Last Friday’s episode was the finale of Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” and since the series didn’t do very well in the ratings this year, it may be the last Food Revolution show we see for a while. Here’s my recap and review – I’d love to hear what you thought about it, too.
A new Los Angeles USD superintendent has been appointed by the school board — John Deasy — and Jamie sees this as “a glimmer of hope” for his Food Revolution. He meets with Mike McGalliard of West Adams High (formerly known on The Lunch Tray as “Hipster Charter School Dude”) at Dino’s revamped fast food restaurant. (By the way, Dino says he’s busier than ever selling grass-fed-beef burgers providing half the calories of his former burger.) Mike and Jamie talk about John Deasy and Mike expresses hope that school food will be a top priority for the new superintendent. (I know I swore off any further wardrobe critiques on TLT but since Mike himself told TLT readers his style was changing a bit in this episode, just want to say: Mike, loved the new glasses! 🙂 )
Jamie tells us he’s going to do something “big and noisy” to get Deasy’s attention. He gets seven of L.A.’s top chefs together and surprises them by serving them “typical” LAUSD school meals, hoping to anger them so much over the poor quality of the food that they’ll want to help him out. When the school meals are unveiled, the chefs go on and on about how disgusting the food looks and one says he wouldn’t feed it to his dog. They all recoil in horror when one of the chefs dares to take a bite. One of chefs, Jamie tells us, looks like she’s going to throw up.
OK, maybe it’s just me, but did anyone else find this whole scene disturbingly elitist? Like these chefs’ palates are so rarified they can’t bear to take a nibble of this oh-so-awful food? Because I totally agreed with one of the chefs, Seth Greenberg, who noted that these mock school meals didn’t look as bad as some real school food. I would even go so far as to say that some of the meals would be an improvement over the food many school kids get every day.
Consider Jamie’s lunch of a corn dog, fries, apple sauce and celery sticks:
Here in Houston, we on the HISD Food Services Parent Advisory Committee were THRILLED when we got celery sticks onto the menu, a recent development. Now look at a real school lunch corn dog, along with some overcooked spinach:
Take a look at Jamie’s green beans — made from fresh, not canned, beans:
Here’s what green beans really look like in most school cafeterias:
Meanwhile, HISD’s Food Services Parent Advisory Committee recently asked the district if we could put edamame on our menu but the request was rejected on the grounds that it would cost too much. Yet here’s Jamie’s plate with our sought-after edamame on the side:
I make these comparisons not to denigrate Houston ISD’s school food, which is often quite good (and steadily improving), but to offer a reality check. Scratch-cooked, produce-rich Carpinteria High-style meals are the goal, and I live for the day when all American kids have access to them. But the meal shown above — grilled cheese (if this were served in HISD, it would be on whole grain bread), tortilla chips (in HISD, the corn chips are baked) and edamame — is hardly dog food. Indeed, I would serve this exact meal to my own kids for lunch — and I’m pretty sure no one would throw up.
At any rate, the chefs all agree to mentor student culinary teams from eight schools across L.A. in a cooking competition hosted by the Food Revolution. Winners will get a trip to New York City to visit the Culinary Institute of America, and a company called Pro Start will also teach a two-year culinary training program at their school. I understood from context that the competing schools serve underprivileged/minority populations (one team is from West Adams) and Jamie tells us — correctly, I think – that winning the contest will be life-changing for these kids. The competition is reminiscent of Jamie’s Fifteen charity, which offers young adults aged 18-24 a chance to learn culinary skills and break out of a life of poverty or crime. And it’s stuff like that which makes me really like J.O., despite the disagreements I’ve had with the Food Revolution show. No one can question the sincerity of his commitment to improve the lives of kids, both in terms of the food they eat and the opportunities offered to them.
Jamie next shows us his mobile Food Revolution kitchen (previewed on TLT months ago) and hopes that it will get “kids, parents and communities excited about food how important food education at school is.” (By the way, that’s a topic I hope to dig into further in a few weeks – the roles schools should or should not be expected to play in teaching kids about food. Stay tuned.)
Now we get to the actual cooking competition, the part of the show I most enjoyed watching. You could really feel the drive and passion the West Adams kids brought to their work and how much winning the contest would mean to them. There were funny moments, like the look on the kids’ faces when Jamie urges them to make carpaccio (raw beef) as their second-round entry. Sofia is under the gun to come up with a perfect salsa for the raw beef and you can see how pressured she feels – I was sweating on her behalf. In the end, the West Adams team wins the competition (I’m sure some will feel the contest was rigged in favor of Jamie’s team but I’m not so cynical) and they’re overjoyed. It’s a sign of how well we’ve gotten to know these West Adams kids that I actually teared up when the winners were announced (or maybe I’m just a softie). If Mike McGalliard stops by here again to comment, I’d love to know the postscript here – have the kids yet gone to New York? If so, what was the experience like for them?
