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Episode: Jamie Oliver
Author: Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Duration: 01:02:52
Episode Shownotes
In the 2000s, Jamie Oliver made a big splash with his work reforming kids’ meals in the UK and US. Was his work wicked slammin’, or just proper rustic?Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastLinks!BBC Profile -
Jamie OliverJamie Oliver Puts America's Diet on a DietAll The Times Jamie Oliver Made Everyone AngryUnpacking School Lunch: Understanding the Hidden Politics of School FoodA brief history of school meals in the UKTurkey Twizzlers: A Complete HistoryMarcus Rashford Is Fighting the Government on Free School Meals. He’s Also Fighting Jamie Oliver’s LegacyHas Jamie Bitten off More Than He Can Chew?Jamie Oliver, you haven’t tasted real povertyJamie Oliver’s campaign against childhood obesity has classist undertonesJamie’s jerk rice is a recipe for disasterThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show
Summary
In this episode of "Maintenance Phase," hosts Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes explore Jamie Oliver's campaigns aimed at reforming school meals to combat childhood obesity. Through analyzing Oliver's 2005 'Feed Me Better' initiative and subsequent efforts, they question the overall impact and effectiveness of his reforms. The hosts discuss the complexities surrounding health trends associated with Oliver's work, including controversies related to classism, hypocrisy, and the media's portrayal of his approach. They highlight systemic issues affecting food accessibility, arguing that celebrity-led initiatives like Oliver's may not address underlying socio-economic barriers, ultimately questioning the sustainability of his changes in children's diets.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Jamie Oliver) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:11 Speaker_05
I have no tagline suggestions because all I have is problematic jokes about British people. Because I lived there, I feel like that gives me a license to be kind of mean.
00:00:21 Speaker_03
I'm guessing some British listeners will disagree.
00:00:25 Speaker_05
It's very funny. It's like whenever anybody asks me about some country I haven't spent much time in, like Thailand, I'm like, oh, a beautiful country with noble people. But if they ask me about Britain or Denmark, I'm like, first of all,
00:00:37 Speaker_05
I have this long rant ready.
00:00:39 Speaker_03
That's true. I did ask you if I should go to Denmark for a work trip and you were like, absolutely not. That is not something you need in your life. Keep it moving.
00:00:48 Speaker_05
The minute you asked, I was like, I, I like tapped on my little keyboard. I was like, wait, all caps. I'm gonna need all caps for this answer. No. So, but okay, does, does Jamie Oliver even have like a catchphrase?
00:00:59 Speaker_05
I was going to use like one of his like little cooking catchphrases, like bam or whatever.
00:01:03 Speaker_03
He's got a few, it's less of a catchphrase and more of like a lexicon that he'll call things like wicked or slamming.
00:01:12 Speaker_05
Welcome to Maidens Phase, the podcast that is wicked slamming.
00:01:16 Speaker_03
Oh,
00:01:19 Speaker_05
We can cut everything before this and make it seem like I knew his little catchwords.
00:01:23 Speaker_03
I'm Aubrey Gordon.
00:01:24 Speaker_05
I'm Michael Hobbs.
00:01:26 Speaker_03
If you would like to support the show, you can do that at Patreon or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content in both places. Same stuff. Today, Michael. At long last. At long last.
00:01:41 Speaker_05
Talking about Mr. Jamie Oliver.
00:01:43 Speaker_03
We are talking about Jamie Oliver and we're particularly talking about his influence in talking about school food and kids diets. Oh, yeah. Mike, tell me what you know about Jamie Oliver.
00:01:54 Speaker_05
He's a TV chef who started with a show called The Naked Chef, which I genuinely believed was a naked man cooking for a very long time.
00:02:02 Speaker_03
Oh, tiny baby gay was like, I'm listening. Yeah, exactly.
00:02:07 Speaker_05
I was like, when exactly is it on in America? He became like one of the early sort of TV chef celebrities.
00:02:14 Speaker_05
He then did a TV series where he was going to reform school – they say school dinners, which is kind of confusing, which I was actually very into. I was like – I was Jamie Oliver-pilled. Were you?
00:02:27 Speaker_05
We talked about this before we were recording, but I have kind of a soft spot for Jamie Oliver because he seems like a genuinely nice guy who is trying, but then I know that since I've kind of stopped paying as much attention to him, he's made a series of blunders that are less defensible.
00:02:43 Speaker_05
But I don't actually know the scope and nature of the blunders.
00:02:46 Speaker_03
Yeah, I will say I came in similarly. I did not have a soft spot for him mostly just because he was part of that wave of like late two thousands, early 2010s like the problem is fat kids, 100% kind of media.
00:03:04 Speaker_03
And as someone who at that point was like a fat person in their twenties that felt too close to home for me.
00:03:11 Speaker_05
And then you went on a film tour in the UK, and people in the signing line were like, you should do an episode on Jamie Oliver 200 times.
00:03:17 Speaker_03
No, I told people I was thinking of doing an episode on Jamie Oliver, and I used the sign lines to ask people. The closest you got to Defenders was, I guess his heart's in the right place.
00:03:30 Speaker_03
And for the most part, people were just like, fuck this dude forever. It really felt like when you would talk to people from the UK about James Corden before the Balthazar thing happened.
00:03:43 Speaker_05
Yeah, or me talking about Elon Musk at any period up until the present. Yeah. The world has finally caught up to you, Michael. This is becoming a California high-speed rail podcast immediately. This is always in danger of becoming such a thing.
00:03:59 Speaker_03
So Jamie Oliver was born in 1975. He was born and raised in Essex. His parents ran a pub. He went to a grammar school, which is like a sort of middle classy thing to do, right? It's so confusing. There are so many. Yes.
00:04:15 Speaker_05
Kinds of schools and they're so confusing. Public and private, but they mean different things.
00:04:20 Speaker_03
He starts off as a pastry chef at Neal Street Restaurant and over time moves on to become the sous chef at the super acclaimed River Cafe. Are you familiar with the River Cafe?
00:04:31 Speaker_05
Is this in London? Mm-hmm. Oh, no, I had no money and I ate out of the sales bin at Sainsbury's on my way home because they had sandwiches for 49p.
00:04:40 Speaker_03
Did you get the smoked salmon one? Why don't we have smoked salmon sandwiches here? It's at the river cafe that he makes his first TV appearance in a show called Christmas at the river cafe.
00:04:53 Speaker_03
He sort of pops on screen as sort of the way that this story gets told, which like I believe it. He's a charismatic dude, right? Yeah. That leads to his first TV series.
00:05:02 Speaker_03
The aforementioned the naked chef, which premiered in 1999 in 2005 he launches a campaign called feed me better. Um, which is his campaign to change school children's meals. Okay.
00:05:16 Speaker_03
As a result of that, they have a channel for viewers poll and they name him the most inspiring political figure of 2005 political figure. That's a transformation. Right?
00:05:28 Speaker_03
I think there's a little bit of a sort of Dr. Oz leaning story here of like, by all accounts, he's a very good chef. Yeah. And he gets into hot water when he veers away from that thing.
00:05:39 Speaker_05
Yeah. And also he's very likable. He has the sort of the combination of fine dining and then this every man quality.
00:05:45 Speaker_03
Right. Since the sort of start of his career, he has published 32 cookbooks. Oh wow. He has presented 44 TV shows of more than one episode and 19 single episode specials. He's almost like a Twitch streamer at that point.
00:06:02 Speaker_05
He's just on. He's just on.
00:06:04 Speaker_03
He has also faced, in that time, more and more critique. In addition to getting more and more successful, he's faced more and more critique. When I started this episode, I texted you and was like, hey, I think I'm going to do Jamie Oliver.
00:06:16 Speaker_03
And you were like, oh, cool, influencer episode. I was like, yeah, it'll be like a light little influencer episode. OK. No. It was like Gwyneth Paltrow volumes of media that have been written about this guy.
00:06:28 Speaker_03
Think pieces, op-eds, so much ink has been spilled over every little thing that Jamie Oliver does. Some of it, I think, is really, really on point.
