Overhaul of U.S. School Cafeteria Food

I just ran across Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Wow. Watch it here. http://www.hulu.com/watch/136381/jamie-olivers-…

Second Episode Now available online – http://www.hulu.com/watch/138201/jamie-olivers-….

You can sign his petition here http://www.jamieoliver.com/campaigns/jamies-foo….

Thanks so much for posting this. I am a huge fan of Jamie Oliver’s and overhauling school lunch programs / teaching children how to eat properly is a cause that is dear to my heart.

Cheers!
Kate

I watched last night and was blown away by what is happening not only in school cafeterias but in households in this country…nutritional suicide. I don’t think that is an exaggeration either, the kind of garbage we are eating is just off the charts. I am not a health food fanatic by any means , I eat meat and cheese and other so called bad foods but I eat them in a fresh state not a completely artificial replica of their former selves, ala corn dogs. I think the thing that really stood out for me was the severe knowledge gap between healthy eating and healthy food. The USDA allows frozen pizza crust to count as a grain serving in their dietary requirements really? If you haven’t watched this show I highly recommend it …it is eye opening to say the least…

I also watched Jamie Oliver last night about the School Cafeteria Food Service in the United States and I have different thoughts as I too work in The Cafeteria .All the food that is served in the cafeterias are APPROVED by THE USDA. And we meet all the codes set by the Health Inspection Department and those can be seen online anytime at Tennessee.gov.
The Biggest issue we see as Food Nutrition Associates is This:
Everyday there are students that come to school from home late that have had NO BREAKFAST and then maybe NO MONEY at lunch either But they still get to eat, Parents are not sending money and on weekends and evenings some children are left to get their own meal example:bg chips,soda!! and by Monday at school they are starved to death!!
So my point is this: It all starts at HOME FIRST: Food,Education,Respect,Etec!!
The Schools see so much more than you think and we love our students and everything that we serve has been tested and is baked .broiled, fresh , etc! I am sure Mr Oliver has a Big heart and will show us some good in the long run But we have Rules and Regulations to go by and when you are preparing for 750-1259 + students each day plus other daily task then there is no way you can do everything from scratch like they did 50+ years ago??? Thanks!!

completely agree ..it does start at home. I think what people are saying is why not have school be the ONE place these kids can get a nutritious meal IF they don’t get it at home? Is there anything wrong with IMPROVING the standards that the USDA has set? I don’t see how schools cannot see the connection between nutrition and the ability to learn. I think the message is shouldn’t we at least try to get kids to eat a more nutritionally balanced diet. Who does that hurt?

The USDA has it’s own issues, they are revising the nutritional guidelines this year and will be releasing a “new pyramid” for 2010. If you compare the nutritional guidelines from the US to that of other countries they are quite different. I am very interested to see the new version and how it compares to the current.
I would estimate the processed foods that kids eat in schools contains as much sodium then those kids should be eating in a day. I do not need to analyze the side of the box of the chicken nuggets to find that out.
The US government uses our tax dollars to subsidize crops such as corn and soy. This is why corn shows up in almost all processed foods, the biggest item being High Fructose Corn Syrup, which is how the processed foods are so cheap. The government subsidizes the crops of corn to make it cheap, food manufacturers purchase cheap ingredients and make low quality, high calorie, nutrient deficient foods. The USDA is just about as good as the FDA, how many commercials have you seen lately for lawsuits against previously FDA approved drugs?
The USDA are labelling genetically modified plants to be “generally recognized as safe” while every other country on the planet requires food products that contain genetically modified ingredients to be labeled. Why do they require labling? Yet, we in the US think that altering the genes of our crops is a great idea. One problem, the USDA has never tested the long-term effects of consuming these altered crops, and guess what, it’s in your kids lunch.

