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I watched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution this weekend. Talk about eye-opening. I never went to a school with a lunch program, so I never realized how much processed junk is served. That's what the government deems to be nutritious, and also what comes in under budget. For as suspicious we are of our government at getting too involved in things and telling us what to do, for some reason in this area we've completely let bureaucrats take over. And we're all pretty okay with it. And it's not just with school lunches, but all processed foods. There's this idea that if the FDA doesn't have a problem with it and it's in our grocery store, then it's fine to eat. We even get defensive about it. Why do we do that? Why do we feel the (sometimes) very strong need to protect sub-standard food?

I think it really got to the root of the problem with obesity in America. (Well, it's even more than an "obesity" issue - it's a general health issue.) There's this sort of ambivalence to food and nutrition a lot of times. (And sometimes even a belligerent attitude of "it's my right to eat crap.")

Somewhere along the way we've fallen down on eating right, with time, money and convenience outweighing health. I'm not pointing fingers - I've been guilty of it myself. Who doesn't love a good burger? And popping something in the microwave is easy. And I don't think it's bad to have that from time to time. It's just when an entire diet revolves around it, it's problematic. If I hadn't already stopped eating frozen dinners a year or so ago, this show would make me stop. I kind of wish everyone in the U.S. had to watch it.

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This is where being really picky has actually served me quite well, because I can't stand most processed/mass-produced foodstuffs. Not in a "I'm so virtuous and above it all" sort of way but in a literal "this is as bad as eating brussels sprouts, I kind of want to hurl" sort of way.

As a result, even when I attended schools that served lunches, I always packed mine (ham or turkey sandwich on a bagel, apple, snack-sized bag of some sort of chips). And frozen dinners? I've eaten very few in my life because something about the texture just skeeves me out. Canned foods also. Basically anything that is in any way mushy or slimy when god did not intend it to be so naturally just makes me wan to run for the hills.

But when I was teaching in public schools, I was on a regular basis horrified at the lunches. Not just health-wise, because it wasn't even appetising junk food, it was always just gross-ass shit. Nasty floppy greasy flavourless frozen pizza, shoe-leather-style grey burger-pucks, ugh, no. And the salad bar? Ugh. Iceburg lettuce and vegetables that went around the bend days ago. No.

This is where being really picky has actually served me quite well, because I can't stand most processed/mass-produced foodstuffs. Not in a "I'm so virtuous and above it all" sort of way but in a literal "this is as bad as eating brussels sprouts, I kind of want to hurl" sort of way.

That really was part of the reason I stopped eating frozen dinners. Towards the end there weren't really many I liked the taste of, so it wasn't a huge trauma to go cold turkey on them. You mentioned the texture - yeah. I'd pretty much stopped eating anything with chicken in it long before I gave it up all together. That's NOT what chicken should taste/feel like.

But when I was teaching in public schools, I was on a regular basis horrified at the lunches. Not just health-wise, because it wasn't even appetising junk food, it was always just gross-ass shit. Nasty floppy greasy flavourless frozen pizza, shoe-leather-style grey burger-pucks, ugh, no. And the salad bar? Ugh. Iceburg lettuce and vegetables that went around the bend days ago. No.

BLECH.

Yeah, I haven't seen his program, but read an article recently about the resistance he's facing here. Someone linked to this blog in the comments and ugh. I cannot imagine why you would want to eat 95% of the stuff pictured there.

I think I'll wait to take a look until after I've finished eating lunch. :D

It might be interesting to see if the cost of obesity and other nutrition caused issues start making the government tighten what the food rules from the FDA are. Money is a big motivator. As someone who has to search for gluten (not just wheat) on an allergy list I would love to see better labeling.

I would imagine if someone would sit down and calculate the cost of obesity-related bad health, it would be staggering.

It's actually not that bad. Not nearly what, say, smokers and people with eating disorders cost.

Huh. Well, I guess I'm not surprised - especially when it comes to smoking.

I was about to edit, but you commented too fast! I actually do a lot of reading on obesity, food scarcity, and health at every size. It's an important topic to me, and a lot of information gets misrepresented for a lot of different reasons. It's a huge topic.

There are actually a whole huge slew of issues regarding health and obesity, which causes the numbers to get fudged. For one, obesity is a really weird classification, because it's mostly using the BMI, which has been shown again and again to have very little relation to actual health (and the BMI recently made the "average" BMI smaller. That is, more people are being classified as overweight).

Fat people also tend to go to Doctors less, because they are treated poorly. So it's really hard to figure out what could have been fixed by preventative care, and what is an issue directly related to being fat.