00:06:40 Speaker_03
Some of it, I think, is like, as you would say, we're in bitch-eating crackers territory with some of it.
00:06:44 Speaker_05
Yeah, this is always the thing with British influencers is that some of them are really garbage, but then on the other hand, they have a super garbage media environment.
00:06:52 Speaker_05
And so it's hard to separate, like, does this person suck or does the coverage of them suck? Yes.
00:06:58 Speaker_03
So we're going to do a little rundown of some of the things that he has been criticized for. OK. And then we're going to dig into our school dinners stuff. OK. One of his big critiques is he's been criticized many times for being a hypocrite.
00:07:13 Speaker_03
He had a whole show about the conditions in which chickens are raised and produced. After making the show about chickens, he then signed a multi-million pound deal with Sainsbury's, who at that point did not conform to the RSPCA standards at the time.
00:07:30 Speaker_03
In 2015, he worked with the UN Environment Program as a quote unquote environmental champion. Two years later, he signed a five million pound deal with Shell. Again, it's money. That's quite bad.
00:07:48 Speaker_03
There are also plenty of complaints about racism, colonialism, and appropriation in his recipes. This is from a piece on CNN.
00:08:01 Speaker_05
In the Sunday Times interview, Oliver acknowledged that his Empire Roast Chicken, a chicken recipe involving coriander, turmeric, garam masala, and cumin, would no longer be appropriate today.
00:08:12 Speaker_05
In the episode titled Empire Roast Chicken, Bombay Roasties, and Amazing Indian Gravy, Oliver set out to celebrate what he called our Indian love affair by making a full-on collision between beautiful British roast dinners and gutsy Asian spices.
00:08:26 Speaker_05
Oliver also celebrated the trade routes he said led to Indian spices making their way into British dishes, and which he used in his lemon-scented roast empire-style tandoori chicken.
00:08:36 Speaker_05
Toward the end of the episode, while carving the chicken, Oliver said this is empire food. you can use your hands, and then raised a toast to the empire while clinking beers with members of his camera crews.
00:08:49 Speaker_05
Although originally billed in the episode as lemon scented roast empire style tandoori chicken, the recipe has now been renamed on Oliver's website as spiced roast chicken.
00:08:59 Speaker_05
Ooh, this didn't seem that bad to me until we got to the let's toast to the empire.
00:09:06 Speaker_03
There are so many versions of this kind of thing that have happened. There have also been critiques and perhaps the most pervasive critique of Jamie Oliver is around class and classism.
00:09:19 Speaker_03
One of the big, if you sort of talk to people about Jamie Oliver, one of the big things that comes up is they're like, he's charging eight pounds for beans on toast.
00:09:28 Speaker_03
For US listeners who are unfamiliar with beans on toast, it's literally canned baked beans on a piece of toast.
00:09:34 Speaker_05
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, it is exactly what it sounds like.
00:09:39 Speaker_03
His version is definitely dressed up. It's on ciabatta, there are cherry tomatoes, there's basil and arugula and balsamic and all kinds of stuff, but it's still beans on toast. He has since sort of reconsidered, but he's also kind of doubled down.
00:09:51 Speaker_03
He tells the BBC quote, I should have been brighter. Heinz came to us and offered 15,000 pounds for us to put something cool made with baked beans on the menu. Oh, it's more money stuff, Jamie. That funds one student for a whole year.
00:10:06 Speaker_03
Am I going to do it? Of course I am.
00:10:09 Speaker_05
Oh my God. He's doing that speech from Schindler's List. But also it's such a weird defense because like, whatever, if you don't want to buy the $8 fucking beans on toast, don't buy the $8 beans on toast.
00:10:20 Speaker_05
These sorts of things don't really bother me that much. It just seems like rich people, dumb shit. And I'm a cheapskate, so I would just never go to this restaurant anyway.
00:10:27 Speaker_03
This is where we start to get into bitch eating crackers territory. I'm like, why are you monitoring his menus? I don't really care. I don't give a shit. But I will say the classism stuff also sort of seeps into how he shows up politically.
00:10:40 Speaker_03
In January of 2022, he stages this protest outside of number 10 Downing Street because of what he calls the government's U-turn on obesity policies, quote unquote. Oh, I remember this. What do you remember about this protest, Michael?
00:10:56 Speaker_05
Wasn't this a whole Boris Johnson getting COVID and being like, if I wasn't so fat, I wouldn't have had this problem or something. And then they were going to do a bunch of stuff and they just didn't do it or something. Sort of.
00:11:08 Speaker_05
I feel like you're being nice and I'm totally wrong. No, you're not totally wrong. You're not totally wrong.
00:11:12 Speaker_03
So Boris Johnson gets COVID. He has all of this messaging about how like this wouldn't have happened if I weren't fat. So therefore we have to have a quote unquote obesity plan.
00:11:22 Speaker_03
Jamie Oliver in January, 2022, the government he says is doing a quote unquote U-turn their obesity policies.
00:11:31 Speaker_03
And the thing that he is mad about, the policy in question, is that the government had pledged to restrict higher calorie foods in supermarket promotions of buy one get one free items. Okay. He's mad that people are getting high calorie for free. Okay.
00:11:50 Speaker_03
So he stages this big protest outside 10 Downing Street. And the theme for the protest is this policy is a total eaten mess. Oh.
00:12:05 Speaker_05
That's actually not that bad. Sorry, pardon me, excuse me. Look, I'm a man with a podcast that has never had a good tagline. If there's one thing I know, it's wordplay.
00:12:16 Speaker_03
You're like, wow, he really did a thing that we have not delivered on. That we've not achieved. So here's, I'm going to send you a little screen grab from Sky News of this protest.
00:12:26 Speaker_05
The fuck? Oh my God. So it's Jamie Oliver in the front of a crowd and he's holding an eaten mess.
00:12:34 Speaker_03
A giant like trifle dish full of eaten mess.
00:12:38 Speaker_05
But then one of the signs that somebody has in the background is give peas a chance, which is also good.
00:12:43 Speaker_03
There's Boris, keep your promise.
00:12:46 Speaker_05
That one's bad.
00:12:47 Speaker_03
There are a number of signs when you sort of zoom out on these pictures of like, this policy is an hashtag eaten mess. And they all have hashtags. Yeah.
00:12:58 Speaker_05
The hashtag doesn't work. If it's not, if it's you're writing it in real life, you can't, you can't click on a hashtag.
00:13:03 Speaker_03
In addition to, and sort of overlaying this classism critique are some genuine sort of reportings about what I would consider to be wage theft.
00:13:12 Speaker_03
Oh, his restaurant chain, Jamie's Italian, which was sort of a high street chain, closed in the 2010s with debts of 83 million pounds. And he gets big headlines at the time for closing his restaurants without having paid his staff. Oh, that's bad.
00:13:31 Speaker_03
That's real bad. they lay off 44 employees at Christmas. The last two sort of general critiques. Oh my God, Mike, this has been the longest. Yeah, I know the longest table. So we're still table setting.
00:13:44 Speaker_03
This is, so I texted you this morning and was like, oops, I need another hour. And then I was like, oops, I need another half hour.
00:13:50 Speaker_03
It's because I was sorting through that, like just like dozens and dozens and dozens of these stories being like, and he sucks for this. On top of all of that, he's kind of cringe.
00:14:05 Speaker_05
We finally get to people's real beef with this person.
00:14:08 Speaker_03
In 2012, this is so fucking funny, Mike. It's not like every corporate restaurant chain has shit like this where they're like famously at Chick-fil-A, for example, if someone says thank you, you don't say you're welcome.
00:14:25 Speaker_03
If they ask you for something, you don't say no problem. You just say it's my pleasure.
00:14:29 Speaker_04
Really?
00:14:30 Speaker_03
Yes, absolutely. Oh, I've never been to Chick-fil-A. Oh. Look at you. I don't think we have in Seattle. We have one in Oregon.
00:14:35 Speaker_03
And I went one time and then I was like, sorry, this is the reason that people are so worked up about like, man, I love gay people, but that chicken is so good. I'm like, it's a fast food chicken sandwich.
