:: Martin Collis
You don't find the Food Channel on TV by accident. It's up there in the high numbers beyond CNN and 'Law and Order', it's somewhere in a cluster with 24-hour golf (which of Dante's Circles is that?), antique shows and home renovations. Yet it's the Food Channel that has provided me with my best TV watching this Millennium, four one-hour shows with a bland title ('Jamie's School Dinners'), about one of the blandest and saddest meals in the world: school dinners, (school lunches in North American parlance).  But this seemingly bland leading the bland TV captured the reality that eludes 'reality' shows and has begun to do for children's nutrition what Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" did for migrant workers in California.
Britain's young celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver loves food with a passion that most Brits reserve for football (soccer) and many North Americans never know at all. He grew up helping to cook in his parents' pub, The Cricketers and at 16 went off to Catering College. Five years later he was working at the prestigious River Café in London, where he was featured in a TV show, 'Christmas at the River Café'. He was a natural on TV and within a year had created his own show on BBC called 'The Naked Chef', with 'naked' referring to the natural simplicity of Jamie's ingredients and not his unclothed body.  In his early 20's he was on his way to becoming a multi-millionaire; he was a star on TV, columnist for top newspapers and magazines, his books sold in the millions and he had a multi-million pound deal with Sainsbury's supermarket to promote their food. All he had to do was open up some high-end restaurants and count the money.
To use Jamie Oliver terminology it would have been 'easy peasy' to make a ton of money fronting a posh restaurant.  Instead, he proposed to train out-of-work, underprivileged youth to be chefs who would run a restaurant which he created called 'Fifteen' (Matchbook cover is from Fifteen), the number of students who survived his training. He suggested filming the training for a TV show called 'Oliver's Army' (from the Elvis Costello song of that name) but was turned down by the BBC. However, Channel 4 liked the concept, changed the name of the show to the rather insipid 'Jamie's Kitchen' and broadcast the series to almost universal acclaim. (A DVD copy of this show and the companion cookbook, both titled 'Jamie's Kitchen', can be ordered from Amazon.com or Amazon.ca) The 'Fifteen' restaurant became a reality and despite the odd negative review from a 'foodie' concerned that great food was losing its exclusivity, Fifteen is booked about a year ahead and even had to turn away Bill Clinton one night.
Surely the man had done enough, but instead he plunged deeper and deeper into the fundamentals of food and national nutrition. Jamie looked at what English children were being fed for their school dinners. (In North America this would be called a 'hot lunch program'). Jamie looked and he was gobsmacked; the menus featured items such as burgers, chips, pizza, fish sticks, potato smilies, turkey twizzlers and some of the world's nastier chicken nuggets. The closer he looked the worse it got, the cost of each meal could not exceed 37p (about 75 cents Canadian or 65 cents US), the dinner ladies were low paid and under trained, all the food seemed to be reconstituted, fried and reheated and, perhaps worst of all, the kids liked it. The problem that faced Jamie Oliver was nothing more or less than re-educating the taste buds of a nation.  The dominant multi-national companies know that taste buds respond to food that is salty, fat and sweet so that's what they sell. Children brought up on this pap and crap lose their ability to enjoy real food, they can't handle the flavors and textures of many vegetables, fruits and spices and refuse to eat the nutrients that may save their lives.
We all know how experts, professionals, politicians and academics respond to a situation such as this:
- THEY IGNORE IT!!!
There's no glamour in school dinners and a host of bureaucratic problems. If people hadn't ignored kids' nutrition it would never have sunk to where it is today. - They study it by getting millions of dollars (pounds) for research to collect data.
- They form task forces, committees and focus groups to examine the problem.
- They sell their professional souls by taking money from the commercial giants, who supply the food, to say that it actually exceeds minimal nutritional requirements.
- They write articles in magazines and academic journals.
- They re-write Federal food guides. They redesign the Food Pyramid (US) or Rainbow (Canada), which previously had been heavily influenced by lobbyists for organizations such as Dairy Producers, Meat Marketing Boards etc.
- They might even create expensive web sites.
