Food revelation! Jamie Oliver, food gospel | Bread & Butter

French fries, rectangle-shaped pizza and chicken nuggets; school kids are eating the same garbage today we all were just a few years ago. As adults, we have the power to make our own lunchtime food choices, but kids are still limited to what local lunch ladies serve up.

And it’s been a tough couple of weeks for the lunch ladies.

The debut of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution on ABC comes on the heels of the White House’s recent initiative declaring war on childhood obesity and the factors that contribute to it. For one, school lunch.

United Kingdom native Oliver and his new show (adapted from his Brit version Ministry of Food) have taken aim at American school lunch’s nutrition, or rather the lack thereof.
And the extra scrutiny is causing headaches for (and in some cases minor rebellion among) the women (and men) who dish them up.

While Oliver’s first season’s worth of efforts — which kicked off in Huntington, W. Va. (dubbed “the fattest city in the America”) — have met with plenty of resistance, TV ratings pegging it as Friday’s No. 2 show seems to boast that someone is getting (embracing) the message.

No one ever said reform was easy, but that’s just what Oliver, the White House and the ever-growing concerned parental population are aiming to do when it comes to what America’s kids eat.

And Oliver’s show couldn’t have shown up at a better time.

In the past several months, Michelle Obama has endeavored to put pressure on food manufacturers nationwide to revise their labels, encourage schools to lean their lunches and get moms and dads to pay more attention to what they’re feeding their children.

It would appear Obama has a new (important) ally in the charismatic, former Naked Chef, Oliver, who has managed to use television to cut right to the core of the issue by putting himself in the living rooms of Americans to get his message across weekly.

Watching the first few episodes in which the stubborn (lazy) lunch lady, Alice, defends mile-long, chemical-filled ingredient lists, might lead one to wonder how it ever became acceptable to feed our kids garbage.

Or, even more poignantly, bare witness to kids who can’t even name common vegetables on sight. This food columnist struggled to understand how our children have come to know “nuggets” as a foodstuff before tomatoes?

And while Oliver continues to use his show as a giant mirror to accurately reflect the sad state of nutritional affairs in this country, politicians continue attempting to wrangle adequate funding for the necessary overhaul.

But those trying to do exactly that were dealt a blow on March 24 when Obama’s grand proposal to dedicate an additional $10 billion to childhood nutrition programs was cut by the Senate by more than half.

While the move, which reduces the budget to an amount of $4.5 billion, is disappointing for those championing food reform across the country, others like Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) say the money is still an improvement.

“We’d all like to do more and we’re going to try, but we’ve got to get started,’’ she said. “If we just separate and go to our separate foxholes we don’t get to the end product.”

Margo Wooten, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, championed the bill as a strong one, despite the slashing of funding and pointed out in a statement released by the center that, “Although the USDA regularly adjusts school meal reimbursement rates for inflation, this is the first time in four decades that Congress would provide an additional increase in funding.”

But while legislation continues to float around up in the air, the one thing we know for sure is that knowledge is power, and where Oliver gets it right is in his conveyance of it to American families nationwide — in mass and regularly.