00:14:46 Speaker_03
Especially in a world of Popeye's chicken sandwiches, get out of town. So In 2012, a tweet goes up, it gets picked up by media that is allegedly a list of words that servers at Jamie Oliver's restaurants are supposedly required to use.
00:15:07 Speaker_03
I am sending you a link to a piece from Eater that has the list in it.
00:15:14 Speaker_05
Oh man. Okay, it says, servers at Jamie Oliver restaurants told to use words like scrummy, slamming, wicked.
00:15:21 Speaker_03
I saw this list of words and I was like immediately transported to the like pieces of flair scene from Office Space. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. God. If you're going to subject people to this, pay them like $100,000 a year.
00:15:33 Speaker_05
Oh God. What? I just noticed the third entry on this list. Pimp. It's just a list it says melt-in-mouth fresh pimp juicy legendary messy magic dollop Whatever silky wicked radical treasure. Oh It could not be more 2000s if it tried. I know, exactly.
00:16:00 Speaker_05
Remember when the word deadly was going around as like, cool, like, Ooh, that's deadly. The new album is deadly. I was trying to make malignant happen for a while. Like that thing is malignant. I'm so mad that it never caught on. It's never too late.
00:16:14 Speaker_05
It's never too late.
00:16:15 Speaker_03
One of the things that is cut off from this list are some other phrases, including proper rustic. Ooh, yeah, that's hella artisanal.
00:16:24 Speaker_05
That's homemade, no cap, for real, for real.
00:16:27 Speaker_03
Mega is on the list. And so is scrummy?
00:16:31 Speaker_05
Yeah, that's something British people say, even though it sounds like an STD.
00:16:35 Speaker_03
Boy, oh, fuck. This is like calling it Crimbo. Not Christmas, Crimbo. What's happening here?
00:16:40 Speaker_05
What are you guys doing? You know what I've started to spot in the wild lately is unforch. Oh, I can't make it on Thursday.
00:16:46 Speaker_03
Unfortunately, you really saved yourself a lot of time. The headline about all of the Jamie Oliver stuff is he is a polarizing dude. Yes. People really love him or they really hate him.
00:17:00 Speaker_05
This honestly just seems kind of like standard to me. Yeah. Like he sort of becomes famous as this kind of everyman, working class guy making fancy food. And then eventually he becomes like a multimillionaire and a giant empire.
00:17:13 Speaker_05
And of course, that's going to attract scrutiny. Yes. And like most public figures and most corporations do not hold up to scrutiny.
00:17:19 Speaker_03
I think you're in a similar place that I was at this point in the research.
00:17:22 Speaker_05
You're taking me on a journey.
00:17:23 Speaker_03
None of them are get this guy off our TVs immediately kind of right shit necessarily. Right. Right.
00:17:30 Speaker_03
It's a tale as old as time that like dudes like this get to make big mistakes that would absolutely end the careers of people who had less power and less privilege than him. And yet he just gets more money. He just gets more famous, right?
00:17:46 Speaker_03
Like all of these things just sort of keep accruing and accruing and accruing.
00:17:49 Speaker_05
Question, how does he generally deal with these things? Because, of course, people are going to fuck up as public figures, whatever. Does he just, like, apologize? Like, yeah, I shouldn't have done the Empire Toast. It was fucking cringe.
00:18:00 Speaker_05
I'm really sorry. Or is he, like, weird about, like, pushing back against his critics and all this kind of stuff?
00:18:04 Speaker_03
He gets really defensive, and I think that's part of what sets people off. Yeah.
00:18:08 Speaker_03
There's a quote that he gives at one point where he's like, sometimes I think it would actually be easier to be somebody like Gordon Ramsay, whose persona is like a miserable bastard. I think he's correct about that, honestly.
00:18:20 Speaker_03
I think he's right, but he's saying it after he's talking about like wage theft. Yeah. After he's like, he's using it as a defense. Yeah. And you're like, I think you're right, but I don't think that's the main issue here.
00:18:32 Speaker_03
So those are the general critiques of Jamie Oliver. We're about to dive in to Jamie's school dinners and Jamie's ministry of food, his two UK shows about feeding kids. Both of which I've seen.
00:18:46 Speaker_05
You've seen both of them. Yeah, back in my Jamie Oliver days. I mean, this would have been like more than 10 years ago, though. I mean, I saw them when they when they aired.
00:18:51 Speaker_03
I'll tell you what I have not because that shit has been scrubbed from the Internet. Wait, really? Even if you have a VPN, even if you're willing to pay for it, even if even if you can find little clips, but you cannot find the whole shows. It's wild.
00:19:05 Speaker_03
That and Plandemic are the two.
00:19:08 Speaker_05
recently that are scrubbed on the internet.
00:19:10 Speaker_03
Plandemic you can get at their website. It's actually arguably the easiest thing to get. You just can't get it on YouTube. No way.
00:19:17 Speaker_03
I want to sort of take you through a little bit of the Genesis of school meals in the UK and sort of how they like what the policies around those have looked like. Primary school, like just as education, isn't made mandatory in the UK until 1870.
00:19:32 Speaker_03
It was not uncommon at that point for students to go to school underfed or just unfed entirely, particularly poor and working class kids.
00:19:43 Speaker_03
By 1880 this becomes enough of a known problem that they actually start piloting free school meals and the first free school meals are served to poor folks and students in Bradford. The meal is just straight up porridge, that's oatmeal, and bread.
00:20:01 Speaker_03
The cost was limited to one penny per student, according to The Independent. In today's money, that'd be about 37 pence.
00:20:11 Speaker_03
By 1906, a liberal government passed the Education Provision of Meals Act, which allowed local governments to serve free school meals.
00:20:21 Speaker_03
Most of them ultimately did not provide those free meals, and by the start of World War II, you know, decades later, only half of local schools in the UK offered free school meals.
00:20:32 Speaker_03
Again, this is just like allowing people to do it should they so choose, and many of them do not so choose. In 1944, a new law was passed requiring schools to feed all children, not just low-income kids, but like all kids.
00:20:46 Speaker_03
They also had nutrition standards that required them to provide 40% of the kids' daily protein and 33% of their daily calories. That usually looked like steak, two veg, and a rhubarb crumble, which sounds so fucking good.
00:21:01 Speaker_05
Yeah, we got hamburger and fries for $1.25. We got tater tot Tuesdays. Oh, yeah, I remember tater tots, too. I have, like, not eaten tater tots since. What? That's such a, like, school food for me.
00:21:12 Speaker_05
Like, in my mind, turkey tetrazzini and tater tots are, like, school food and cannot be consumed elsewhere. Turkey tetrazzini! I've never seen that on a menu anywhere else in my entire life.
00:21:24 Speaker_03
I met, there are a couple of foods I met for the first time in college. We did not have turkey tetrazzini at school. So I saw that for the first time at college and I was like, what the fuck is this fancy ass name for this goopy ass?
00:21:34 Speaker_03
Dude, it's like prison food. It is goop. Midwesty food. Yeah.
00:21:37 Speaker_03
The other thing I met for the first time at college was I went through, there was like a little sandwich bar, you know, there's like all the savory stuff and then also the sweet stuff for making sandwiches.
00:21:46 Speaker_03
And I was like, guys, somebody really fucked up. They put some marshmallow fluff out. I was going to school in New England and they were like, it's a fluffernutter. And I was like, what are you talking about?
00:21:55 Speaker_03
And I absolutely thought that people were pranking me that they went to school with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich. Dude, I still think that's a prank.
00:22:02 Speaker_05
Candy sandwich. I feel like it's something like rainbow parties where it's something like there's a name for it, but nobody's ever actually done it. And like nothing will convince me otherwise.
00:22:12 Speaker_03
In 1971, Margaret Thatcher is around. She removed free milk from schools. This is sort of the beginning of the erosion of the school lunch program.
00:22:23 Speaker_05
Just a fucking nightmare of a person.
