Jamie Oliver takes on the States
We’ve been following the reaction to the announcement about Ryan Seacrest Productions’ new unscripted Jamie Oliver show for ABC.
Ryan had this to say via twitter:
RyanSeacrest: Have u guys seen what jamie oliver has done for kids in uk? He and I created a show I am going to produce for him in U.S. For abc. Stoked
Some of the coverage compared the planned series to NBC’s The Biggest Loser, which apparently targets America’s fattest cities, while others concentrated on the UK series Jamie’s School Dinners, where Jamie went into schools and showed them how to prepare healthy meals using fresh ingredients. Some of the comments were funny … we particularly liked the idea of The Naked Seacrest, in which Ryan would ‘pop in from time to time to corner an attractive man and demand to know “how he lost the weight.”’
Media and comments out of the UK are mixed, with a little more scepticism and a little less optimism, as you’d expect from the inherently cynical inhabitants of a country that’s already seen Jamie’s intervention take place.
The Guardian was true to form with an amusingly snarky Take two cooks … please! in which they asked America to take the rest of our celebrity chefs to join Gordon Ramsay, and brought up the stories about mothers passing chips (fries) through school railings to their little darlings rather than have them eat healthy meals.
Dear America, in case you’re wondering, our schools are not prisons. Mothers are perfectly free to pack unhealthy lunches for their progeny and children may even leave school during lunch breaks should they prefer to buy their own chips, mars bars and crisps rather than deal with the trauma of facing a vegetable.
It’s true there was some resistance and re-education required, and as dinner lady Nora Sands explains, the kids will choose the unhealthy meals if they’re given a choice:
I’d say to any other school thinking of making these kind of changes, just do it. We did half and half for a while – offered Jamie’s food and the old menu, and the kids took burger and chips every time. Jesus, I was so fed up, it was beautiful food and they wouldn’t try it, they just kept moaning, ‘When are we going to get our proper food back?’ So we stopped that. We haven’t served a chip at this school since the end of May 2004. Now we have 500-600 kids come in and enjoy this lovely food every day and not one moan. They take their salad, yoghurt and fruit and they sit down and eat the lot. Before, they wouldn’t look at veg or salad.
They’re kids. They don’t know any better because their parents don’t know any better … and speaking as a former fat kid who had to break the cycle and educate herself about nutrition as an teenager, I thank Jamie, Ryan, RSP, ABC and anyone else who intervenes.
Now, where did I put that donut…