Next Jamie gets a one-on-one meeting with John Deasy and when he shows up at LAUSD offices he “happens to stumble” on a group of parents seeking to get flavored milk out of LAUSD, J.O.’s pet cause. Deasy seems somewhat more open than former superintendent Ray Cortines to letting Jamie into LAUSD. At the very least, Jamie is again allowed to film at West Adams High, and Deasy says he supports a flavored milk ban (later we see Deasy and J.O. on Jimmy Kimmel’s show – also previewed here on TLT a while back – making the ban public). Deasy also alludes in the meeting to the “new menu” at LAUSD and Jamie, unlike viewers, seems to know what he’s talking about. As we’ll see in a bit, Jamie also seems to take credit for these menu improvements as a Food Revolution victory.
Jamie returns to West Adams where he’s enthusiastically greeted by Mike and the students. He gets to see the school garden planted in last week’s episode and for the first time he brings cameras into West Adams’s kitchen (but not, I noted, the LAUSD central kitchen, Jamie’s main goal at the beginning of the season). Mike says to Jamie that these West Adams food service workers are “ripe for scratch cooking.” Viewers might not understand what he means here, but readers of The Lunch Tray know from Mike’s comment here last week that West Adams will be getting outside funding from the Orfalea Foundations (just like Carpinteria High School) to train its workers in scratch cooking. That’s a wonderful development for West Adams but it’s important to note that LAUSD is not picking up this tab, so it can’t fairly be pitched as a LAUSD concession caused by the Food Revolution.
Jamie and the kids meet with LAUSD’s Deputy Food Services Director David Binkle to cook and taste one of the previously mentioned “new menu” items, a roasted vegetable quesadilla with freshly chopped cilantro. (Wow – with 700,000 kids in LAUSD, that’s a going to be a LOT of cilantro-chopping.) Binkle agrees with Jamie that LAUSD Food Services needs more funding and lauds Jamie as a “national hero.” Even Jamie looks a little stunned that a LAUSD representative is being so supportive on camera.
The implication of both the meeting with Deasy and the cooking session with Binkle is that pressure from Jamie is responsible for the new menu in LAUSD. Intrigued, I tried to find out exactly what’s going to change next year but I could only find vague media reports. For example, this article quotes Deasy as saying that ““the board has done a number of steps in terms of removing soda and junk food, and reducing sodium, and completely revamping the menu,” but no further details are provided. Another report says that the menu will now include “Salvadorean beef stew, chicken tandoori, Asian pad thai, California sushi roll and teriyaki beef and broccoli with brown rice,” but also notes the district says the changes were already in the pipeline well before Jamie even showed up in L.A. (And given what I know about school food procurement in my own large urban district, which I’m told can have a year-long lag time, that seems likely to be true.) [Ed Update: A letter from Ray Cortines, provided by a TLT reader, confirms that the menu revisions were already in the works when Jamie arrived.]
We’ll have to wait to learn more about the new LAUSD food when the 2011-12 school year begins. But I just want to note that HISD has also removed soda, lowered sodium, increased the amount of fresh produce (including yellow and orange vegetables) and has new international entrees along the lines of those listed above, including many with brown rice and whole wheat tortillas. But when you’re serving 250,000 meals a day in Houston (or 700,000 in L.A.) on limited federal reimbursement dollars from a central kitchen, I can tell you with some confidence the food is going to look a lot more like the pictures I showed you above than it’s going to look like the West Adams culinary students’ brightly-hued, scratch-prepared wraps and salads.
Put another way (and coming full circle from Episode One of this show), I still understand why LAUSD – including the “more transparent” John Deasy, as J.O. called him — didn’t want Jamie in its lunchrooms or central kitchen, even despite this much-lauded “new menu.” A district can be doing a lot right – maybe not everything, but a lot — and still get slammed on a reality TV show for the appearance of the food. (Along these same lines, HISD Media Relations was not at all happy when I asked for permission to take photos of school food at Milby High School, site of a student-led school food boycott this past spring. I eventually received permission from the district, and will go there in the fall to take pictures, but I understood HISD’s concern. Even good school food can be made to look bad if the photographer isn’t playing fair.)
The show ends with Jamie telling us that “the battle is not won.” He describes school food reform as a “war against a beastie,” which made me both laugh and nod in rueful agreement. He says he’s succeeded in showing his viewers the sorry state of school food and how worried children are about obesity-related diseases (at least in hard-hit communities like West Adams). He concludes by urging us to “expect more and demand more.”