I agree with youu both here 100%!!! And Thank you for taking the time to help explain the USDA and the FDA STANDARDS!
We as Americans can make a change and all Schools have started making those changes a few years ago. It isn’t like it was when I went to school when you ate exactley what they put on your plate or you didn’t eat at all. And then if you had no money you just didn’t eat!. We have choices daily and all fresh fruit, whole wheat breads and when we do have fries they are baked.So the students are learning and everything is portioned and excerise in the schools are a big issue also .So when we look at the picture we need to look at how well our Cafeteria Staff is doing with, Cleanliness, Tempatures, Handling of Foods and Quality. I would like to say that the school system I saw Mr Jamie In was very Clean and doing exactly what the
Health Inspector would have expected on a daily basis. I would love to have Ms Alice in our School System here anytime! Better yet, maybe she should go to Jamie’s hometown and look at their School Cafeteria Lunch Program’s???

They didn’t really like him in Huntington: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLgmk323H6k – this video is now notorious on this side of the Atlantic! Over here, Jamie Oliver has been a superstar for years and I have to say I love his books – he has some seriously delicious recipes :-) It’s also true that he fairly revolutionized the food served in school cafeterias in the UK – at least, according to the reports I read. I’m not from the UK, l’ve never lived there and the school I went to didn’t serve lunch anyway (everyone brought their their own), so my knowledge is based on what I’ve read in the (British) papers. I guess it’s annoying to have this Brit arrive and announce what’s wrong – but his message is actually quite interesting and oh-so-relevant for the future. Seriously though, pizza for breakfast???

I dont think I could EVER eat, another Chicken Nugget!!!

We let my 6 year old son watch this and he said is never eating a chicken nugget again.

I would have blown up at those lunch ladies and school officals. I was screaming at the TV. You gotta have 2 servings of bread. I would have told them where to put there gd bread. Great show.

And make sure the bread is wholemeal ;-)

if you are angry about this call your local congress representative and tell them that a 6 cent / child increase (see healthy hunger-free kids act) is not enough! Nutrition guidelines based on caloric MINIMUMs are not cutting it. Feeding kids surpluses and commodity crops…making milk, meat and corn happy is not cutting it. Instead of covering costs with soda/chip sales, sell actual foods.

There’s a bill before congress right now… I’ll go try and find the bill number and come back to post it here. Look into it and WRITE your representative if you think it’s worthy of your support.

The USDA and FDA (and EPA, for that matter) are staffed with industry insiders and aren’t looking out for the interests many Americans believe they are. That they set the guidelines for school lunches should NOT make anyone feel these standards make sense to keep kids’ bodies healthy and functioning well.

The USDA stacks the deck in favor of wheat, soy and corn – since those make the most money for companies like Monsanto. THAT’s who the guildelines really cater to.

Worth looking into:

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-26-blanche…

and

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jill-richardson/l…

I can’t find the g.d. bill number at the moment…. !! Grrr.

Entertaining show. I added it to my Tivo.

I really like what he’s trying to do, but I wonder how much he knows about healthy eating and weight loss. His advice to the overweight teen was very misleading. Simply cooking from raw ingredients and avoiding fried food isn’t going cause his weight to melt off.

http://blog.ted.com/2010/02/teach_every_chi.php – Powerful.

@Jenmaster2003: Thanks for posting this: I found it horrifying. I can’t believe that there are families where three generations have never learned to cook even basic dishes – and that it’s so widespread! Truly horrendous.
@beala: Jamie Oliver is a chef, not a doctor and not a personal trainer (unless he’s added another arc to his bow that is ;-) – and he says so himself. I would say he’s fairly clueless about the fitness aspect of things, but his advice on healthy eating isn’t bad – cooking from raw ingredients and avoiding fried food is an important part of losing weight, but you can’t out-train a bad diet, so exercise obviously has to be part of the equation – but that’s not his job. I agree with what you’re saying – but I would say that the boy Jamie’s advice was incomplete rather than misleading. That said, I haven’t seen the programme as I’m one of the few people in the Western world without a TV !

I haven’t seen this show yet, but I know the jist & am so glad to see people getting excited about it. It’s about time that we had an open talk as a country about our culture of food and how it effects our children. I know that my personal story about myself & food as a child has played a huge role in the way I treat food today.