00:22:26 Speaker_03
So she gets this nickname in the press that is Thatcher the milk snatcher. It is fully just like
00:22:32 Speaker_05
taking fucking milk away from poor children. Yes! It's like cartoon evil.
00:22:37 Speaker_03
By 1980, Thatcher passes her Education Act, which ended the requirement to provide school meals.
00:22:45 Speaker_05
Of course.
00:22:46 Speaker_03
From here on out, only kids whose parents were on benefits or income supplements qualified for school meals.
00:22:53 Speaker_05
Of course.
00:22:54 Speaker_03
That is a really, really low income threshold.
00:22:58 Speaker_05
And also it stigmatizes the kids because if it's only the poor kids, like it basically announces to all of your classmates that you are the poor kid who doesn't have to pay for school lunch.
00:23:06 Speaker_03
And actually they later pilot, like within the last, I don't know, 15 years, they piloted a free school lunch program again in the UK and they found that uptake of school lunches was higher amongst students in all income brackets when it was free for everyone.
00:23:22 Speaker_05
There's also, there's something, this comes up in America too, where it's, there's something so fucking weird about this thing where we are providing children with free education to the tune of billions of dollars.
00:23:33 Speaker_05
And then you're like, these freeloaders want a lunch too?
00:23:35 Speaker_03
Yeah.
00:23:35 Speaker_05
And then it's like, oh, but feeding them is like where we draw the line and they have to fucking pay for it. And it's like, it's so, it's like, why, like, why is this the fucking hill we want to die on? Like we don't charge kids to ride the school bus.
00:23:46 Speaker_03
So in 1986, the social security act passes that may seem unrelated, but because meals, school meals are now means tested, right?
00:23:57 Speaker_03
And like tied to an income level and a level of benefits, they're cutting people off of benefits, which means that the kids of those people are losing access to free school meals, right?
00:24:08 Speaker_03
So as a result of this social security act, half a million kids from low income families lost access to free school meals.
00:24:16 Speaker_05
The thing is, you've stacked the deck because now compared to Margaret Thatcher, Jamie Oliver seems fine.
00:24:20 Speaker_03
He hasn't taken food from millions of children. He's not a political supervillain.
00:24:27 Speaker_05
Yeah, the waste stuff doesn't seem so bad now.
00:24:30 Speaker_03
Without that national mandate to provide free meals, the systems around food shifted really dramatically throughout the 1980s and 90s in Britain.
00:24:41 Speaker_03
schools aren't funded the way that they need to be at any point in this, certainly not school food programs. So there's kind of a race to the bottom price wise that happens, right?
00:24:50 Speaker_03
Where schools are like, Oh fuck, our federal mandate went away, which means that some amount of federal funding went away, which means we got to get this shit on the cheap, right?
00:24:58 Speaker_03
And this is also when a famed star slash villain, depending on who you ask of UK school food comes around to the Turkey Twizzler. God, yes. This was a big thing in the show. This was a big thing in the show.
00:25:13 Speaker_03
We'll talk about the turkey twizzler in a minute.
00:25:15 Speaker_05
Oh my God, do you know what I remember about the West Virginia one, the version of this that he did in America? What? There was a whole thing where it was like kids were bringing Lunchables to school, but the show had to bleep the word Lunchable.
00:25:27 Speaker_05
I don't know what the legality is or if they were just like too chicken shit, but it was like Jamie went on this big long rant about like kids bringing fucking Lunchables to school because they're so unhealthy, but it was like they're bringing poop to school But you could tell he was saying Lunchable.
00:25:40 Speaker_03
They replaced a bunch of it with packed lunch Oh, really as a person who just just watched it. They dubbed it. There is such funny ADR in the u.s. One.
00:25:48 Speaker_05
It's so funny that's like Ramon used to watch diehard on TV and it would be like It would be like, yippee-ki-yay, terrible person. Melon farmers. Yeah.
00:25:58 Speaker_03
By this point in the early 2000s, nutritional standards for school meals in the UK have been pretty well decimated, right? They're not non-existent, but they are a shell of their former selves. That's when Jamie's School Dinners premieres.
00:26:12 Speaker_03
Jamie's School Dinners is a four-episode docu-series that airs on the BBC in early 2005, in February and March of 2005. It is set at Kidbrooke Comprehensive School in Greenwich, which is a borough of London.
00:26:28 Speaker_03
Comprehensive schools are sort of like US public schools. The daily budget for students at Kidbrooke was 37 pence per child per day. adjusted for inflation that is functionally the same budget as those 1880s meals in Bradford. He gets into the schools.
00:26:47 Speaker_03
He does this sort of song and dance that he ends up doing at several other schools. This is part of the U S one as well. He revamps the school menu.
00:26:57 Speaker_03
He has a day where the existing school menu goes head to head with his new healthy menu and all the kids pick the foods they know. Aw shucks. And he's like, okay, well then we just have to keep going.
00:27:08 Speaker_03
We got to make even better, healthy, quote unquote, healthy food. Weirdly, almost every meal that I see him serve in these clips and includes like a green salad with plain vinaigrette as one of the options.
00:27:21 Speaker_03
And I'm like, buddy, in what world did you think six year olds were going to be like, yum, yum, eat it up?
00:27:26 Speaker_05
Get him some like carrots or something like some like nice roasted veggies.
00:27:30 Speaker_03
You could do some make a stir fry that has vegetables in it with a good sauce. Like there's a bunch of ways to do this. A like French style dressed bitter green salad is like maybe not the like easy entry point.
00:27:46 Speaker_05
I'm a 42 year old man and I would skip that.
00:27:48 Speaker_03
So one of the most famous images that comes out of this is not only of students sort of rebelling against the menu, but of parents. I'm sending you a picture.
00:28:00 Speaker_05
Oh, I know what this is going to be.
00:28:02 Speaker_03
You do?
00:28:02 Speaker_05
I do, because this is such a big deal in the British media.
00:28:07 Speaker_05
it is this is this fucked up thing where like parents would pass their kids candy bars like through the school fence yeah people report different things this one appears to be burgers people say other passing and chips okay whatever it is it's like
00:28:23 Speaker_03
foods that those kids shouldn't be having to the point that there are like daily mail pieces about the woman who is foregrounded, the mom in this picture being like, now her kids are fat. Now what? And you're like, Oh my God.
00:28:37 Speaker_05
If parents want to send their kids to school with whatever food they have, that honestly seems fine to me. Like whatever. But it's like if kids are in your care, you should be feeding them healthy stuff. That's not fucking deranged.
00:28:48 Speaker_05
But it's weird that these became stories. Like I feel like the right wing media was like really against him like doing this in this way that like how dare this celebrity metal. But it's also like he's trying to get kids to eat fruits and vegetables.
00:29:00 Speaker_05
Are you really fucking against this?
00:29:02 Speaker_03
I think another thing that happened in Jamie's school dinners, and this also happens in the U.S. version, he is dramatically increasing the workload of school cooks and then sort of characterizing them as sticks in the mud and or lazy.
00:29:18 Speaker_03
They object so strenuously that some of them threaten to resign.
00:29:22 Speaker_05
To be fair, having some fucking reality show person coming in and fucking cameras in my job, I feel like I would also rebel against this.
00:29:30 Speaker_03
And it's like some dude with a bunch of money telling you without a bunch of money and resources how to fucking do it. You'd be like, give me a break, dude.
00:29:38 Speaker_05
Get out of town. It also shows the extent to which these problems are so entrenched that even somebody with the clout of Jamie Oliver can't really come in and fix them, right?
00:29:47 Speaker_05
Because on some level, yeah, you want to be feeding the kids healthier food, but it's really not a problem of like the lunch ladies being better.
00:29:54 Speaker_05
It's like a much broader problem of like they should be hiring more lunch ladies and having different training. And it's like you just can't solve this stuff by berating people in like the school kitchen.
00:30:04 Speaker_03
Can you solve it with a boot camp for school cooks run by the catering division of the British Army? Is that what they did in the show? They bring in the catering division of the British Army to show them how to cook large amounts of food efficiently.