On all of those points, I completely agree. While I still feel that “Food Revolution” fell short when it came to showing viewers the hard realities of school food reform, the show was invaluable for its vivid depiction of serious problems in our society, problems which we hear about so often in the media that it’s easy to tune them out. I personally will never forget Denny Barrett, a middle or upper middle class father who is so food-ignorant that he feels he has no choice but to rely on fast food to feed his kids. I won’t forget Sofia, whose sister tragically developed Type 2 diabetes as a mere child. And I won’t forget the obvious anguish of the West Adams students who fear for the health of their families and their own futures. Jamie put human faces on what might otherwise be statistical abstractions and that, in my opinion, has been his greatest contribution.
So that’s my take on the season finale and the series as a whole. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Get Your Lunch Delivered and never miss another Lunch Tray post! Just “Like” TLT’s Facebook page or “Follow” on Twitter and you’ll also get bonus commentary, interesting kid-and-food links, discussion with other readers AND you’ll be showing TLT some love. ♥♥♥ So what are you waiting for?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Bettina Elias Siegel
EdT. says
Thanks for the comparison of the dishes offered to the “guest chefs” and those served in HISD. While I didn’t find the segment “elitist” at the time, looking back on it I wonder just what the heck JO was thinking when he prepared those dishes.
I do have a question around the removal of soda: wasn’t that a mandate at the Federal level? I remember it being discussed when Son was still in school (in the first half of the ’00s), and recall there was a requirement that soda be pulled out of the school back then. IIRC, they also targeted the “fruit drinks” which were basically 5% fruit juice, and 95% HFCS-laden water (or, as I used to call it, “soda without the fizz”.)
~EdT.
Melissa House says
Thank you very much TLT Lady, for all of your recaps, and opinions on JO and his food revolution. I did not notice the food that JO presented was not as bad as the school lunches. The pics you show of HISD has me scared. My boys go to Deer Park ISD, and when I have visited with them at lunch through the years, it never looked that bad. Glad to hear they are or Armark is improving their lunch.
I did feel the cooking competition was fun to watch, but very unrealistic. Chefs are just not able to teach those kids in that short amount of time what they are preparing. I could be wrong. I do understand the stress those kids felt. In the FCCLA (Family, Careers, Community, Leaders of America association, they have similar cooking contest where the students get a bag of goods and have to prepare a meal. I am not sure how much time they get thinking of the dish, but now I will have to find out. That is a very hard task. I have also been told by a chef from CIA, that when students go to these contest, most choke under pressure. Who would not? I do think the winners was a rig thing too, but glad they get to go to NY. Hope we hear about that soon.
I take back what I said about not believing the kids got real emotional (for real) when they had the episode in social studies, talking to people who have obesity problems. I was thinking of some students I taught year before last, that it would not effect them. But I might be wrong. I would like to try that very thing when I am able to teach again. I will try anything to reach a child:)
I would like to see a JO government food revolution one day, or sponsor a children’s cooking show with their idles. But JO cannot help change our system while we are in this recession, till then, educating the public is the best food medicine.
Overall, I love your blogs, and look forward to reading them all the time. It was truly awesome to have Mike join in:) Keep up the hard work and your drive:)
dana says
In this letter, which Ramon Cortinez sent out to LAUSD parents, students, and employees when he was still superintendent, those new menu changes with new food items like the Salvadoran beef stew were already underway before Jamie Oliver came into town.
http://library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1103726990034-9/img022.pdf
When you read the letter, I don’t understand why Cortinez didn’t address those same points on TV when Jamie Oliver confronted him. Indeed, even in the letter, Cortinez could have been much more forceful and really gone after Oliver but decided to hold back his punches.
For example, Cortinez alludes to the LAUSD being burned before by participating in a reality show called “School Pride”- the quality of the workmanship on “School Pride” was so sub-par that the LAUSD had to gone in aftewards and redo the work on its own dime.
What was supposed to be a ‘free’ makeover ended up costing the district over 100,000 thousand dollars.
In Season 1 in West Virgina with Jamie Oliver’s lunches, the costs spiralled out of control for those schools- everything from buying new equipment to more labor costs to higher costs for the food. Fortunately, behind the scenes, the producers paid for those costs.
But, if the same thing happened at LAUSD on a larger scale because the LAUSD has so many more students than than West Virginia school district, then the costs would have been so enormous that I don’t think the producers could have stepped in to cover those costs like they did last season. If that happened, the LAUSD would be stuck with this large bill, long after Jamie Oliver moved onto his next project.
