Jamie Oliver is a celebrity chef from jolly old England who made a name for himself cooking naked in Britain's schools. Or something like that (I don't do much research). Apparently he was disgusted by the over-processed, under-nutritioned meals the schools were feeding the children. So he made a TV show about it. The U.K. show was a success, so he repeated the efforts in Huntington, West Virginia - a place Oliver calls "ground zero" for America's obesity epidemic. Damn, Huntington just got served.
Now he's tackling the Los Angeles Unified School District, for reasons both altruistic and possibly monetary. Oh, and it's gonna be televised, son!!!
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| Jamie Oliver in the... kitchen? |
Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution season 2 aired three nights ago on ABC. The reviews were generally positive beforehand, with most of the "liberal" press applauding Oliver's efforts. Last season the show won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Series.
Yet the debut season 2 episode saw the ratings slip 40% from last season's premiere. This got me thinking. As my girlfriend recently proclaimed, fat people have replaced little people as the go-to ratings boon for any network. Say goodbye to the Roloffs and Pit Boss and say hello to the Biggest Loser, Heavy, and I Used to be Fat (which is a GREAT show for other reasons). So why did Oliver tank and the ratings for other fat shows balloon like the waistlines of our populace?
Jamie Oliver might just piss people off. He's very polarizing. People in America have seemingly had enough of Jamie Oliver and his quest to get us to stop eating garbage. I settled in with some Doritos and a Coke Zero and jotted down some notes in a Running Diary of Food Revolution 2: Los Angeles.
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8:00 - Jamie arrives in Los Angeles, 11 million people, Hollywood stars, healthy lifestyles. Why did he choose this place again? Someone on screen says, "It's easier to get a gun, crack or prostitute in Los Angeles than a tomato." Wait a second, that's not a fair comparison! Guns, crack and hookers are native to Los Angeles, tomatoes come from South America.
8:03 - Jamie explains that prior to even filming, the LAUSD denied him access to any of their schools. Come on LAUSD, you just gave the producers the entire season's story line!!! Now if he does get into the schools, you look like you caved.
8:04 - There's a shot of Jamie's chubby wrist on the steering wheel of a car. This is one thing I have a problem with. For a healthy eating advocate, Oliver sure is doughy. He's developing a double chin. I want my food advocates rail thin and looking like they've never enjoyed a cheeseburger in their lives.
8:05 - Jamie goes on Ryan Seacrest's radio show to promote his efforts. Seacrest is producing Jamie's show. Synergy!
8:06 - Product placement! Microsoft's bing© has sponsored some sort of a giant CNN-style Stiuation Room touch screen that lets Jamie keep tabs on obesity and where exactly someone is eating a doughnut, possibly complete with a Google satellite view of the person gorging on fried food.
8:06 - Either Jamie or his producers have put a casting call out for middle aged folks and chunky kids. They've arrived to hear a lecture on what goes into a school lunch hamburger. But first Jamie has asked kids to bring in their "actual" school lunches. A lot of prepackaged doughnuts and cheese filled things. They do look pretty disgusting.
Yet a part of me longs for the sticky sweet taste of a Svenhard's Bear Claw while watching this.
8:03 - Jamie explains that prior to even filming, the LAUSD denied him access to any of their schools. Come on LAUSD, you just gave the producers the entire season's story line!!! Now if he does get into the schools, you look like you caved.
8:04 - There's a shot of Jamie's chubby wrist on the steering wheel of a car. This is one thing I have a problem with. For a healthy eating advocate, Oliver sure is doughy. He's developing a double chin. I want my food advocates rail thin and looking like they've never enjoyed a cheeseburger in their lives.
8:05 - Jamie goes on Ryan Seacrest's radio show to promote his efforts. Seacrest is producing Jamie's show. Synergy!
8:06 - Product placement! Microsoft's bing© has sponsored some sort of a giant CNN-style Stiuation Room touch screen that lets Jamie keep tabs on obesity and where exactly someone is eating a doughnut, possibly complete with a Google satellite view of the person gorging on fried food.