In the words of Shakespeare,
They will strut and fret their hour on the stage and then be heard no more.
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Jamie Oliver did none of the above. He felt children deserved better and with all his enthusiasm, energy, naivete and street smarts set out to do it himself. He started with one school in Greenwich; it was a comprehensive school with about 1500 students with a good mix of ethnicity and socio-economic groups. I will just give you a few examples of the problems he faced.
- The dinner ladies were used to opening cardboard boxes, putting the food on trays and pushing the trays into ovens. Jamie wanted them to chop, blend and actually use some basic culinary skills, which virtually none of them possessed. It took all Jamie's charm and huge personal effort to help the dinner ladies prepare a nutritional alternative to bland, boxed food.
- 800 children participated in the dinner program and on the 1st day Jamie's food was available they had a choice: Great Food or Garbage
ONE CHILD SELECTED THE GREAT FOOD
- Jamie went into the classrooms and taught and tried to create a different food culture in the school, but still only a few kids would select the simple, healthy food prepared by England's most famous chef.
- Jamie then eliminated the pre-prepared, reheated food and served only his food and faced a revolt. Kids threw it away by the bin full. Parents called in asking when they were going back to "real food". Mothers passed chocolate bars and chips through the school railings. 25% dropped the program and most of the others would only eat sandwiches, which Jamie felt compelled to prepare along with his cooked food.
Jamie and Nora in the kitchen
The dinner ladies hated it, the kids hated it, the parents were upset and the school administration faced a barrage of complaints. But Jamie Oliver didn't succeed by accident, and he systematically dealt with every problem. He persuaded the dinner ladies to work longer hours and promised to try to get the district to pay for them. He created a whole school curriculum so that food was a part of every subject. He got kids to help him make food, which would be acceptable to the damaged palates of Greenwich children. (One taster turned down £50 to taste a chicken and veggie wrap. "It'll make me throw up.") Jamie went out into the street with free curries and chow meins to try to win over the children crowded around the chip shops and corner stores. Gradually there was acceptance and children reluctantly learned to eat wholesome food and then started to like it.
The results surprised the school personnel.  Teachers reported that the children who ate Jamie's dinners tended to concentrate better in the afternoon compared to kids who had pop, chocolate and chips. The school nurse said the "puffer" that she used for children with allergy problems was getting less and less necessary. But one school does not a program make and the next task that faced Jamie Oliver was how to take the program district wide.
 All the principals in the Greenwich district were invited to Fifteen, where Jamie fed them his version of school dinners. He took 60 dinner ladies to the army cooking school at half term to teach them to cook. It was shocking to see that when he prepared a great meal for them at the end of a long day, they were just like the kids and left most of the vegetables and wouldn't try anything unfamiliar. There were many, many weak links in the children's food chain, but one of them was certainly that the school personnel in charge of feeding them, the dinner ladies, knew little about food.
One has to be careful of just blaming the schools; the origins of the problem are with the parents and the culture itself. A culture that bombards the unformed minds of little children with TV ads for bad food. A culture that allows the multi-nationals a beachhead in the schools with machines dispensing solid and liquid junk. A culture in which parents cheat their children of nutrition by serving meals from packages and cans or by stopping off for fast food, or ordering pizza. Growing children need good food and exercise, both of which take time and it's time which parents seem unable to find. A pediatrician on the show told Jamie that he sees children who consume so much fat that their bowels shut down and they vomit up half formed feces. Jamie interviewed a nutritionist who said she holds weekly constipation clinics as many of the children do not have regular bowel movements and some had not gone for 6 weeks. Her concern was for the probability of these children developing colon cancer later in life. I'm writing this on June 29th and in this morning's paper I read of a school teacher who was reprimanded for refusing to send home bonus fast food coupons with his students' report cards. 
As a direct result of Jamie's efforts the British Government came up with £280 million over 3 years to improve school nutrition. Kitchens will be upgraded, the dinner ladies will get an extra hour of preparation time and the kids will not have to be fed on 37p a head. The British Medical Journal recently wrote, "Jamie Oliver has done more for the public health of our children than an army of health promotion officers or a hundred million pound advertising campaign."