00:30:18 Speaker_03
Oh my fucking god. As I learned this I was like, ah yes, the famously delectable food of the army. Of the British Army. Hell first!
00:30:29 Speaker_05
Now I get why this was taken off the internet. This is really bad. I do not remember all of this problematic shit, probably because I was really problematic back then.
00:30:40 Speaker_03
Well, so here's the other thing, and they really don't, like they sort of acknowledge it in the shows themselves, but they never really dig in on it. He just fucking explodes the budget. Right, of course blows the fuck.
00:30:54 Speaker_03
He's not making these meals for 37 pence. He's just not right He's making much more expensive foods and is working folks really hard without any additional extra staff or pay and then he's like look how easy it is and I'm tired.
00:31:10 Speaker_03
I'm not getting paid more and we don't have the money for this shit
00:31:13 Speaker_05
Yeah, and that's the whole fucking point is that people would be doing better meals if they had the resources. You can't just come in and be like, you should make better meals without the resources to match.
00:31:23 Speaker_03
As part of the show, one of the things that happens on the show is that he confronts a dude from one of the nation's largest distributors of school foods. It's called Scholarest or Scholarest. They're the ones who make turkey Twizzlers.
00:31:37 Speaker_03
A turkey Twizzler is like a chicken nugget kind of thing, but instead of being in boot or oval shape, it is in a corkscrew sort of shape. It looks like a little pig's tail. It is a mainstay of UK school meals at this point.
00:31:50 Speaker_05
Yeah, it's like a deep fried breaded turkey thing.
00:31:54 Speaker_03
Turkey thing. It is worth noting that turkey twizzlers are a distinctly classed food in the UK. I would think about for a US analog, I might think about Mountain Dew. Oh, is that classed?
00:32:05 Speaker_03
If you say Mountain Dew, there's like a gender, there's a race, there's a class, there's like a kind of person that comes up. Wait, really?
00:32:10 Speaker_05
Is there? I was not aware of this Mountain Dew at all.
00:32:12 Speaker_03
Do you not think about this? Holy shit.
00:32:14 Speaker_05
I used to drink like three Mountain Dews a day. Are they from five foot four gay men? Is that the way that they're classed?
00:32:20 Speaker_03
No, I mean, I think Mountain Dew is often used in like political cartoons and shit like that to denote like a stupid poor person.
00:32:28 Speaker_05
As a member of the drinking Mountain Dew community. Wow, my people.
00:32:33 Speaker_03
The response from the company is really funny and silly. It's always fascinating to me when terrible actors appropriate anti-diet rhetoric or sort of like wind up using it.
00:32:45 Speaker_03
The company said in a statement quote, we believe that there is no one food that is bad for you and it is the balance of food you eat that makes for a good or bad diet. Oh, I've seen this. They're doing sort of like an all foods fit sort of approach.
00:32:58 Speaker_03
Hashtag all foods matter. Here, I'm gonna send you a little example of the way that people were talking about turkey Twizzlers in the media following this show.
00:33:09 Speaker_05
Okay, it says, one third turkey, two thirds Twizzler. The product contains turkey, 34%, water, pork fat, rusk,
00:33:18 Speaker_05
Coating and then it lists like 4,000 fucking ingredients vegetable oil turkey skin salt wheat flour dextrose Stabilizer mustard yeast extract antioxidants. Hey, it's good for you extract spice extract and color So it's just like a bunch of shit.
00:33:37 Speaker_05
It's like this list of ingredients is probably like, I don't know, 25 things.
00:33:41 Speaker_03
This appears in like every article about turkey Twizzlers at the time. People are just like, get a load of this list of ingredients. And it is doing this really facile, really common critique of foods at the time.
00:33:55 Speaker_03
This is sort of the quote unquote Frankenfoods era, right? It's easy to go. These are scientific and therefore sort of foreign sounding names, right?
00:34:06 Speaker_03
The implication of stuff like this is that if you don't recognize the name of an ingredient, it is inherently sinister and also harmful to your health.
00:34:16 Speaker_03
But there's not any real analysis of like, this thing is in it at this quantity, which is known to have these effects. People are not doing that. They're just like, look at this fucking load of shit.
00:34:27 Speaker_05
Also, the thing is when you have to feed kids for fucking 37p, you're gonna have food with a bunch of fillers in it. This is the output of the choices you've made politically.
00:34:38 Speaker_03
So the company that makes Turkey Twizzlers ends up first cutting the fat content in Turkey. They're like, okay, okay, okay. We'll make them lower fat, which is like a very two thousands thing, right? Yeah.
00:34:49 Speaker_03
There's a quote from the managing director that I'm like, you're a piece of shit who runs a giant food company, but also you're not wrong in this one instant. I'm going to send it to you.
00:35:00 Speaker_05
The then-managing director David Joel insisted at the time that the company had been unfairly treated. Turkey is the least fatty of all meats, he said. The new Twizzlers have only a third of the fat level of the average pork sausage.
00:35:14 Speaker_05
Yet you don't hear Jamie Oliver telling people not to eat sausages.
00:35:17 Speaker_03
This is true. That's like a fair point. That is a fair point, right? Like pork sausages, a real cornerstone of British cuisine, right? Yeah. Pork sausages would have been served in his parents' pub, right? Those are like okay foods, right?
00:35:30 Speaker_03
And Jamie Oliver is not telling people not to eat sausage. And in fact, in a number of these schools, he goes in and he's like in the U S one, he goes, Oh, they're having pizza for breakfast.
00:35:40 Speaker_03
And he says at one point, it's not so much what's in the pizza. It's the fact that it's pizza for breakfast. It's sending all the wrong signals. And then he goes in and makes a meal.
00:35:52 Speaker_03
And one of the first things that he makes is pasta with red sauce and cheese. So basically pizza with boiling water instead of an oven. Right. Yeah.
00:36:02 Speaker_03
He's doing this sort of very two thousands and 2010s thing of like, we got to handle the number of fat kids. We, there have to be fewer fat kids. Therefore just throw shit at the wall.
00:36:15 Speaker_03
And the shit to throw at the wall is the stuff that feels right to you. Yeah.
00:36:20 Speaker_03
It feels right to you that these sort of like foods that are processed in this way and that have this long list of ingredients are worse than a pork sausage, which is also very processed.
00:36:32 Speaker_03
I mean, the thing is, I'm actually like, I don't think kids should be eating chicken nuggets.
00:36:36 Speaker_05
which is basically what turkey twizzlers are, at school. I also don't think they should have chocolate milk at school. I think they should be getting very nutritious, well-made meals.
00:36:45 Speaker_05
I also feel like another very early 2000s thing about this is that there was this fantasy that you could solve these problems without investing extra money. I feel like the school lunches problem is mostly a problem of money.
00:36:57 Speaker_03
This is the credit where credit's due section. This show really leads to some real change in the UK. On the show, he meets with Tony Blair, who's the prime minister at the time. He secures 280 million pounds for school meals.
00:37:12 Speaker_03
That is genuinely a huge deal. It's really good. It shouldn't take a celebrity having a TV show to do it. But it happened and that's like a good, that's a net benefit, right?
00:37:24 Speaker_03
It also leads to the establishment of a national children's food trust, which was operational from 2005 until 2017. There's also some conflicting data on the impact of Jamie's school dinners and that whole sort of shift. Okay.
00:37:39 Speaker_03
There is one study over the course of a year that shows that more students, like slightly more students, it's like five or 6% more students get kicked into a higher grade bracket, right?
00:37:51 Speaker_03
Like they're sort of like generally scoring higher than they were, but it's small. And then there's a bunch of other studies that show some backsliding, like almost immediately.
00:38:00 Speaker_03
So the effects on student performance I think are disputed and murky at best.
00:38:07 Speaker_03
One of the great finds in my research on Jamie's school dinners and Ministry of Food was a phenomenal piece from a former student at Kidbrook that was published in Eater London who was like, I was at this school when this show was filmed.
00:38:28 Speaker_03
One of the famous sort of scenes in the show is him showing vegetables to kids and them guessing incorrectly as to what those vegetables are. And he's like, oh, no.