8:06 - Either Jamie or his producers have put a casting call out for middle aged folks and chunky kids. They've arrived to hear a lecture on what goes into a school lunch hamburger. But first Jamie has asked kids to bring in their "actual" school lunches. A lot of prepackaged doughnuts and cheese filled things. They do look pretty disgusting.
Yet a part of me longs for the sticky sweet taste of a Svenhard's Bear Claw while watching this.
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| Delicious. |
8:08 - One mom tells Jamie that ever since her son started going to school, he won't eat his vegetables. I'm sorry, how is this the school's problem? Why do so few people blame the parents, when as Details Magazine stated, indulgent parents are raising a generation of douchebags. Of course, when given choices, idiot children will always pick something sugar-coated. This is why as parents, you give them NO CHOICES. Kids can't feed themselves! They just aren't smart enough, people! There is a reason why parents of yesteryear demanded that their kids eat their vegetables before leaving the table. Just because something is old school doesn't mean it's a negative, you New Agers. Gawd.
8:09 - Jamie just grabbed a baby from a mother's arms. "This is the future of America," he says. He's in full campaign mode now.
8:13 - After a commercial, Jamie walks a full grown cow out into his kitchen. It has chalk markings drawn onto its flanks to show the cuts of beef. Oliver once slit the throat of a live lamb on a TV show in the U.K. That's true, he did it to highlight inhumane slaughterhouse conditions. Is he about to do the same thing to his cow!?! Stay fucking tuned!
8:14 - Alas, no Jamie will not be slaughtering this cow. It's a stunt cow, and apparently the only stunt it can perform is standing still while Jamie spraypaints dollar values over its flanks. Booooring.
8:16 - Jamie introduces us to Pink Slime. This isn't a Nickelodeon gimmick, but God I wish it were. It's the unused trimmings of an animal, usually beef, that gets processed into a slime and sold as an additive to fast food restaurants for their burgers. It's three cents per pound cheaper than regular ground beef, so profits aplenty. Spoiler alert - Jamie says it's rampant with E.coli and salmonella, and that companies mix ammonia in with the trimmings to kill bacteria. Mmm, ammonia.
The company in question that seems to have patented the ammonia beef is Beef Products, Inc. of South Dakota. Only, it doesn't really work all that well. I went to their website to get some more information, but the "Food Safety" section was under construction.
Yikes. In any event, BPI is in need of some serious re-branding and PR goodwill. The name "Beef Products" just doesn't ring out and frankly it's cold, utilitarian and unfriendly. A company with such a bad reputation needs to put a positive spin on things, like when BP added a flowery sunburst to its logo. So here are some suggestions for a name change:
8:24 - Jamie goes to an LAUSD board meeting to address the members. At the end of a three hour meeting, Jamie gets to plead his case for a measly three minutes. Predictably, he gets the run-around from the LAUSD PR lackey... blah, blah, blah. I'm way more interested in the wack job that speaks to the council before Jamie!
Crazy Guy spends his three minutes ranting about the Seven Seals, and seems to spend a lot of time on the Sixth Seal. This is interesting. You don't hear much about the Sixth Seal, it's usually the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse getting all the pub. The Sixth Seal refers to cosmic disturbances, earthquakes and the moon turning blood red, stuff like that.
Why this is of particular importance to the LAUSD is beyond me. Perhaps this guy is NOT crazy and merely a concerned parent. What are the LAUSD's plans for the apocalypse, should it occur on school time? Will the kids get under their desks? Will they know evacuation routes to the playground? Will they have to stand in a single file line until the bell rings and they can safely go back to class?
8:27 - Crazy Guy hands Jamie a flier, and tells him to check his Blogspot. Two things, ouch to Blogspot writers (ahem...), and how come ABC doesn't flash the URL in an on-screen graphic. The guy could have important information!!!