I think it's really important that everyone have access to healthy food, and the time to prepare it. And I think that the government absolutely subsidizes the wrong foods to do it. (Check out this comparison of the food pyramid vs. food the government subsidizes). I just think focusing on weight is focusing on the wrong portion of the problem.

I thought it was pretty great that when Jamie Oliver was on Oprah the other day, he made a point of mentioning that it isn't only the overweight people eating terribly. He pointed out that plenty of thin people eat complete crap and are actually in bad shape underneath the thin. That pleased me.

I really was hesitant to use the word "obesity" since it's such a mis-used word as well as a trigger word.

Heh. I remember the hot dogs in middle school were GREEN. Not just overcooked-slightly-grey. I mean luck-o-the-Irish GREEN.

However, if it weren't for school free lunch program in high school, I would certainly have starved. And when we did have money for food, it was never enough to cook a full meal for a family. It was ramen noodles or frozen pot pie. Neither of which is healthy but it satisfies the hunger. I don't think the problem is that we don't know good food when we see it, it's that a box of wheat pasta is 20x the price of a ramen noodles pack. Even if you're feeding a family of five, it's a hell of a lot cheaper and can provide more meals for the same amount of money.

Could the government afford to offer free lunch programs if they got quality food? I doubt it. It's either good food for a few or mediocre for all. FYI- the cost of a school lunch around here is $2.50. Obviously it's more economical to pack lunch, unless you are on the free program, which a lot of kids are. And considering the economy being what it is, I expect we'll be seeing the health fallout for years to come, not just due to food served in schools (it's always been shit) but because folks on a budget feeding a family have no choice but to buy junk because it's all they can afford.

That goes deeper into what I think is complete failing of the food system in the U.S. When highly processed low-quality food is cheaper than raw food, there's something very VERY wrong.

You'd think they could do something...anything though. I just picked up a giant cooked bbq chicken breast, a croissant (nom nom buttery) and a pound of strawberries for my lunch at the grocery store. $3.86. I wonder if I could do $2.50 with something healthy. I might have to see next time I go. :D

Yeah, but you have to remember, that $2.50 isn't just covering the cost of that one meal. Most likely families capable of feeding their own kids do so, because they know the lunches are crap. They aren't putting money into the system so it drains the funding a little bit more.

I'd be interested to find out the percentages/ratios of purchased meals vs free lunches. I'd guess that one meal has to cover the cost of at least 3-5 free lunches. Plus the overhead of storage, preparation, worker compensation & the like. My estimation is it would be more like walking into the store to see what you can buy for $0.80. That will buy you maybe a frozen pot pie, as I mentioned before. (Tangent: I'm allowing for inflation since I refuse to buy those things now and therefore have no idea what they cost. Too much bad karma associated with them. They were exactly $0.69 back then. To this day I know that 69 x 3 = 207 for no other reason than we were poor.)

No wonder they're horrible. :( :(

(And there's still something very very very very wrong about a frozen pot pie being that cheap while buying the ingredients themselves (minus the chemicals) are so expensive.)

Yeah. Granted, I haven't seen Jamie Oliver's program, and I don't doubt his heart is in the right place - he's a very cool guy, but I get the feeling this is sort of the school lunch equivalent of

What Not To Wear

. Anyone can make a better lunch with a decent budget, but I'm betting a lot of these schools don't have that.

Now, that's not to say I'm defending the school administrators. You know my feelings on the ones I've personally had to deal with. That said - in an age where budgets are getting cut back, education adn the peripheral social programs are the first to be hit it seems. It's wrong, but it's how it works. I'm not sure I'd want to be the administrator that has to figure out how to budget everything out. It can't be easy.

Again, I may be talking out of my backside here, but I wonder exactly how much local control there is for food service. If the individual school systems had the ability to negotiate with local produce farmers, that would probably go a long way to helping, but I'm guessing most states handle these things in bulk to save money.

I don't know. There has to be a happy medium somewhere.

The budget is actually a big thing he's running up against. (And all the red tape of the system.) It is one thing to say "thou shalt" and then swan off, but another to fix what's broken.

The series isn't done yet, so I'm really curious to see how things end up. I think his first attempt came in over budget, so we'll see if he can figure things out.

In that way the program is a bit different than something like Extreme Home Makeover where everyone can feel good about building one giant house while scads of other people go without. We'll see if he can pull it off.

He did the same thing over here a few years ago - called Jamie's School Dinners - and it was a really interesting concept. Again, he had to try and produce decent lunches on a very minimal budget - I think it was something ridiculous like 35p per meal. It was a multi-pronged approach though - he took a petition about it to the Prime Minister, and debated the issue with politicians. He also, in the show, hired some Army kitchens and took loads of dinner ladies there, and taught them basic knife skills and so on to give them the confidence to actively cook, not just rely on feeding the kids frozen stuff. So it really isn't just him prescribing food snobbery, but trying to genuinely change things from all sides.