Bettina Elias Siegel says
Dana – I’m going to share the link to Cortines’s letter on TLT. Thank you again for these valuable links.
dana says
Also, I don’t undestand why Cortinez didn’t lay out the same conditions on TV that he does in the letter under which he would worked with JO.
They seemed fairly reasonable and appropriate:
1) JO needed to turn in a detailed written proposal what JO was going to do on-site
2) No cameras during the menu committees (So we’re not even talking about a total ban on cameras or even no cameras in the central kitchens, just no cameras during specific committe meetings)
3) JO needed to create menu and recipes that was on budget and that met all the various regulations and requirements which seems pretty important because JO failed to do that last season.
Condition #2 seemed like a deal breaker. At one point during the show, JO said something like if there’s no cameras then there’s no show or no point in doing the show.
But, even if Cortinez had removed condition #2, I still think JO still would have never agreed to work with Cortinez. As the letter points out, JO never ever responded with any written proposal or menu.
When you read JO’s interview with the LA Weekly, its not surprising- he comes off a bit too flaky to meet those other conditions.
http://blogs.laweekly.com/squidink/2011/06/jamie_oliver_quotes.php
JO said stuff like “I don’t like planning stuff anyway. I’ll buy stuff for the day and cook whatever feels right. And people don’t like that. That’s why I work with people who are more renegade.” and
“I didn’t know what I was doing from six hours to the next.”
And, despite the low ratings, JO justified the sensationalism of the show, ” we just made an incredible documentary with big stunts. Why do we do big stunts? Because a lot of the information we work with is bloody boring. And I don’t expect any public, let alone the Americans, to be remotely interested.”
Its too bad that the accompanying cover story about the LAUSD lunches was just okay.
http://www.laweekly.com/2011-06-16/news/why-los-angeles-school-kids-get-lousy-meals/
Instead, I’d rather read this much better, more in-depth article about school lunches even though it was more about season 1:
http://www.alternet.org/food/146354/how_tv_superchef_jamie_oliver?page=entire
Bettina Elias Siegel says
Dana: Thank you very much for all of this valuable back story! I look forward to reading these links. (And just to clear up any potential confusion for readers, this commenter is not Dana Woldow, another “Dana” who often comments on TLT.)
Mike McGalliard says
Hello Bettina. Yes the students did go to NY and CIA. Here’s a link from their site: http://www.cianewswire.com/2011/06/jamieoliversfoodrevolution.html
One of the students, the fellow who slammed the hell out of the beef carpaccio at the cooking competition, received a 50k scholarship to CIA.
Did Jamie make any change happen here? Was the show worth it? Etc. I hope I have a balanced perspective, and one that’s well informed (I did work with the guy nearly every day he was here in LA, and I was VERY involved in all the back and forth between Jamie’s crew and LAUSD – in fact, i was caught up in much of it myself). There is little doubt that Jamie was the catalyst for the ban on flavored milk (in fact, though it passed the school board, one board member refused to vote for the ban out of spite for Jamie!). What else? We are working on the scratch cooking pilot – that’s all Jamie (point of correction: the Orfalea Foundation won’t actually fund the work themselves, but rather provide the expertise and training. They only fund in Santa Barbara County. Just want to be clear about that.)
And don’t read too much in that letter by Ray Cortines. It isn’t evidence of much. It was written after the show was filmed, after the fight was documented in the press, and the letter was written in defense of those promo’s that villainize poor Ray. And the offers for Jamie to “put requests in writing,” serve on committees, or what have you, and that Jamie was somehow negligent on that point and therefore insincere in his desire to help… c’mon. Those “offers” were all attempts to throw Jamie a few bones to keep him busy, or make him look bad, but not sincere requests for assistance. Jamie certainly didn’t come to town (with ABC in tow) to serve on a committee and “put requests in writing.” Can you imagine how bad the ratings would have been then? 🙂
Like I said in a number of my comments during interviews on the show (though I don’t know if any made it to primetime), I don’t fault Ray for keeping Jamie out of the Central Kitchen. I’d probably do the same if I were Supt. It’s not the distraction you need when you are battling a 500 million dollar budget crisis. But the lunch program, the schools, LAUSD and the show would have been so much better if LAUSD hadn’t started off with so much animosity.
Thank you Bettina, I’m glad you noticed the new specs!
Heather says
What I want to know is why all of you are knocking what JO is trying to do and defending the school districts for their crappy school lunch choices. My children will NOT be going to public schools for many reasone, and this is one of them. The man is just trying to change a system that has so many excuses for their unhealthy practices and you parents are defending them! How disgusting, you shold be ashamed. As parents we are supposed to protect our children, not defend the people who are helping to make our children dumb and sick!