8:32 - Back from commercial, and Jamie is meeting with a Greek guy named Dino who runs Patra's Drive-Thru, an independent fast food joint in LA. First, Jamie drives through and orders one of everything on Patra's menu, just to show how truly disgusting it all is. Chili cheese fries, cheeseburgers, onion rings. The real disgusting part is the grease that is dripping onto the dash of Jamie's Land Rover. As any drive-thru eater knows, you must keep a pack of Armor All Wipes in your car at all times. Disgusting yes, impractical no.
8:33 - Jamie walks through the diner and exclaims "I love the retro look." Um, I'm pretty sure the look of Patra's is the same as when Dino's father built the place in the 1970s.
8:36 - Dino doesn't know where his beef comes from and uses artificial flavoring in his milkshakes. Dino agrees to let Jamie take a crack at health-ifying his menu, but Dino says if this fails he could lose his entire business. Oh, what stakes! Don't worry, I'm sure you'll be properly compensated by the producers, Dino my man.
8:40 - After commercial, Jamie's back at Dino's place with an arsenal of wholesome burger patties. They cook up one of Jamie's free range, grass fed, organic burgers and one of Dino's possibly-processed, ammonia-laced, salmonella-wiches. A lucky customer gets to taste test the two, and hey... he loves the taste and juiciness of Jamie's burger!
But when told by Dino that the healthy burger costs $4.95 and Dino's burger costs only $2.69, the customer says he'd buy the cheaper, less healthy version. And there you have the real crux of the issue. In the age of Extreme Couponing, Americans only care about values and getting a deal. It's why McDonald's posted a $24 BILLION profit last year.
We're also extremely lazy. It's easier and cheaper to buy a McDouble off the Dollar Menu than it is to buy organic ground beef at Whole Foods for $7.99/pound, cook it up while your rugrats scream at you that they're staaaarrvvviiinnnggg, then get them to use a napkin to wipe the grease off their faces instead of their shirtsleeves. I know, it's an old argument, but it's completely true. Americans won't conquer the obesity problem because it's just as easy not to.
8:44 - Jamie tries to make a milkshake using yogurt instead of ice cream to reduce calories, but Dino isn't having it. It's just not a classic American shake. Jamie says the "classic American shake sticks to your ass" (good line) and that Dino's getting "fussy about the ingredients." Dino's eyes light up with rage. You never insult a Greek's manhood. It's the whole reason Alexander the Great invaded Macedonia and didn't stop until he hit India!
But Jamie has a point, yogurt is dairy too. What difference does it make if it tastes fine?
8:52 - Jamie goes to a hearing on flavored milk in schools. It's as boring as it sounds.
8:53 - Jamie decided to do his own presentation on flavored milk. Why does anyone drink milk anyway, it's disgusting. You are drinking the breast milk of a cow. And it looks horrible, tastes like watered down blandness, and makes your mucus thick and chewy. It shouldn't even be served in schools. Ugh.
8:55 - Anyway, Jamie's stunt in this act is to fill an entire school bus with the equivalent of a week's worth of the added sugar in school lunch milk - a whopping 57 tons worth. Okay, I'm totally in agreement with Jamie on this one, kids don't NEED flavored milk, they just WANT it.
But how much did this stunt cost? Only 15 people showed up to the demonstration. And between the production crew, cost of 57 tons of sugar (around $45,000 as I calculated), school bus rental fee, Jamie Oliver's fee, cost of the crane to siphon the sugar, travel costs, craft services, cleaning fees... you are conservatively looking at $125,000. That's like $8,000 per person!!! But it's a helluva visual, I gotta say.
If they need a place to re-purpose all that used sugar, I know a place in South Dakota.
8:58 - It's the end of the show, and Jamie's feeling depressed. It's going to be a tough slog and he feels like he's "treading water." All in all, it turns out I like Jamie Oliver. He seems genuine, although a bit of a media whore (but who isn't these days). But here's the thing. No one wants to be lectured in this country, even if they agree with you. And worse, no one wants to be lectured by an "outsider" coming into their country.
Look, we fought tooth and nail to overthrow British rule, and there's a lot of people who don't take kindly to a Brit trying to come back and in a way, trying to impose rules all over again. This is America, man. We eat shitty food, drive shitty cars and watch shitty television. But by God, we're proud to do it.