Did he succeed?

When highly processed low-quality food is cheaper than raw food, there's something very VERY wrong.

This is a huge part of the problem with the availability and price of food in general nowadays, especially for the working poor. Unhealthy, processed, carb- and salt-heavy foods take the place of well-prepared meals because (A) the store-brand mac & cheese is all mom can afford, and (B) she's working two jobs anyway to make ends meet, so even if she could afford something better (and she can't), when would she have the time to prepare it?

Also, a lot of schools (I'm willing to bet most of them, in fact), don't have the proper facilities to prepare a well-thought-out meal. Jimmy's school barely has a kitchen as it is. Even if the school districts had the budget to provide a genuinely healthful lunch on a daily basis, the cost of retrofitting the school kitchens to be able to prepare them would be astronomical--and in my state, at least, they're cutting staff left and right to keep the schools open, so taking chicken nuggets off the menu is low on the list of priorities.

Illinois now has a program allowing WIC recipients to use their benefits at farmers' markets, though that still doesn't address the issue of making those food dollars stretch, or the fact that many women can't *get* to the farmers' markets, but it's a step, I suppose.

My concern about Jamie Oliver's approach (or any shame-based approach towards behavioral change) is that one has to take into account not only the choices people make, but the reasons they have made those choices. It's all good and well to tell someone how to eat healthy, but without a support system enabling them to do so on a regular basis, I fear it won't do much good.

*nodnodnod*

The whole system is just...broken. Badly broken. Food production is in a dismal state, and because of it we've got a class system of basic food stuffs.

I'm not sure how it'll be with the people he's actually interacting with - the series isn't done yet - but to me it's really highlighted just how bad we've let things get. Just...in general. And that something positive needs to happen.

I read an interesting article recently that brought up the Hierarchy of Food Needs.

Nutrition is actually the last thing people worry about when they buy food. Before that you have to have access to fresh food, enough money to buy it, and enough time to prepare it. And a lot of people don't have any of those things.

EDIT: And I totally remember the green hot dogs! And yellow ribs, and bleeding chicken. And salty cake. Oh, school lunches, I do not miss you. Well, I miss those cute milk cartons.

Edited 2010-03-30 00:34 (UTC)

I've seen that article before, but thanks for the link. I need to bookmark this because it comes up far too often nowadays.

The one thing I do miss from school lunch was called fiestada. It was pizza with a Mexican flair. OMG SO GOOD. That was the one day they were GUARANTEED to have lines around the lunch room. Absolutely rubbish for you, I'm sure, but OM NOM NOM. I need to try to make it myself. The issue was the dough. It wasn't pizza dough, but it was much thicker than an average soft tortilla.

Oh, school food has been complete crap for 30 years. They served us utter shite when I was in school, and I graduated in 1990.

It was stuff like fries and hot dogs and steak-um sandwiches and fishsticks and burgers and minipizzas and... I could go on. It was pretty much impossible to get anything that wasn't junk unless you were buying a side of applesauce or a carton of milk.

There was actually a big stink at my high school when the cafeteria tried to have the co-located snack bar that was run by and for the benefit of people in the school band(s) SHUT DOWN - what won the fight for the snack bar is that they were able to prove conclusively that what they were selling, things like soft pretzels and Frosty-like shakes, were better for you than what the cafeteria served. And the lunches at the high school level, back then were $3.85. God knows how much they cost now.

Edited 2010-03-29 20:35 (UTC)

You know, I like that stuff, but the thought of having to eat it day after day is making me a bit nauseous right now. Bleh.

And yeesh. That snack bar thing is a very sad commentary.

(Oh man, flashback! You reminded me that while we didn't have a lunch program, there was a snack shop at one of the schools I went to. Carnation Frozen Chocolate Malt!! (Although they sold snacks, not meals.) I wonder if they still make those.)

I'm guessing that this is Jamie Oliver taking his British School Dinner campaign to America!

Strangly, my school always had pretty good school dinners anyway. There were seven menu options each day and there was always one chip dish, one salad dish, one international dish (mmm...moussaka...the only place I've ever eaten that was at school...I miss that), one 'packed lunch' (sandwich, crisps, yoghurt, fruit, drink etc.), one vegetarian, one vegetarian salad (the first salad was normally with meat like a chicken risotto or something) and then another meal option (maybe another chip dish, maybe a roast, maybe a pasta dish etc.). And the dinner ladies ALWAYS remembered if you had chips every day and made you have some variety every so often!

