After a hiatus of several weeks, the third of four episodes of this season’s Jamie Oliver “Food Revolution” aired last Friday night. As with the first two episodes (links below), I’ll provide a quick recap and my take on the show and then you let me know your thoughts and impressions.
The show opened with Deno, the owner of a burger joint whom J.O. has been imploring to offer healthier fare. In this episode, J.O. offers Deno $30-40,000 worth of new restaurant equipment and a promotional push on Ryan Seacrest’s radio show (Seacrest is an executive producer of Food Revolution) if he will change the meat in his patties from the product he now uses (of unknown origins and possibly pink-slime-containing) to meat that Jamie procures from one of “LA’s best butchers.” The cost of the change, we learn, will be thirty cents more per burger and the hope is that if Deno makes the switch, other fast food places will follow suit.
Deno’s resistance to this change struck me as a little trumped up — he moans and groans about it for half the show but then he asks his fry cook to try the new meat (which, by the way, already proved really popular in Episode 2) and when the fry cook likes it, he says that’s all he needed to know before agreeing to Jamie’s deal. So if that’s true, why did he wait so long to do the taste test, and is he also forgetting that everyone loved the taste in Episode 2? Whatever.
Next we return to West Adams High School where J.O. has been banned from the school kitchens (and from even talking with students about school food) but he is allowed to work with a team of ten culinary students. (BTW, at the end of the last episode we were told ominously that JO had been banned by the LA school board from even filming in West Adams, yet here we are again with cameras, so not sure what’s up with that.) Jamie has his students cook a meal for 150 West Adams students, with the supposed goal of eventually getting this little band of ten inexperienced cooks to prepare meals for “one thousand” students. (Really?)
The meal they prepare looks delicious and wholesome – chicken drumsticks, whole grain macaroni and cheese, a green salad and a fruit salad. J.O. makes no mention of the cost of this meal but one student later alludes to the fact that it’s made “at the same price” as the school meal. I would LOVE more info on that claim, and would point out the rather obvious fact that even if the food does cost the same as the LAUSD school meal, all that fresh food is being prepared for free, by unpaid student labor. Try asking LAUSD workers to forego their paycheck while preparing labor-intensive meals from scratch ingredients and see what happens.
J.O. seems to be under the impression that he can serve this food to West Adams students in or near their cafeteria, since he says something along the lines of, “I want them to see what we’ve got and what they’ve got.” When some LAUSD official instead directs Jamie and his culinary team to the back of the school, Jamie claims to be shocked and devastated, calling the development a “bombshell.”
Now this is one of those instances where I can’t help but feel that viewers are being manipulated. Maybe Jamie really is surprised here, and his later tears at a parent meeting about this development do seem genuine. But a quick Google search yielded this California state regulation which indicates that foods offered by students during the school day need to be pre-approved by the governing board and cannot be food prepared on the school premises, as was the case with this lunch. (I’m going to ask Dana Woldow, San Francisco school food reformer, for her take here in case I’m reading this incorrectly.)
But if there really are state rules (or union rules, which were also alluded to) that prevented Jamie from distributing his food, shouldn’t an advance person in his production team have thought to investigate a little before filming? Anyone with even basic knowledge about school food would know that most states have rules regarding competitive food sales on campus, and, indeed, here in Texas, Jamie would definitely not have been able to bring his food into or near the cafeteria. Had he done so, the school could lose its entire federal NSLP reimbursement for the day.
Then we get to the part of the show I liked least. Jamie decides to introduce Deno to Sofia, the young West Adams student we met in Episode 2, whose entire family has been devastated by diabetes. Jamie claims he is introducing Sofia to Deno to show “what inspires him to get up every morning,” but in reality, he is putting Deno in an extraordinarily uncomfortable position (I was literally squirming while watching this segment) and is implicitly blaming Deno and his ilk for Sofia’s family’s poor health.
Now, readers of TLT know I’m not above a little governmental regulation to improve public health, but like my more politically conservative readers who commented in the GOP kerfuffle last week, I found myself screaming (in my head – my kids were asleep), um, hello? What about personal responsibility? Why is no one talking to Sofia’s parents, who by Sofia’s own account last episode, continue to serve fried food in the home at least twice a week, despite the fact that their youngest daughter developed diabetes at age ten? No doubt that practice stems from ignorance and/or poverty, not malice, but let’s go ahead and address those problems, not make Deno seem like an evil monster. Moreover, I readily acknowledging that our fast food culture (replete with restaurants like Deno’s) does play a role in our nation’s obesity problem, but I fail to see how improving the quality of Deno’s meat and making a few other seemingly minor changes to his menu will do the trick. More on this below.
Jamie then exposes the shocking lack of food knowledge among West Adams high schoolers by asking them to identify the source of their food. I was willing to give the kids a pass when a few of them thought butter came from corn (they probably eat margarine at home, which many refer to as “butter,” and which often has a corn logo on the tub), but even I was shocked when they thought honey came from bears and chocolate came from a chocolate lake. Wow.
To educate them about processed food, Jamie creates an ice cream sundae to graphically illustrate the origins of certain food additives. For example, to illustrate where L.-cystine comes from, he tosses human hair and feathers into the bowl. For the shellac on the shiny candies, he tosses live beetles into the bowl. The kids are suitably grossed out.
TLT readers may recall that an almost identical lesson (replete with feathers and hair) is used by Recipe for Success here in Houston to teach kids about what is in a Hot Pocket (“Deconstructing a Hot Pocket to Teach Kids About Nutrition.”) When I described that lesson on TLT, it was criticized by two readers, one of whom wrote:
I’m not saying we don’t have a lot of harmful “crap” in our processed foods–we most certainly do and I commend the chef for wanting to point that out to the kids. What I do find fault with is equating something that’s IN lipstick to lipstick itself and more or less drawing the conclusion for the kids that their food is filled with lipstick and duck feathers. That’s not teaching the truth–that’s using scare tactics.
I suppose the same could be said of Jamie’s lesson, although I think no one can disagree with the overarching instruction he gave to the students, which was, if you don’t know what something is in the ingredient list, put the food back on the shelf. That simple instruction, if followed, will set students on a path of much healthier eating.
Next we see the grand re-opening of Deno’s, now selling Revolution Burgers, regular burgers with improved meat, and french fries that have been spun in a new device called the Spinfresh. (For the curious, I did a little research. According to the Spinfresh site, this centrifuge/fryer reduces fat content in fried food up to 38%, although the reduction can be lower, e.g., 15% for fried fish or 16% for chicken wings.)
Of course, I’d much rather eat at the new and improved Deno’s than the old one, but I still wondered how much of a Big Picture improvement this is. In other words, if Sofia’s family replaced their current fast food with Deno’s new fast food, would they really see a huge difference in their health? (Any RD’s out there – please let me know what you think.) Wouldn’t the real solution be for Sofia’s family to just eat less fast food — even healthier fast food — altogether?
The episode ends with a local nurse telling Deno how appreciative she is of his new menu. Deno is touched by the nurse’s gratitude and there’s a moving moment when Deno describes how generous and caring his late father was, implying that his father would approve of the new menu changes.
OK, that’s a wrap. Now tell me what you thought. (And if you missed the episode, you can watch the full video here.)
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