However, you don't beat the junk-food merchants easily, some British school districts are locked into 25-year contracts and their lawyers are sharpening their pencils because they know if they had to provide nutritious, fresh food their profit margins would disappear. I wrote in a previous 'Well' article that parents panicked when the Pied Piper came for their children. The Pied Piper of fast food has arrived, but most parents, instead of protecting their children, are dancing along to his tune. Jamie Oliver is playing a different tune and it's one that could do more for the health of children than anything since child labor was made illegal.
Here is an extract from a typical letter from a UK food website.
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« They did have one great chef who insisted on going in at 7am to supply a good breakfast instead of just a danish every day. He also supplied healthy stuff for the 11am break, so lots of them had that instead of going to the vending machine.
Guess what? He and/or the company he worked for lost the tender because of the cost.
All I can say is I hope that someone somewhere is listening to Jamie. » |
For more information about Jamie's School Dinners check out his website.
Jamie's books are available through Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.
Here are a couple of the recipes Jamie used in the schools.
 Lemon-roasted Chicken
Serves 5
Ingredients
1 lemon, zested and juiced
1 clove of garlic, peeled
1 small pinch mixed dried herbs
35ml olive oil salt and freshly ground black pepper
5 whole chicken legs
Method
Zest the lemon by gently grating the yellow skin with a fine grater; peel the garlic
For the marinade
- Prepare the marinade by blitzing the lemon zest and juice, garlic, mixed herbs and olive oil in a blender, making sure it is all mixed well.
- Once blended, add a small pinch of salt and a grind of pepper, taste a tiny bit to check the seasoning.
- Pour the marinade over the chicken legs, rubbing it into every nook and cranny. Cover and leave in the fridge for at least 2 hours, or preferably overnight so that the flavours can develop. You can cook the chicken straight away but the flavours will be nicer if you can leave it to marinate.
A few hours later...
- Preheat the oven to 200C/400F
- Transfer your chicken legs to a shallow baking tray, spoon the marinade over the chicken legs and cook in the preheated oven for between 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until golden, crisp and tender.
Super Vegetable Noodle Chow Mein
Serves 5
Ingredients
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger.
1 clove garlic.
one-half - one red chilli, deseeded.
150g noodles.
Drop of sesame seed oil.
1 onion, sliced.
2 carrots, shedded.
100g beansprouts.
50g mangetout peas (sugar peas).
1 red pepper, sliced.
1 yellow pepper, sliced.
100g mushrooms, sliced.
1 spring onion.
Soya sauce.
Method
Finely slice the chilli then peel and finely chop the ginger and garlic. Add a little water to this mixture to make a paste. Cook the noodles in boiling, salted water for 4 minutes, and refresh in cold water. Heat the sesame seed oil in a frying pan or wok and cook the chilli paste and onion for 10 minutes. Add the rest of the veggies until they're cooked, but still crunchy.
Add the noodles for a couple of seconds and combine. Drizzle with a little soy sauce.
And I'll leave the last word to Jamie.
« Being a good cook isn't about being born to it, it's about discovery and growth. I don't believe there is such a thing as a person who doesn't like cooking, they just don't know it yet. »
Alice Waters—Food Fighter in the USA
 Alice Waters is twice the age of Jamie Oliver but that doesn’t stop her culinary crusade to get American children eating wholesome, nutritious food. Like Jamie, she’s a world-famous chef and I can attest to the great food at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. The similarities between her approach to school based nutrition and Jamie’s are remarkable. After much political wrangling and persuasion she created a one acre garden at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley and involved the children in the preparation and eating of food they had actually grown in a program called the Edible Schoolyard. All 16 public schools in Berkeley now provide a Waters designed nutritious lunch for over 9000 students.
