Replies to post #94905 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[Alex G]

Jamie Oliver reduced to tears (and so are the Americans as they reject his healthy eating advice)

By David Gardner
Last updated at 6:19 PM on 23rd March 2010

Jamie Oliver knew it wasn't going to be easy changing the eating habits of the unhealthiest city in America.

But he was so shocked by the hostile reaction to his health crusade that it reduced him to tears.

The celebrity chef crossed the Atlantic pledging to usher in a food revolution in a country where two out of three people are overweight.

Heading straight for the clogged-up heart of the problem, he chose a city where schoolchildren are served up pizza and chocolate milk for breakfast.

But there was little appetite in down-at-heel Huntington, West Virginia, for the cheeky chappie Londoner.

And ‘Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution’ didn’t go too well across the rest of the country either, only drawing a comparatively modest 6.1 million viewers for its network premiere on Sunday night.

The locals in Huntington were already smarting over being branded America’s fast food capital by the US Centres for Disease Control.


Big problem: An American child is given a lesson in healthy cooking by Jamie

And, if the first episode of Oliver’s new stateside reality show is to be believed, they certainly weren’t happy about being told what to eat by a foreigner with a meticulously tousled hair and a funny accent.

The TV chef’s first stop took him to a radio station where the interviewer made him about as welcome as a bowl of broccoli.

‘We don’t want to sit around eating lettuce all day!’ said DJ Rod Willis on the Rocky n’ Rod morning show at a country radio station.

‘Who made you king?’ he added.

While Oliver’s health crusade in Britain resulted in a trip to Downing Street five years ago and turned a healthy new leaf for more nutritional school meals, he appears to have a much bigger job on his plate in the US.

He meets the lunch ladies at a Huntington primary school just as they are serving up ‘breakfast pizza’ smothered in eggs, sausage and cheese to 450 children.

Later, the same canteen lays on a lunch of chicken nuggets and instant mash potatoes.

‘It’s that kind of food that’s killing America,’ he declares.


‘You don’t have processed food in England,’ snaps back feisty head cook Alice Gue, who is singularly unimpressed at the intervention.

An incredulous Oliver is further stunned when he holds up tomatoes on a vine to a young boy, who thinks they are potatoes.



Poor diet: A mother starts to cry as Jamie Oliver tells her she's not feeding her children properly, with a table packed with her regular offerings of pizza, hot dogs and pancakes

The next day, Oliver returns to whip up a healthy lunch of roast chicken and wild rice, while the school cooks provide a pepperoni pizza alternative, which proves by far the most popular with the pupils.

It didn’t help that Oliver was forced to apologise after the local Herald Dispatch newspaper ran an article chewing him out for being rude about Huntington.

Promoting the show, he said of Americans: ‘They are all anaemic with information. Like, when you meet these people, they are not stupid. They are not ignorant. It’s just that they have never had food from scratch in their life.’

Swearing the remarks were taken out of context, Oliver ends the first show sitting in the school playground in tears, upset that he is being judged so harshly.

‘They don’t understand me because they don’t know why I’m here,’ he sobs.

During the programme, he also visits a local family living entirely on fried food and pizzas, and reduces the mother to tears by lambasting her diet.

‘This is going to kill your children,’ he tells the weeping mother of four.

Finding at least one local ready to listen, she vows to change her ways after he buries the deep fryer with a prayer in the back garden.

The Washington Post wasn’t won over, with a review saying the show ‘regurgitates the worst of reality TV pap’.

But he won praise for his health crusade from the New York Post and the Los Angeles Times.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1260052/Jamie-Oliver-reduces-mother-tears-Americans-reject-healthy-eating-advice.html#

[wbmw]

One BIG problem, as I see it, with the healthcare bill is that it does zip to actually improve our health. It's a health insurance bill that mandates a very flawed system. Our medical system treats symptoms and disease but rarely questions WHY we have those symptoms and diseases.

most importantly, I believe the primary goal of our healthcare system should be good health.

This is a legitimate point, but I wouldn't call it a "problem" with the current bill. That's like saying the problem with all environmental bills is that they don't shut down the entire industrial complex, thereby removing pollutants completely.

Such a thing would be highly disruptive, just as an overhaul of health care would be, to a more naturopathic (or homeopathic, or anthroposophic) model.

The health care reform bill's focus was on improving *access* to the existing health care system, as opposed to improving the system itself. And in that, it succeeded in its goal.

I would praise the bill for its ability to reach its intended goal, rather than setting the expectation that it should do more. Most attempts to do everything (so-called "boil the ocean" bills) eventually fail from their own weight. This health care bill actually passed, and that's an achievement!