Egg Salad!

I’ve been trying to avoid writing about reality shows for a while because they’re not even marginally related to my List of Giant Things, but I’m making an exception today for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, which premiered on CBS Friday night to some pretty decent ratings. The premise of the show is actually quite broad once you try to nail it down – Jamie Oliver, of Naked Chef fame, spends three months in Huntington, West Virginia, a city recently named the unhealthiest city in the United States. His goal is to incite some change in the city’s eating habits by reworking the public school menus, promoting fresh and unprocessed foods, and educating people about food and cooking. The show will run for six episodes, two of which have already aired, and in the first two, Jamie focuses on helping one family cope with obesity and changing their diets, and tries to instigate change in one elementary school’s lunch program.

The entire concept is rife with tricky problems of tone, etiquette, and diplomacy. It’s actually quite similar to The Marriage Ref in its foundation – an incredibly wealthy celebrity is going to tell middle-class and poverty-level Americans how they should be living their lives. Oof. And yet, as frustrating and potentially disastrous as that idea is, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution does a pretty decent job of coping with it. Jamie talks repeatedly on the show about how much he respects the area and knows what he’s asking is going to be hard. He offers himself up for abuse on a local radio show, and refuses to back down from a conflict with one of the cooks in the school’s kitchen. He tries to defuse some of the whiffs of classism or any denigration of Americans by noting repeatedly that England’s school food is just as bad as ours. Most helpfully, he addresses the problem directly, saying over and over again to cooks and housewives and school administrators, “I know I’m some crazy rich English person. I still want to help.”

I find the portions of the show where Oliver works with an individual family to be fairly routine. They eat an incredible amount of junk food, and are at risk for all sorts of diseases, but this type of show (help people get healthy!) has been bandied around a lot in reality television. Focusing on individuals helps give the story dimension and human interest, but it feels unoriginal. Where Food Revolution really becomes fascinating is in Oliver’s work in the school system. The kitchen is full of all the horror stories you know exist and yet shudder when you see in real life. Pizza for breakfast, chicken nuggets for lunch, kid after kid throwing away their apples, mashed potatoes made out of pellet-shaped potato pearls, a classroom where no one knows the difference between a tomato and a potato. “What is this?” yells Oliver, holding up an eggplant. Silence. “It starts with egg!” he adds helpfully. “Egg salad!” offers a kid in the back.

My favorite part of the first two episodes is a scene near the end of the second episode. It’s Oliver’s last day of his trial week of cooking new menus for the elementary school, and he’s hoping the beef fajitas will go over well. In the middle of prep, he walks into a discussion between the principal and the regular kitchen staff about what utensils to give the students – the fajitas really require a knife and fork, but the kitchen rarely gives out utensils at all, and doesn’t even keep knives on hand. The staff feels that the kids are too young to handle knives, and Oliver’s stunned. He tells them that the kids in the English schools he’s worked with use knives, and one of the cooks asks for “documentation.” “You teach ‘em to read, you teach ‘em to write, you teach ‘em to use a knife and fork!” he offers, to baffled expressions. Finally, the staff scrounges up some knives from the summer program, and predictably, the students have no idea what to do with them.

In a voiceover, Oliver points out that not having knives around is a symbol of the school’s abandonment of “real food,” and he’s right. The entire school menu is based around food that kids eat with their hands, which means it’s been processed to within an inch of existence and then shaped into unnatural rectangles or dinosaur shapes. The great thing about the whole scene is that the knife is such a simple and meaningful object in this discussion, a lovely, essential emblem of everything that’s not working. Food Revolution may be slightly scripted, and clearly represents a highly edited picture of Oliver’s experiences in Huntington. But those images of kids stabbing oranges with a knife, spitting out salad, and gazing cluelessly at a potato are real enough to be quite persuasive. It’s edited and dramatized, yes, but that’s how we learn. And if Jamie Oliver wants to go from school to school teaching children how to use knives and forks, more power to him.