I'm sure there was a lot of mass produced stuff used (like cheap sausages and burgers etc.) but they were cooked on site and the lasagnes and curries and some such were made in bulk by the staff, not defrosted. None of the horror stories I've seen from some places. The unhealthiest was probably the 'packed lunch' as I remember the drink was cheap and artificial...at least it had a piece of fruit with it.

Wow! It sounds like you had an amazing program! That sounds way better than what I got at college, and that was decent enough!

I was looking at that yesterday and trying to decide if I wanted to ahem it. Still haven't decided.

But yes, it's horrifying what we serve to our kids. I think a lot of parents just hold their noses and try not to think about it, because they don't have the money or the time to do anything about it. I don't blame them -- and I don't know how single parents get anything done ever, let alone worrying about what their kids are getting fed at school -- but it's sad that society in general doesn't give a shit. Maybe part of it is an uphill both ways kind of thing. I ate disgusting mystery meat in school, and SO SHOULD YOU!

But remember the wise words of the Gipper: ketchup is a VEGETABLE!

(Edited for extraneous d.)

Edited 2010-03-29 22:26 (UTC)

I found it to be interesting, and one I hope turns into a success story. Instead of coming away thinking something like, "oh, look at those slobs," it was "they deserve a HELL of a lot better."

I think I was very lucky with my lunches.
I loved the hot dogs, the grilled cheese and a few other menu items.
But I was/am very picky and wouldnt eat most of the food there.
If I knew that lunch was going consist of mystery meat, salad, corn or other things then I'd just bring in a PB&J sandwich.
Then I'd snack when I go home.

Sounds like you avoided the good stuff! Well, except the mystery meat. :D

Oh man, I just had another flashback. My mom attempted to give me a hot dog for lunch by packing it in a thermos with hot water, and the bun and other stuff separately. It was a good idea except that the hot dog would be luke warm by lunch. Bleh. Oh, childhood. XD

There's a lot I don't like about Japanese schools, but a few things they do right is have the children serve their food and clean up after themselves. This is huge, because a lot of people see eating as just a disposable time where you can do it anywhere - in the car, in front of the TV and the respect for food is nowhere to be seen. If the lunch period were treated more as a positive thing that everyone contributes to I can wager that people would realise the food they're actually eating is more than questionable and would think toward changing it.

I rarely ate food at school because it was terrible. At university was almost worse because I was much more conscious of it and more often than not I would end up drinking soy milk & lactose free milk (which I had to fight with the administrators to serve) and fruit. Instead of gaining weight I lost weight because there was usually not a lot for me to eat, being a vegetarian. It's a problem that needs to be addressed from the low grades all the way up.

That's a good point. Our habits are pretty lousy when it comes to eating, even in how we eat.

And it is something that needs to be completely re-thought.

http://thestir.cafemom.com/food_party/100502/teacher_eats_school_lunch_every

This is the blog of a teacher eating the kid's lunch everyday. She is talking about the changes to her health.

I know for a fact, that the school I work at counts ketchup as a vegetable.

Man, I don't envy her.

And I BOGGLE at ketchup = vegetable. Just because there was once tomatoes involved in the process does not equal vegetable. O_O

Hmm. I watched the sneak preview only. I agree with his goals. I like what he did with the one family. But I'm uncomfortable with his being confrontational with minimum-wage employees. I know, in working against racism and sexism we call that a tone argument and it's both infuriating and ineffective, but in this case I think essentially insulting women who are doing the best jobs they can with the little they've been given is not cool. The production ends up painting these women as close-minded, not-so-bright harpies. Of course, it's television and nobody would watch if there weren't confrontation.

Still, I'm interested to see what he does when he goes out into the community, and how well he can stay within the budget. I hope he works more with the pastor.

(You really don't need to reply to this bit of rambling. I should probably post it in my own LJ instead, but I'm not going to.)

I don't know - it seemed to be pretty clear to me that the cooks had absolutely no power when it came to what they served. (However, it was frustrating to see them resist any kind of change since they're the ones on the front line.)

I starting learning to cook in earnest when I found I had high blood pressure. And lately I've been really keen on making sure I cut out the junk out of my diet.

I'm finding it rather hard to actually eat well. Almost everything I cook comes from raw ingredients. and the stuff that doesn't I make it has no "evil" ingredients (namely high fructose corn syrup).

My officemate eats two packs of powdered donuts and two pints of milk each morning. That's over half the calories that I eat in an entire day...

Once you start reading labels, it really is hard to find decent things to eat.

If it looks like a plant - eat it. If it comes from a plant - don't eat it.

If has more than five ingredients (or ones you don't recognize) - don't eat it...

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