8:59 - A discouraged Jamie says he's retreating home to "give my little boys and girls a cuddle." Don't give up hope yet.
8:09 - Jamie just grabbed a baby from a mother's arms. "This is the future of America," he says. He's in full campaign mode now.
8:13 - After a commercial, Jamie walks a full grown cow out into his kitchen. It has chalk markings drawn onto its flanks to show the cuts of beef. Oliver once slit the throat of a live lamb on a TV show in the U.K. That's true, he did it to highlight inhumane slaughterhouse conditions. Is he about to do the same thing to his cow!?! Stay fucking tuned!
8:14 - Alas, no Jamie will not be slaughtering this cow. It's a stunt cow, and apparently the only stunt it can perform is standing still while Jamie spraypaints dollar values over its flanks. Booooring.
8:16 - Jamie introduces us to Pink Slime. This isn't a Nickelodeon gimmick, but God I wish it were. It's the unused trimmings of an animal, usually beef, that gets processed into a slime and sold as an additive to fast food restaurants for their burgers. It's three cents per pound cheaper than regular ground beef, so profits aplenty. Spoiler alert - Jamie says it's rampant with E.coli and salmonella, and that companies mix ammonia in with the trimmings to kill bacteria. Mmm, ammonia.
The company in question that seems to have patented the ammonia beef is Beef Products, Inc. of South Dakota. Only, it doesn't really work all that well. I went to their website to get some more information, but the "Food Safety" section was under construction.
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| No, I'm not kidding, the safety section doesn't exist! |
Yikes. In any event, BPI is in need of some serious re-branding and PR goodwill. The name "Beef Products" just doesn't ring out and frankly it's cold, utilitarian and unfriendly. A company with such a bad reputation needs to put a positive spin on things, like when BP added a flowery sunburst to its logo. So here are some suggestions for a name change:
- Goody Goo!
- Hungry Pants Industries
- Fummy Brands (Fun and Yummy!)
- Pasture Patties
- Sunburst Foods
- Moo Mixin's
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| Look at this face. Won't somebody think of the cows? Or children, whatevs. |
8:24 - Jamie goes to an LAUSD board meeting to address the members. At the end of a three hour meeting, Jamie gets to plead his case for a measly three minutes. Predictably, he gets the run-around from the LAUSD PR lackey... blah, blah, blah. I'm way more interested in the wack job that speaks to the council before Jamie!
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| The Sixth Seal! |
Why this is of particular importance to the LAUSD is beyond me. Perhaps this guy is NOT crazy and merely a concerned parent. What are the LAUSD's plans for the apocalypse, should it occur on school time? Will the kids get under their desks? Will they know evacuation routes to the playground? Will they have to stand in a single file line until the bell rings and they can safely go back to class?
8:27 - Crazy Guy hands Jamie a flier, and tells him to check his Blogspot. Two things, ouch to Blogspot writers (ahem...), and how come ABC doesn't flash the URL in an on-screen graphic. The guy could have important information!!!
8:32 - Back from commercial, and Jamie is meeting with a Greek guy named Dino who runs Patra's Drive-Thru, an independent fast food joint in LA. First, Jamie drives through and orders one of everything on Patra's menu, just to show how truly disgusting it all is. Chili cheese fries, cheeseburgers, onion rings. The real disgusting part is the grease that is dripping onto the dash of Jamie's Land Rover. As any drive-thru eater knows, you must keep a pack of Armor All Wipes in your car at all times. Disgusting yes, impractical no.
8:33 - Jamie walks through the diner and exclaims "I love the retro look." Um, I'm pretty sure the look of Patra's is the same as when Dino's father built the place in the 1970s.
8:36 - Dino doesn't know where his beef comes from and uses artificial flavoring in his milkshakes. Dino agrees to let Jamie take a crack at health-ifying his menu, but Dino says if this fails he could lose his entire business. Oh, what stakes! Don't worry, I'm sure you'll be properly compensated by the producers, Dino my man.