00:38:39 Speaker_05
I remember that. Yeah.
00:38:40 Speaker_03
Eaterpiece says, quote, In another memorable piece of sneering superiority, friends of mine were pulled into a classroom and asked to identify vegetables.
00:38:50 Speaker_03
What the editors decided to air was a blooper reel of misidentified broccoli edited together to make it look like the burger fiends had never seen fresh food.
00:39:02 Speaker_03
The reality was that there were students in the room who identified produce correctly, but in most cases these examples were not included in the montage which aired. Which is like, of course, right? Of course.
00:39:12 Speaker_05
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where they walk around a mall or whatever and they ask Americans, like, can you find Iraq on a map? And it's like, they only use the times that people can't do it. To be like, oh Mary, look how dumb Americans are.
00:39:23 Speaker_03
It is very standard issue reality TV antics and sort of cherry picking of like the most dramatic shit.
00:39:30 Speaker_03
I don't want to like overblow it on that front, but it's stepping into a context of classism that is reinforcing really regressive shitty ideas about poor and working class people.
00:39:43 Speaker_05
This is such an amazing example of how like when you have a real social problem, a celebrity and a reality show are literally the worst ways to address it.
00:39:53 Speaker_05
Cause you would imagine like a documentary about the same thing that would have, that would have actually like educated the audience. Whereas a reality show, of course they're going to fucking edit it in this way.
00:40:05 Speaker_05
Like of course they're going to set up these fucking stunts.
00:40:08 Speaker_03
There's a scene in the West Virginia season where he like, opens up this mom's fridge and freezer and there are just like a bunch of frozen pizzas in it. And he's like, this is disgusting. I can't believe you're feeding your kids this.
00:40:23 Speaker_03
You're killing your kids by feeding them this stuff. And he then cooks all of the food. He fries all the corn dogs, he bakes all the pizzas and he piles them up on their kitchen table. And it's like, look at this, look how disgusting it is.
00:40:35 Speaker_05
Like a month's worth of food. Jamie, anything is going to be a big pile on the table if you cook it all at once.
00:40:41 Speaker_03
Right. And he's like, it's all Brown. It's all the same color. And this is a very frequent interaction that he has on each of these shows. And actually we're going to watch one of them from Jamie's ministry of food, which is the one in Yorkshire. Okay.
00:40:58 Speaker_03
So in Ministry of Food, Jamie Oliver says that he wants to make Rotherham the culinary capital of the UK. And the way that he's going to do that is by teaching its residents how to cook. Okay.
00:41:11 Speaker_03
We're going to watch a little clip, little clippy clip of one of the many trips that Jamie Oliver makes into the homes of like low-income moms. Okay, gosh.
00:41:23 Speaker_05
Yeah, sorry. It's going to be really bleak.
00:41:25 Speaker_03
Sorry, pal.
00:41:27 Speaker_01
Natasha has never cooked a meal for her children, Kaya and Robbie. Dinner is nearly always a kebab.
00:41:34 Speaker_00
Give me the lowdown, then, because, like, the fact that you've sort of let us turn up tells me that you're open-minded and... I'm sick of this. You might, yeah. Right, so you're... I'm absolutely sick of it.
00:41:43 Speaker_00
You're sick of the junk food, you're sick of the repetition. It's affecting her. Right. In what sort of way?
00:41:48 Speaker_02
Well, she's not healthy. She's been in twice for a tea-taking act, cos they've rotted, they've gone bad.
00:41:53 Speaker_00
Right.
00:41:54 Speaker_02
What's your favourite pop? Dr Pepper. Dr Pepper. We love it, don't we?
00:41:58 Speaker_00
And what happens if you don't do nothing about it? Where do you see it going?
00:42:01 Speaker_02
I see her being obese. I see her being really, really unhealthy. Really. And it's not good.
00:42:08 Speaker_00
So how much... Are you on a budget? Tight budget. To be honest, if you're spending 12 quid, 10 quid a night, seven days a week, that's 70 quid. I know. That's quite a lot of money, actually, just on food.
00:42:17 Speaker_02
So you only get £8 a week as it is.
00:42:19 Speaker_00
Yeah. So you get 80 quid a week. I get 80 quid a week. I'm on benefits. You're on benefits. Yeah.
00:42:25 Speaker_02
So as you can tell, I'm spending more than what I get. I don't know, I just know I can't keep doing it. I really don't want to do it. I don't want to do it ever again. I want to learn how to cook and just be healthy.
00:42:38 Speaker_05
Makes me so uncomfortable.
00:42:41 Speaker_03
This thing happens in every episode that I was able to see. There was a great op-ed that I read about this that was just like, when you are this poor, your entire life is no. Your kids are having a birthday. Can you have a birthday party? No.
00:42:57 Speaker_03
A new movie is coming out and you want to see it. Can you see it? No. Food is like one of the only affordable pleasures that people have when they have absolutely like deeply limited access to almost everything else in their lives.
00:43:14 Speaker_05
Right.
00:43:15 Speaker_03
His response to this isn't to go, Oh, holy shit, you're on benefits and you only get 80 pounds a week. He's like, you got to get a cooking class.
00:43:24 Speaker_05
Yeah.
00:43:24 Speaker_03
This is a show that's produced for an audience and this plays into a long standing dynamic of more class privileged people sort of leering at what poor people eat.
00:43:35 Speaker_05
Dude, I know. It feels really Victorian.
00:43:37 Speaker_03
This is like a fundamentally conservative approach and fundamentally like not an upstream approach, right?
00:43:43 Speaker_03
It says it's talking about systems and it's proposing once again, as so many things on this show have, an individual solution to a systemic problem.
00:43:51 Speaker_05
There's also an interesting shift in him too because the first show seemed like it at least somewhere acknowledged that like this is a resources issue and we need to go right to the top and like talk to Tony Blair about giving more money to this but then by the time we get to Ministry of Food it seems like he's basically abandoned that and it's like let's teach people to cook.
00:44:09 Speaker_03
It just feels like he is sort of losing the thread and or he's following the thread of reality TV and losing the thread of like policy solutions, right? And like actually fixing the problem. Cause ultimately his job is to make a TV show.
00:44:22 Speaker_03
At the end of the day, the people who are paying him are people who are paying him for a TV show. Right? Right. In the same way that, like, our bottom line is to release episodes for our listeners.
00:44:31 Speaker_05
Which we're really good at. Which we're really good at. Which we've never failed.
00:44:33 Speaker_03
We're so fucking good at it. We never miss.
00:44:35 Speaker_05
Our schedule's perfect.
00:44:36 Speaker_03
So, following his TV success in the UK, Jamie Oliver follows the James Corden path. And comes on over to the US, right?
00:44:47 Speaker_05
They're like, look, we have poor people in America that we also love to gawk at. Let's send Jimmy to West Virginia.
00:44:54 Speaker_03
The first season focuses on Huntington, West Virginia.
00:44:57 Speaker_05
Which is the fattest city in America, right? Isn't that why they choose it?
00:44:59 Speaker_03
It was listed as America's unhealthiest city. Somebody's like, well, who decides that? And he's like, it's a government statistic based on death rates.
00:45:10 Speaker_05
Oh, really? What?
00:45:12 Speaker_03
But also there is like, it is true that at this point, Huntington had the nation's highest rates of heart disease, diabetes. They had the highest rates of seniors who had lost their teeth. Oh God.
00:45:23 Speaker_03
This show really sort of opened the door to some very naked anti-fatness and classism and made way for the time honored tradition of people outside of Appalachia, sort of gawking and telling them how they're doing it wrong. Yes.
00:45:39 Speaker_03
So Jamie Oliver heads to an elementary school in West Virginia and essentially does Jamie's school dinners all over again.
00:45:46 Speaker_05
I remember this. He's like berating the lunch ladies. And then there's one lunch lady who's like, you're a celebrity. You don't care. And he starts like crying. It's like, I swear on my children that I care.