I starting paying attention to food only because I wanted to pay attention to calories so that I could lose weight. Over the 5 or so years that I’ve been learning about food & health & everything, I have come to think about food in an entirely different way, for the better.

Less than a year ago, the only thing I knew how to cook for myself was an omelette. Now I can bake my own breads, bagels, I’ve made several gourmet meals, and I just plain ADORE cooking.

Growing up, my Mom was a single mother from South Korea, working 5-6 jobs at any given time, learning english, and raising three daughters by herself—all of her family was still in Korea. Needless to say, she never cooked because there was no time, and money was tight, so my sisters and I ate a whole bunch of junk…and ramen noodles (which I guess, in excess, can be junk too). I never learned to cook. Even though my grandmother & aunts make fantastic Korean food, I never learned. I never had to, either—my sisters “made” me food (more like microwaved it for me). We did the best we could with what we had.

As a result, my sisters and I have all struggled with weight. We all are now much healthier than we used to be, but it has taken years for us to get our eating habits under control and make exercise a regular part of our lives.

And now, I love to cook. It won’t be for many years, but when I do have a family and have children, we WILL eat dinner together. I will cook meals for them. We will bake together. I will teach my kids how to cook, knowing that those skills will help them be healthy, self-sufficient individuals.

In my eyes, cooking a meal for someone is the ultimate act of love. You put your time & energy into something that is going to provide nutrition for that person’s body, but more than that, you are showing someone that you care about them by crafting a meal for them. And by creating something healthy, nutritious, and delicious for them, you show them that you want them to feel good and be happy.

So I think that what @Jenmaster2003 posted is incredibly important. There are so many of us out there who never learned to cook, and it is so terribly important that we DO learn, so that we can pass those skills on.

One more quick story…now that I’m the family chef (haha), my mom’s boyfriend & his best friend are passing on all of their family recipes to me. No one else in their families cooks, so they are passing them on to me knowing that I will keep them alive, and pass them on to my future children.

One cookbook of theirs that was passed on to me was actually a cookbook created by a family friend whose parents were from Italy. I am in the process of typing this cookbook up and making it more presentable, since it’s wearing away and the typewritten pages are yellowing.

The introduction he wrote was amazing. Written in 1978, but still, he speaks to how America is becoming a ‘fast food country’, and that parents are “cooking” tv dinners, eating out, and people are cooking less and less. He warns that if we do not keep our family recipes alive, they will die, and it will be a sad day when we have children who grow up not knowing how to cook for themselves or for their own families. It’s like reading a dark omen that has come to fruition.

Although we have come very far in the past few years in terms of healthier foods & lifestyles, there is still so much more to do—and I firmly believe that the root of the problem is that many young families simply don’t know how to cook, or view it as a laborious task. I’m hoping that this show, and others (such as the fine shows on food network…my addiction) will inspire people to give it a go in the kitchen, become creative, and learn a set of skills that will save generations of kids to come from turning to the fast, easy route.

I’ve only seen the first episode but actually really enjoyed it. My wife and I were a big fan of his “School Dinners” series when it was on the food network here in Canada, this seems to be a bit of an “Americanized” (not dumbed down, but not as biting, kinda like how Kitchen Nightmares UK series was more realistic than the American version, more real life than “everything turns up roses”) version of it with the town aspect thrown in.

It looks like in future episodes they are going to get into educating the kids and town a bit more as to what nutrition really is and why they don’t want to eat crap, at least every day. In hindsight they most likely should have started with that, although might have been done that way to cause some early drama, and set Jaime up as the underdog.

Who is watching Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution tonight? I’ll be watching it. We’ll be having a virtual viewing party on twitter, so make sure to follow @dailyburn to watch with us!

Yep – New episode tonight at 9:00 PM EST on ABC.

i love the Jamie Oliver’s show, when will be the next one? see also some easy recipes on http://www.fastrecipes.com to try them yourself at home

This is all fantastic but…. I work in a school district and food services run into budget problems. They don’t like it either but they are following standards. Get budget fixed and then start the better menu planning. I want those kids to as healthy as they can too.