April 27, 2011 Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution started airing its second season a couple of weeks ago on ABC, this time he descended upon Los Angeles with the intent to film within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). But he and his crew was shut out. Then he found a window of opportunity with a partner school, West Adams Preparatory High School, but it came with restrictions.
Oliver appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Tuesday night and talked about the early days of his food revolution in Britain:
“To put it into perspective, seven years ago we had standards for dog food but we had none for kids food in school. And we had the most obese and unhealthy country in Europe, and it was a serious time for us… So I made 4 documentaries and about 3 days after the first one went out – because the parents were so engaged and outraged – there was a billion dollars of new money put into the system and laws were made and vending was changed. And last year, the final icing on the cake was the government agreed that every child in Britain would have 18 hours of physical cooking before they left, to arm them with the life skills to make better choices and to look after their future families. And that’s just from TV. I guess the moral of that story is adults have been making bad choices for kids for 40 years and now we’re paying the price.”
[Video no longer available from source]
But hold on – there’s promising news! The new Superintendent of the LAUSD, Dr. John Deasy, took over the reins on April 15th and recently met with Oliver to discuss his Food Revolution project within the walls of the 2nd largest school system in the United States. The first (surprising) edict – well, maybe not so surprising if you saw the segment with the school bus overflowing with 57 tons of sugar, which represented the amount of sugar from flavored milk that was consumed by LAUSD students in 1 week – is the removal of flavored milk from the cafeteria menu.
“One of the things I’ve been very concerned about is the whole issue of flavored milk and additives in milk. [Kimmel: Chocolate milk, strawberry milk?] Right. So we’re going to be recommending to the Board of Education, that I’ll be going to the Board by July, actually eliminating that from our cafeterias.” -Supt. John Deasy, LAUSD
And, as Oliver aptly says, “The parents of LA and America need to start giving a **** about what we feed kids”.