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Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution




I was on vacation when Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution came on TV, and I just watched the first episode this week.  I bet most of you are watching it, but if not, I highly recommend it.  As someone who works in a school kitchen, I am blown away that the challenges of improving school lunch featured on Jamie’s show are very similar to that my school, even though I work for a small, independent private school.  I bet it’s similar to most schools across America. 

I recognize the school freezer packed to gills with boxes of precooked foods like chicken nuggets.  I also recognize the attitude from lunch ladies, the resistance to change, and the skepticism of bringing in fresh food to replace precooked, processed foods.

For those of you who haven't seen the inside of a school kitchen, here's your chance.       

4 comments:

  1. I love this show! I feel like I really can connect to what Brittany is going through. For those who want to catch back episodes try Hulu.com

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  2. Great show, I do love seeing how much of what drives rigidity and change simply boils down to personality. Alice is utterly intractable, while the other lunch lady in the elementary school Mille is much more amenable to change and actually cooking (instead of heating up), as is the lunch lady in the high school who seems not only amenable to change, but pretty enthusiastic about it.

    I do like how Jamie caught out the district's nutrition representative about the amount of vegetables in his dish, while all the rest of the kids were snarfing down burgers and chips and not one of them selected any of the salad. Turns out its "optional" -- in which case what is she fussing about>

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  3. I forgot to say how much I LOVED it when Jamie threw away the fries. Ha! The veggie thing was annoying.

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  4. I love the show, and have saved it on my DVR. I've been blogging about it as well which you can check out here: http://losingweightafter45isabitch.blogspot.com/

    What amazes me have been the critics of the show, who seem to think that improving school lunch is going to put us on the road to being some kind of a dictorship.

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