Alice Waters and students at work in an ‘edible schoolyard’
It was hard to take the program beyond the confines of Berkeley, which has often been on the cutting edge of new ideas. Ms. Waters radical strategy was to go to Washington and plant a vegetable garden in the National Mall as part of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
R. W. Apple of the New York Times writes: Unlikely as it may seem, there she was on a late June morning, the queen of California cuisine, bouncing out of a car, opening a tiny parasol to shield herself from Washington's pitiless summer sun, pausing to pick up a few stray shreds of litter, then showing a friend around a dozen raised beds of thriving corn, beans and eggplants, okra and mizuna, onions and tomatoes. Sunflowers grew along one side, high-bush blueberries on another. A shiny copper wood-burning oven sparkled in the morning light, and a large wooden gazebolike shelter stood in the center.
Ms. Waters was there to promote a cause as surely as civil-rights crusaders and anti-abortion demonstrators have done in the past. Her cause is inculcating improved lifelong eating habits among schoolchildren, thereby fighting rampant obesity and supporting sustainable local agriculture in the process. She terms it "edible education," and she has declared all-out war on the burger-and-soda school lunch.
IDEALISTIC as she is, Ms. Waters, 61, is no political naïf. During and after her years at the University of California she was active in the radical Free Speech Movement there, and she has maintained a lively interest in public affairs ever since. As long ago as December 1995, she began looking for a way to dramatize her concerns in Washington, writing to President Bill Clinton to ask him to establish an organic vegetable garden on the grounds of the White House.
"I am convinced that food can again be, as it once was, the everyday vehicle for learning mutual responsibility," she wrote. "When food preparation and service was both the solemn shared duty and the reward of family living, community values were instilled at the dinner table. If you were to talk about food with the same fervor with which you now talk about AmeriCorps, it could accelerate and strengthen our movement toward a healthier diet and saner society."
Appeals from afar having failed, Ms. Waters decided to go to Washington herself, like Frank Capra's Mr. Smith. In five extremely busy days here she not only watched children exploring her garden, carrying compost and pulling weeds under the guidance of teachers, but also plunged headlong into the political life of the capital. Movers and shakers came to hear her pitch and to share light lunches at picnic tables set up inside a temporary honeysuckle-clad enclosure just beyond the vegetable beds: senior officials of the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services; senators like Barbara Boxer, Debbie Stabenow, Tom Harkin and Hillary Rodham Clinton; and representatives like Lynn Woolsey and Nancy Pelosi. All the visitors from Capitol Hill were Democrats; Laura Bush was asked, among other Republicans, but sent her regrets.
Ms. Waters opened the festival with Brillat-Savarin's maxim to the effect that the destiny of nations is dependent upon how they nourish themselves. Then she drove home her argument:
"The future of American agriculture, our environmental preservation, our health and our family traditions—all these things depend on the choices we make about what we eat every day. That's what I mean when I talk about edible education: learning where our food comes from and how to eat it."
MS. WATERS said she got "an overwhelmingly positive response" from almost everyone who had toured the garden, including the politicians, bureaucrats and others like Kevin Klose, president of National Public Radio, and Robert Egger, founder of D.C. Central Kitchen, which feeds homeless people. But enormous problems remain if her vision for Berkeley, let alone the United States as a whole, is ever to be realized.
The school lunch project will work, she said, only if all students in a school take part, and they will all take part only if the food is delicious as well as healthy. Ms. Waters speaks of turning students into fledgling "eco-gastronomes" whose adventures in the garden and in cafeterias where the tables are set with real dishes and cutlery will be paralleled by their classroom studies of geography, history and the sciences. Where does the food come from? How is it grown? What happens when you cook it?
Clearly, the Chez Panisse Foundation and the three other organizations involved in the initiative lack the capacity to raise the tens of millions of dollars that will be needed, but Ms. Waters thinks she can involve national foundations as well as state and federal governments.
"We have a health crisis, a public-school crisis and an environmental crisis, and we need to address them all, the way President Kennedy addressed our physical-fitness crisis 45 years ago," she said with all the pedagogic passion of the Montessori teacher she once was. "We need to create a new curriculum, and we need to teach it with interactive, hands-on techniques, and not just to kids sitting behind desks.
"We're going to show a whole generation of kids how to cook and how to eat, and our country will be the beneficiary."
Some Useful References and Contacts
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harry back
speakwell