00:45:56 Speaker_03
Right. He says, I swear on my children's lives. And she just shakes her head and goes, don't do that. Like I was so hard on the school cooks team. I was like, yeah, man. At one point he says, so they get pizza for breakfast and chicken nuggets for lunch.
00:46:13 Speaker_03
Welcome to America. He's also doing the whole like Americans are gross and fat and dumb thing.
00:46:20 Speaker_05
Also, I make fun of Britain constantly, but also like the problems that Britain has are the same as the problems that America has. I'm in no position to like talk shit. And Jamie is similarly in no position to talk shit.
00:46:33 Speaker_03
So he does his usual sort of set of things. He does the thing where he shows kids vegetables and they can't say what they are.
00:46:40 Speaker_03
He does a thing where he takes, there's like a dump truck of fat and he empties it into a dumpster in front of a bunch of parents and kids and they're like, this is how much fat you're eating. It's like Oprah's wagon of fat on steroids.
00:46:53 Speaker_05
But now like two decades of reality TV have gone by. Everything has to be fucking amplified.
00:46:59 Speaker_03
He does a bit where he shows kids how he says chicken nuggets are made. What he does is he butchers a chicken, he takes off the breasts, he takes off the legs, he takes off the wings, blah, blah, blah.
00:47:09 Speaker_03
He puts the whole chicken carcass, bones and all, and sort of trimmings into a food processor. He strains out the solids and ends up with this bowl of like pink goo, right? And then he adds in, um, flour. He calls it stabilizers.
00:47:24 Speaker_03
And I was like, that's just flour. You're just having flour. And then he's like, and then you have to add a bunch of flavorings and spices so it doesn't taste terrible.
00:47:33 Speaker_03
And then you get to this very famous clip of him asking these kids, do you think that's good for you or bad for you? And the kids all go bad. And then he goes, would you still eat it? And they go, yeah, like 100% of them.
00:47:52 Speaker_03
And then he says, why would you eat it if you know it's bad for you? And one of the kids says, we're just hungry.
00:47:58 Speaker_05
Yeah, I wonder if this is the real difference between Britain and America. Because the the famous thing about this is that like, the kids are supposed to be like,
00:48:07 Speaker_03
He leads into it by saying, I'm going to do an experiment and this experiment works every time.
00:48:12 Speaker_05
The kids are supposed to say, no, we don't want to eat it because it's like he's put all this gross shit into it. But then I wonder if the real linchpin of this is just like, are the kids hungry or not?
00:48:21 Speaker_05
Are you doing this at lunchtime and they haven't eaten?
00:48:23 Speaker_03
This is a real marshmallow test moment. It's worth noting that in addition to being totally fucking hilarious, this moment also leads to a humongous lawsuit. A 1.2 billion dollar lawsuit. filed by Beef Products Incorporated.
00:48:46 Speaker_04
Of course.
00:48:47 Speaker_03
They're a processor in South Dakota. They sue ABC. ABC ends up settling the suit for $177 million. No way.
00:48:57 Speaker_05
So it was easier to just write a check, I guess.
00:48:59 Speaker_03
When you watch it now, there is a very clear ADR insert of Jamie Oliver saying, luckily, this is not the way they're made in America. It's so clumsy, it's clearly like, the room tone is all wrong, his voice is all wrong.
00:49:17 Speaker_03
I'm like, buddy, you're running this ship like a podcast, get it together.
00:49:21 Speaker_05
Yeah, this is like us when we have to fact check something, like everything completely changes.
00:49:26 Speaker_03
Like a YouTuber who cuts in and is like, editing me. Yeah.
00:49:31 Speaker_03
There is also an incredibly funny scene that happens at the opening of the show where he goes on a local radio show and the DJ is like super antagonistic and says things to him like, what are you going to make us do?
00:49:46 Speaker_03
We don't want to sit around and eat lettuce all day.
00:49:49 Speaker_05
Okay.
00:49:50 Speaker_03
And at one point in the radio interview he goes, you got to tell us what to do. Who made you King? And I was like, Ooh.
00:49:56 Speaker_05
Yeah. He unfortunately went on Paul Revere radio.
00:50:00 Speaker_03
This is the thing. It's both very funny, but also it's sort of a hallmark of these shows that he is framing this up as the core problem is that people know what's good for them and they just won't do it. Yeah.
00:50:14 Speaker_03
At one point he talks to the food services director for the school district and is like, why are you feeding these kids such terrible food? It's unconscionable. And she's like, well,
00:50:24 Speaker_03
We have to meet USDA federal standards and we have a really tight budget. And his response is genuinely, well, I just came here to feed kids. I didn't know I had to take a math test. Like why is this so complicated?
00:50:39 Speaker_05
He's like, okay, poindexter.
00:50:40 Speaker_03
You just got hundreds of millions of dollars from Tony Blair. You know that there will be math at some point. And also, it's not a math test.
00:50:49 Speaker_03
She's just like, you have to serve a certain amount of protein, and you have to serve a certain amount of starch. This is not an uncommon thing. But he's like, oh, shucks.
00:50:57 Speaker_03
I'm just a guy who showed up and wanted to cook for some kids, and you're giving me all these rules, right?
00:51:01 Speaker_05
I'm just a guy who's made this my number one social issue for years now. You can't expect me to know what a budget is.
00:51:08 Speaker_03
Yes. The radio DJ becomes this sort of like recurring character in the show and he's like, I gotta get this guy on board. He's the biggest naysayer and I gotta get him.
00:51:18 Speaker_03
He takes the radio DJ to a funeral home to see where we've gotten with health in this country. And they talked to the funeral directors and they turn a corner and then you just see a very large casket for a very fat person.
00:51:34 Speaker_03
Oh, it is filmed and presented as ludicrously large. The funeral director walks through how it won't fit in a hearse and you actually have to get a cargo van and none of the equipment that they have works with it.
00:51:46 Speaker_03
And I'm like, you're just saying that you're not prepared for fat people. Shouldn't they just be set up for fat people? In addition to that funeral home moment, he also does a whole personal stories segment.
00:51:59 Speaker_03
He brings in this young woman and her mom who says that her dad died of being overweight. Then she tells the story and she's like, he was so concerned with his own weight that he decided to go have gastric bypass.
00:52:15 Speaker_04
Mm.
00:52:15 Speaker_03
And then a week after gastric bypass, he passed out in the hall. They rushed him to the hospital and he died at the hospital. And I was like, Oh wow. I don't think that's a death of being fat.
00:52:26 Speaker_03
I think that's maybe a death of complications of a major surgery. Yeah. That's actually a point against what you're arguing here. Right. I think the darkest moment on the show. And this is where I was like, I need to stop watching and cry for a while.
00:52:44 Speaker_03
As with other shows, he picks sort of a family to like follow around and talk to about their food choices in this family. The dad is a trucker. The mom raises the three kids. All of the kids are fat.
00:52:56 Speaker_03
This is the house where he cooks all their frozen food and dumps it on the table and pushes this mom until she weeps about how she's like killing her kids, right? He takes their deep fryer and buries it in the backyard.
00:53:10 Speaker_03
And then he turns to the mom and he's like, you're a church going lady, right? Why don't we pray over it? And then later he tells the camera that he did that just for a bit of a laugh.
00:53:18 Speaker_05
It's like, I hate these people.
00:53:19 Speaker_03
They're like, Gross. He then takes this family to a doctor who tells them on camera and in front of their children that their sixth grade middle child may already have diabetes. That is the language that they use on the show.
00:53:35 Speaker_03
The doctor talks about all these things and he's like, well, that just means he's going to have amputations. He's probably going to go blind.
00:53:42 Speaker_03
Like he names all of these things that are possible outcomes of diabetes, but they are outcomes when diabetes is not managed or treated.
00:53:50 Speaker_04
Right.
00:53:50 Speaker_03
He is presuming and understanding that these are folks who will not have access to healthcare. Right. And he's painting this like ghoulish picture at this point. He hasn't even taken a blood sample. He hasn't even run like an a one C test.
