Jeremiah and I are now officially hooked on Jamie Oliver's "Food Revolution," and although we love cooking shows ("Iron Chef" and "Top Chef" have been staples in our viewing pantry for years), there's something very different about this show. So much so that we even have our five-year-old daughter watching episodes with us, with interest, on Hulu. (More on that in a minute.) If you haven't heard of Jamie Oliver yet, he's a celebrity chef from England who worked to get the junk food out of British school lunches. Last year he came to America (specifically, to the "most unhealthy city" in America) to try to change how children eat and how their schools and families feed them.

A few things stood out to me in the first few episodes. In one of the more shocking scenes, Oliver held up a variety of vegetables and not one first-grader at the school he had been allowed to make some changes at could name a single vegetable. I'm not talking about showing first graders sea beans or sunchokes, but tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, and cauliflower. (They also were unaware that French fries are made from potatoes.) It was pretty eye-opening when Chef Oliver literally compiled (prepared and piled up on the table) a week's worth of the food that one family ate in a week of their regular diet. Beyond the obviousness of this being a nasty pile of junk food, the entire pile was brown in color - there wasn't a red or a purple or a green thing to be seen. He did the same trick at the school to show parents what the kids there ate in a week, and again, it was brown, brown, brown.

In our household we don't put a lot of weight to the food pyramid; instead we try to have a balanced and colorful diet. We also try to buy in season as much as we can, so that means that we don't always get red in the winter (for instance) but over the course of the year, we try to hit all the colors of the rainbow as often as we can.

After Jeremiah and I had watched it, I thought it about some of the questions it raised for days. Would Z be able to name the vegetables? (None of us really like cauliflower so she probably wouldn't know that...) What would the primary color of our weekly food intake look like if we piled it all on our table? (I can't afford to waste that much food but maybe we can experiment in a different way.) What are we doing to our children to raise them without knowing how to use a knife and a fork? (In England, Oliver said, teachers help the kids in the lunchroom learn how to use utensils - an idea that felt radical and obvious at the same time at a school that had as policy preferred food that required a spoon or better yet, no utensils at all.) What does this say for etiquette in our country? Or for the types of food we choose to eat?

Later that weekend, I took Z to a garden shop to buy some seeds for our garden, and we looked at all the different kinds of seeds and young plants - melons, tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, peas, lettuce - and picked some out. (Last summer, Z stood at the tomato plants and picked the cherry tomatoes off the plant - more of them ended up in her belly than in our basket!) As we looked at the seeds, I talked to Z about the show and later, we decided to let her watch it. She was surprised at the brownness of the food, at the lack of knives and forks (and children's inability to use them) in the lunchroom - she has been proudly learning to use a "sharp knife" to help us cook - and at the inability of the other children to identify vegetables.

We think exposing her to this kind of information is important to her knowledge about food and health. If we shield her from the side effects of our junk and fast food country then what happens when she goes to college and doesn't have that information? Will she fall into the eating habits of her peers? Or even earlier than that - what happens when she is pressured or ostrasized by her peers for drinking green smoothies or preferring water to soda or for her love of sushi or fruit or oatmeal?

Little by little, if we can teach her to value her food - to value the resources that nurtured the plant while it grew and the people who grew it, to recognize the difference between an in-season, ripe tomato and the tasteless blob of red that poses as a tomato in the December grocery aisle, to treasure the health of her body and to nurture it by making healthy, colorful food choices - then maybe she will grow up outside of this brown, fast food America. Maybe she - and others like her - will be able to change the system, support the farmers and the earth and live and grow in health. And maybe she will teach me to instinctively reach for an orange when I need a snack or to satisfy my crunching need with carrots or dried cherry tomatoes instead of chips and salsa, and I'll be healthier too.

Jeremiah and I both highly recommend the show, and showing it to kids, too. There is a lot to it, even more than just info on healthier eating - watching the ways Oliver goes about doing community organizing as a chef, the way he tackles the project from various angles at once, and the way he personalizes the issues involved are all fascinating and inspiring.



Since then, we've planted about twenty tomato plants (mostly cherry tomatoes), a dozen pepper plants, and lettuce and spinach, plus peas, beans, melons, squash, and a few things I'm probably forgetting. Come on, color!

For further info on the state of school lunches (and to learn about other people who have been tirelessly working on changing the system for years) see the links below:

• Jamie's Food Revolution: Sign his petition!


• Let's Move


• Fed Up With School Lunch


• Chef Ann Cooper: The Renegade Lunch Lady


• The Edible Schoolyard


• School Lunch: Subtract the Additives

You can watch episodes online for yourself here. Bon appetit!

I saw a theme of food and children this week while I was going through my RSS feeds and wanted to link to a few posts that offer important reminders or information for me, and might help you too.

Tara from Feels Like Home reminds us that When We Know Better, We Do Better on using food for rewards and punishments. She describes receiving an email that "went on to describe ways that parents could help their children avoid behaviors that lead to obesity. I read intently, excited to see some concrete and specific actions I could take to help Gracie avoid the weight issues I'vesuffered my entire life."

Annie over at PhD in Parenting writes about Olympians and their McDonald's sponsorships, something we have discussed with our five-year-old as we've watched several OIympic events with keen interest. In Annie's post, she writes:

But when I'm trying to convince my kids that McDonald's is not good for you, that fast food will make you sick if you eat it too often, they get to see their Olympic heroes smiling and talking about how great McDonald's is and how much they love it. Mommy isn't an Olympian. If I want to achieve something big like those Olympians, I'd better listen to them instead of listening to Mommy.

I'd like to say my kids are smarter than that, but who am I kidding? They are five and almost three. Advertising works on them.

Katy Farber from Non-Toxic Kids has a guest post addressing Childhood and Obesity:

Studies have shown that obese children tend to have a smaller circle of close friends, leading to isolation and loneliness. Parents often join in the torment even if they are overweight. It can be difficult to escape from the self-image of unattractiveness and body dissatisfaction.

As we've watched the Olympics, we've taken the route of laughing at the commercials featuring the kiddie hockey team that "played like Olympians" and were rewarded with McDonald's chicken nuggets, and Z has picked up the thread and begun scoffing whenever a McDonald's commercial comes on. It's hard to say how deep this early version of critical engagement with advertising really runs, but maybe mimicry is the first step!

There has also been some interesting discussion surrounding our posting of Jamie Oliver's talk at TED regarding the epidemic of childhood obesity in this country, and the potential consequences of it for the lifespans and adult health of our children. While we think the primary commenter has some excellent points regarding our knowledge of obesity and its effects, our main point still stands - current mortality rates can tell you little to nothing about mortality rates under changing conditions, and those who claim "the sky is not falling" fail to understand the basic function and limitations of these statistics. If you'd like to enter the discussion with any observations or thoughts of your own, please do!

An eye-opening and inspiring TED talk from celebrity chef turned food industry reformer Jamie Oliver, author of Jamie's Food Revolution. "We, the adults of the last four generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents. Your child will live a life 10 years shorter than yours because of the landscape of food that we’ve built around them. [...] The statistics of bad health are clear, very clear.”



[Via Thingamababy]