Saturday, March 27, 2010

Poor Jamie

I watched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution last night. It was a great show. You can google it if you want more info about what the show's about, but his basic idea was to change what public school students in West Virginia are being fed for breakfast and lunch and make it HEALTHY!

The students were served pizza and chocolate or strawberry milk for BREAKFAST! Then, for lunch, they had chicken nuggets, some fruit cocktail, more flavored milk, some bread and some fake mashed potatoes. It was all frozen, pre-cooked, loaded with chemicals and preservatives, and oils and sugars.

Jamie only had three days to prepare his own meals. On the first day the kids were to choose between what he prepared (a marinated roasted chicken leg, salad, and brown rice) and the frozen pizza option that had been served before. Part of his success was measured by if the kids liked the food or not.

As much as we all hoped the kids would salivate for that roasted chicken leg and salad, SURPRISE! they picked the pizza.

"Hey Addison would you rather have some steamed asparagus or some chicken nuggets from McDonalds?"

DUH!

This stuff takes time. Kids have to get used to eating healthy. It's not going to happen in three days. These kids are accustomed to only eating foods jam packed with fats and sugars. Their little bodies probably don't even know what to do with a fresh vegetable. You should have seen how upset they were when he only gave them white milk to drink.

This show is pretty fascinating. I'm intrigued!

4 comments:

Amanda said...

Marie! It's a TV show I actually know something about!! I had heard Jamie's TED talk several weeks ago (did you know he was the 2010 TED talk winner??) in which he talked about his upcoming TV show. I, too, was intrigued. So, thanks to the powers of Hulu, checked out his first episode last week. It's sad to see how much flack he is getting for it all but then again, no one likes to be told they are fat and are killing their children! And he certainly doesn't sugar coat it any! I'm interested to see how it all turns out!

Christina Estes said...

Agreed! I will be packing lunches for my girls!

Steve, Amanda, Kyle , Owen, and Madilyn said...

We started watching this show too! I was heart broken when he broke down, you can tell that he really does care. And, he is so right! We feed our kiddos horrible things, we should make better choices for our kids and families.

julia said...

marie...i love him!! I watched him do his show like a year or two ago with some schools in England and i always thought he should come over to the USA to help---it started the same as you described but over time the kids started to choose the healthy stuff. hopefully it will raise awareness about it all right?:)