00:54:04 Speaker_03
He hasn't done anything. He's just like, Oh, he's got this ring around his neck that can sometimes be characteristic of elevated sugar levels. So he might already have diabetes. And if he did, These are all the things that would happen.
00:54:16 Speaker_03
He says, quote, we're talking about shortening their life by 30, 40 years. They may be dying in their thirties. He says to a mom about her own kids in the absence of any test results.
00:54:28 Speaker_03
They're doing this on camera for a show that's going to be prime time on ABC and you just watch this kid wither and recede into him. Like you just watch the wave of shame take over him. And like the message is that what fat kids need is stigma.
00:54:49 Speaker_05
It's a scared straight thing, which is one of the least effective ways to Motivate people to do fucking anything like it. It doesn't work for drugs.
00:54:58 Speaker_03
It doesn't work for food It doesn't work for anything and also if it's a kid that kid doesn't have a lot of control over what he's eating Anyway, Jamie Oliver is using like a kind of rhetoric around school food and parents He uses some of that in a New York Times piece that runs at the time called Jamie Oliver puts America's diet on a diet Okay, here's an example of the kind of rhetoric
00:55:21 Speaker_03
I just sent you a quote.
00:55:22 Speaker_05
It says, Dude, right. Just tone it down. Jamie.
00:55:45 Speaker_03
It's also worth talking about the results in Huntington. We talked a little bit about the results in the UK in Huntington.
00:55:52 Speaker_03
After this all went through 77% of kids who were part of West Virginia schools who were part of this program said that they didn't like or eat lunch anymore. Oh, many of the kids were just straight up throwing the lunch away, right?
00:56:08 Speaker_03
So there's like a couple of problems there, right? One is this is a town with a high level of poverty, which means a lot of those kids are reliant on those meals, right? Like that's how some of those kids are just getting fed period.
00:56:21 Speaker_03
And the other problem is that because no one was buying lunches, staff started to get laid off.
00:56:27 Speaker_03
It started to be seen as like a less essential position and they're really strapped for cash so they're not going to pay people to make lunches that kids aren't eating.
00:56:35 Speaker_03
On top of all of that, his menu changes didn't meet the USDA standards and was way higher than the budget that they had.
00:56:45 Speaker_05
Oh, so he did the same thing where he just like he yada yada yadas over like the actual constraints they're operating under.
00:56:51 Speaker_03
Right, and he's like, look at how much better it can be. And it's like, yeah, if you ignore the law and money, I guess.
00:56:57 Speaker_05
It's actually really easy to feed kids if you don't have to think about those two things.
00:57:02 Speaker_03
Sure, dude, whatever.
00:57:04 Speaker_05
Yeah.
00:57:04 Speaker_03
There's a couple of things to know about sort of the ending of the show. It ends with a big celebration in Huntington. They do like a big high production value sort of like festival in the town at that big celebration.
00:57:18 Speaker_03
They get a gift of $80,000 from us foods, which is like a big food supplier to schools in the U.S. And they're like, we're so proud to present this giant check for $80,000. And then you find out, first of all, that it's $80,000.
00:57:33 Speaker_03
And second of all, that it's meant to be split amongst all the schools in the county. There are 26 schools in Cabell County, West Virginia. So that is a one-time payment of $3,000.
00:57:46 Speaker_05
Right. And then if you break it down, like kid by kid, it's like 75 cents. It's nothing. It's not anything.
00:57:52 Speaker_03
And it's again, one time payment. Right.
00:57:54 Speaker_05
Right.
00:57:54 Speaker_03
And they're like, oh my God, what a victory. Rascal Flats concert. How much did they pay Rascal Flats? More than 80k? They should have just given that to the fucking kids.
00:58:02 Speaker_03
Jamie Oliver is very proud to tell the camera, you know how much they did this gig for? Nothing. Cause they get it.
00:58:08 Speaker_05
Because they want the fat kids to be thin, he wrote.
00:58:10 Speaker_03
Because they're going on ABC and it's a press gig. Because they're getting a shitload of free promotion.
00:58:16 Speaker_05
Great.
00:58:18 Speaker_03
At the end of the final episode of the U.S. one, Jamie receives this reporting from the U.S. that he's like, oh my gosh, they're trying to go back to processed foods in Huntington, West Virginia. I can't believe it after all the work that we put in.
00:58:36 Speaker_03
And then I looked up the article that they're referencing and they also end up saying this on the show. They're like, yeah, we had a year's worth of food sitting in our freezer that we had paid for. And this dude just rolled in
00:58:51 Speaker_03
right and was like make everything different and they're like we already paid for this food right they were talking about like what if we just do it on fridays it's like chicken nuggets and fries or what like how do we get rid of this food how do we use it up and not contribute to further food waste
00:59:06 Speaker_03
he's like, well, what do you need in order to do that? He's they're like, we need them to take the food back or to trade it out for healthier food or something. Like we got to work out a deal here.
00:59:14 Speaker_03
This is not like an issue of like, we're just being willful. And then he leaves that meeting and comes out and tells the camera, imagine being an alcoholic and saying, it's all right to have a drink on a Friday.
00:59:26 Speaker_03
Again, people have been like, there are real constraints here. We need to figure out what to do with this food. We would like to have other food. We would like to have the staff to cook it and to pay for it. We would love to have all of that money.
00:59:39 Speaker_03
We do not have all of that money.
00:59:41 Speaker_05
He seems to think that people want to feed the kids shitty food. I feel like it's like they just don't have a lot of other options. But then he just keeps being like, well, you should have other options then. It's like, yeah.
00:59:52 Speaker_03
They should. 80 pounds a week on benefits.
00:59:55 Speaker_05
So is the epilogue to this that everything just reverted back to where it was?
00:59:58 Speaker_03
Pretty much. Like a lot of stuff is just sort of back to where it was before. It made a big splash. It made some short term changes, mostly for like a few years at a time. That funding, that Tony Blair funding was not necessarily like renewed.
01:00:12 Speaker_03
at the same level, right?
01:00:13 Speaker_05
Yeah, I know, that's always the problem with these things, yeah.
01:00:15 Speaker_03
I live in a town where every two years we're passing a new library levy. Yeah, same, same, same. It's like, save our libraries!
01:00:21 Speaker_03
And it's like, buddies, we should just agree that libraries need money and we should just give them the money that they need, what?
01:00:26 Speaker_05
Dude, Seattle had a fucking referendum of like, to build a seawall down on the waterfront so like, the city wouldn't slide into the sea, and it got like 75% of the vote. Should the city have a giant disaster befall it?" And some people were like, eh.
01:00:46 Speaker_03
I'm not saying yes, but I'm not saying no. Yeah. So the place that I wanted to leave us for this episode Living by his own values and his own code, I think Jamie Oliver really thinks he's doing the right thing.
01:01:01 Speaker_03
The problem is he has come to that decision about doing the right thing that focuses on fat people and fat kids, and he simply will not listen to them. He's not listening to fat people. He's not listening to poor folks.
01:01:16 Speaker_03
He's not listening to black and brown people.
01:01:18 Speaker_03
All of these folks who have really legit critiques of him and really legit requests of him, he is sort of either begrudgingly fulfilling them or getting kind of defensive or just shutting down and refusing to acknowledge it.
01:01:33 Speaker_05
On some level, I think the defense of him with this stuff is that he is up against massive systemic barriers, right? The fact that one fucking celebrity with one TV show couldn't fix the problem of school lunches in the UK.
01:01:46 Speaker_05
Well, yeah, of course, right? That's not how you're going to solve a problem like this. But also, it seems like people for two decades have been telling him, yo, these problems are systemic. They are bigger than you.
01:01:56 Speaker_05
And he keeps just being like, well, I can solve them. And doing basically the same thing over and over again.
01:02:01 Speaker_03
Right. Have you tried using a wok?
01:02:04 Speaker_05
Yeah, maybe the people yelling at Jamie Oliver just need to put it in terms that he understands and be like, Jamie, if you could incorporate the realities of the United Kingdom into your work, that would be wicked scrummy.
01:02:15 Speaker_05
I don't think that's correct. I've learned nothing.