8:40 - After commercial, Jamie's back at Dino's place with an arsenal of wholesome burger patties. They cook up one of Jamie's free range, grass fed, organic burgers and one of Dino's possibly-processed, ammonia-laced, salmonella-wiches. A lucky customer gets to taste test the two, and hey... he loves the taste and juiciness of Jamie's burger!
But when told by Dino that the healthy burger costs $4.95 and Dino's burger costs only $2.69, the customer says he'd buy the cheaper, less healthy version. And there you have the real crux of the issue. In the age of Extreme Couponing, Americans only care about values and getting a deal. It's why McDonald's posted a $24 BILLION profit last year.
We're also extremely lazy. It's easier and cheaper to buy a McDouble off the Dollar Menu than it is to buy organic ground beef at Whole Foods for $7.99/pound, cook it up while your rugrats scream at you that they're staaaarrvvviiinnnggg, then get them to use a napkin to wipe the grease off their faces instead of their shirtsleeves. I know, it's an old argument, but it's completely true. Americans won't conquer the obesity problem because it's just as easy not to.
8:44 - Jamie tries to make a milkshake using yogurt instead of ice cream to reduce calories, but Dino isn't having it. It's just not a classic American shake. Jamie says the "classic American shake sticks to your ass" (good line) and that Dino's getting "fussy about the ingredients." Dino's eyes light up with rage. You never insult a Greek's manhood. It's the whole reason Alexander the Great invaded Macedonia and didn't stop until he hit India!
But Jamie has a point, yogurt is dairy too. What difference does it make if it tastes fine?
8:52 - Jamie goes to a hearing on flavored milk in schools. It's as boring as it sounds.
8:53 - Jamie decided to do his own presentation on flavored milk. Why does anyone drink milk anyway, it's disgusting. You are drinking the breast milk of a cow. And it looks horrible, tastes like watered down blandness, and makes your mucus thick and chewy. It shouldn't even be served in schools. Ugh.
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| Milk is always a bad choice. |
8:55 - Anyway, Jamie's stunt in this act is to fill an entire school bus with the equivalent of a week's worth of the added sugar in school lunch milk - a whopping 57 tons worth. Okay, I'm totally in agreement with Jamie on this one, kids don't NEED flavored milk, they just WANT it.
But how much did this stunt cost? Only 15 people showed up to the demonstration. And between the production crew, cost of 57 tons of sugar (around $45,000 as I calculated), school bus rental fee, Jamie Oliver's fee, cost of the crane to siphon the sugar, travel costs, craft services, cleaning fees... you are conservatively looking at $125,000. That's like $8,000 per person!!! But it's a helluva visual, I gotta say.
If they need a place to re-purpose all that used sugar, I know a place in South Dakota.
8:58 - It's the end of the show, and Jamie's feeling depressed. It's going to be a tough slog and he feels like he's "treading water." All in all, it turns out I like Jamie Oliver. He seems genuine, although a bit of a media whore (but who isn't these days). But here's the thing. No one wants to be lectured in this country, even if they agree with you. And worse, no one wants to be lectured by an "outsider" coming into their country.
Look, we fought tooth and nail to overthrow British rule, and there's a lot of people who don't take kindly to a Brit trying to come back and in a way, trying to impose rules all over again. This is America, man. We eat shitty food, drive shitty cars and watch shitty television. But by God, we're proud to do it.
8:59 - A discouraged Jamie says he's retreating home to "give my little boys and girls a cuddle." Don't give up hope yet.
1 comment:
I don't understand why Americans have this fetish that involves British authorities coming over here and yelling at us. This guy, Chef Ramsey, Tabitha the salon lady (okay she's Australian but how many Americans can tell the difference?) and Trinny & Susanne from What Not to Wear (originally a British show, of course.) I'm sure there are many more that I can't think of ...
What's the deal? Are we feeling guilty about having ruined America and subconsciously crave British rule?
And I agree, milk is disgusting.
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