after the program finished, so don’t give up hope.
A lot of people, including myself, find the word “cunt” incredibly offensive. Its use is not allowed in the Pit as an insult against another Doper. Your usage here isn’t against the rules per se, but given that we’re not in the Pit, it’s completely inappropriate. Please make an effort to keep your audience in mind with your word choices.
I suggest you watch ‘Jamie’s school dinners’ before you start insulting his character so adamantly. Jamie is a recognised and greatly respected campaigner in the UK, I can’t think of someone less ‘racist’ and ‘hugely prejudiced as an Englishman’.
I read an article on this programme in the Guardian (GB newspaper) at the weekend - the crux was that he’s had a really bad reaction from viewers (much like yours, devilsknew), which he’s finding bewildering. The journalist suggested that it may in part be down to the perception that he’s this ‘posh english person telling us what to do’, as most Americans don’t recognise that his accent in fact reveals that he is working class. In the UK, his ‘common cheeky chappy man-of-the-people’ demeanor is part of his appeal. It’s obviously not translating across the pond.
And what snake oil diets would those be? I don’t see him preaching anything except “eat real food, stay away from processed stuff, eat vegetables.” About the polar opposite of diet snake oil IMO.
Are you seriously comparing mechanically separated meat (which is essentially what he made) fortified with stabilizers and artificial flavorings to a real pate consisting of high-quality meat cuts and grains and breads? They’re not the same. Not at all.
Yes, it was sensationalism. But boy oh boy, it sure didn’t seem to do much to just tell these people that the school district was feeding their kids crap. If that is truly what it took to get the parents to care, then fine. Gross 'em out. Sometimes sensationalism gets the point across.
That said, I don’t trust TV enough to believe 100% that it went down that way. So I’ll give you that one.
Better still, watch “Jamie’s America” where he travels all over the US finding down-home and ethnic food created by solid working class and immigrant communities. The episode with the gangs in L.A. is particularly moving. Absolutely in no way racist. A bit ignorant occasionally, but most certainly not racist.
I’ve watched the clip again on YouTube, and in the version there he asked the kids to identify five vegetables: tomatoes, cauliflower, beet, eggplant, and potatoes. You could argue that beets are more common in Britain than in the US, of course. And eggplant is kind of expensive, so working-class kids may not have seen it before. But cauliflower? Tomatoes? Freaking potatoes?!? These kids are exposed to potatoes quite often… in the form of tater tots, french fries, and those awful instant mashed potatoes from the school cafeteria. It’s worth noting that they didn’t recognize what a real potato looks like.
And if he wanted to be provincial, he would have called the purple thing an aubergine. Which, you’ll notice, he didn’t.
I do find him insufferable at times but I don’t doubt for a minute he really cares about kids, and for him that means caring about what they’re eating.
I found it shocking that in a rural state like W Va those kids couldn’t identify common garden vegetables.
I live in Arkansas and it’s common to find tomato plants in back yards. I’m in the middle of Little Rock and several of my neighbors have backyard gardens with squash, peas and other things. I’m lazy and stick with a few tomato plants.
That’s one way to get kids to eat vegetables. You let them plant a few things. Watch it grow. Then help mom cook it. Suddenly the food on the plate means something. This is very simple stuff. Families have been doing this for a long time.
One thing hasn’t been mentioned-the school lunch program in the USA is heavily subsidized by the Federal Government (the same people who buy up the surplus food production and give it out). As such, politically-connected food suppliers pay to get the contracts-which explains the poor quality food served in most schools.
I am not surprised at the resistance he (Oliver) encountered-somebody paid a LOT of money for the food supply/service contracts, and they don’t want anybody messing with the gravy train.
The weird relationship that the USDA has with the institutional food industry also explains why corn syrup is in everything-so much of the stuff is produced, it needs a market-so put it in the spaghetti sause, in the breading, in the hot dogs-who cares!
As long as Cargill and McKesson keep on funding the farm state lobby, this will go on.
When I was six, I could certainly recognize all of those vegetables. That scene was just sad. I was glad the teacher pitched in and helped.
I just watched both episodes online–I meant to start watching it from the start, as I was born in Huntington and lived the first 12 years of my life there (and returned frequently until my last relative there passed away three years ago), and I knew that most of those people would be highly resistant to any sort of change. It’s been probably three to four years since I’ve been to a grocery store there, but the produce and fresh meat sections were minuscule, and the seafood sections were almost nonexistent. It’s damned hard to make the stuff Jamie is suggesting when the grocery stores don’t really focus on anything that isn’t in a can or a box or a bag.
He wasn’t asking them to identify cherimoya or some other foreign foods. He was asking them to identify the most basic of regional foods. Maybe they taught you how to spell pizza and nachos in school but I was taught how to spell apple and potato.
“Processed food” doesn’t mean shit. A meatloaf is a processed food. Just because a food is “processed” doesn’t mean that it’s bad, pretty big paintbrush he has there.
Yes, they are, totally.
First, he even prefaced that presentation with the chicken carcass by telling us that fortunately they don’t make nuggests in the US like he was about to make and that was not what the children were eating. And yes, any way you look at it, he made a pate regardless of what he added, what he added we don’t even know?.. besides, some of the best pates are made with offal and stabilizers… foie gras pate anyone? As regards the chicken carcass, I think mechanical seperation is frugal and green. A lot of the animal is wasted, otherwise. I mean, I’ll tell you what, in some families the baked chicken carcass is the ninth piece… practically a delicacy, the butt and oysters and rib meat. It’s all perfectly good meat and force…
But was the food even crap? we have no way of telling? It could have been just as healthy as Jamie’s? Pizza is not unhealthy… no matter which way you slice it.
add:
the chicken stunt could have been a perfect opportunity for him to cut up some of that chicken breast and bread it and fry it to show the kids the difference between chicken “whatever he made” and chicken fingers and pointed out the healthier… instead he went for some gimmick, and it backfired. I didn’t really see any improvements in the way those children saw food.
