The answer to the above is to put anything with vegetables or anything
remotely healthy looking. Kids shun the healthy and would rather eat
junk, no mind that it’s made especially for them by a celebrity chef!
This is a hard lesson Jamie Oliver learned in the first episode of
Jamie’s School Dinners.
Who is
Jamie Oliver and why do
I continually yak about him in this site? (In fact, he is one of my
tags here). He’s 28-year old chef in London with a growing food empire
– a number of
runaway bestsellers
(remember, these are cookbooks), several shows (The Naked Chef, Oliver
Twist), and owns and runs a popular restaurant called Fifteen. He is
married and is father to two beautiful toddler daughters.
Jamie takes a break from his successful life to something very personal
– changing the school dinners (or lunches to us non-Brits) of schooling
children. Sounds like a challenge, but the reality was much, much
sobering. How do you change the decades of conditioning kids subsisting
on chips (French fries), chicken/fish nuggets, pizza – everything that
can be bought prepacked and simply reheated? All on a tight school
budget and on regimented schedules!
It wasn’t just a tall order. It was mission impossible.
I could feel Jamie’s anguish, frustration, and injustice of the
situation. Our beautiful kids need to be fed good nutritious food and
our schools are jeopardizing the minds that they are trying to educate
by feeding them junk. Instead, schools work on tight budgets and it is
a cheap and efficient way of feed a battalion of kids (imagine a school
of over 1000 kids!). We all know our kids deserve better.
This episode was just a start, and very few kids were eating anything
Jamie had prepared. They didn’t buy the idea of vegetables, and those
who were “forced” to eat his food (because the “junk” had run out) said
that they definitely wouldn’t try it again. There were a few successful
dishes (like his Thai curry) but overall, the kids didn’t like it. To
add to problem, Jamie was working way over the school budget – excess
money spent in the kitchen meant money taken from books, or facilities
improvement, or pay from teachers.
We can’t get away from eating. We are doomed to eat. Right now, we are
all just around the corner from eating our next meal. At three meals a
day, sometimes a snack or two ... now this adds up! By my next birthday
I would have eaten 12,045 meals (give or take)!
Food is such a basic need that it is so easy to forget that food should
nourish us! But the issue here isn’t denying oneself a good burger or
some good cake. It’s the bigger picture. It’s about eating a balanced
diet – one that will nourish and sustain life – which means fruits,
veggies (which have all but disappeared in those Brit school dinners)
along with the meat/fish/whatever and carbs (bread, potatoes, rice).
In the case of kids, this takes on a much more profound meaning. Food
figures so much more as they are in the critical business of growing.
Parents and schools need to feed them the food they need in order to
fuel their growing bodies and their growing minds. If we condone their
eating junk now, we more or less guarantee that they will continue
trashing their bodies when they become adults. And so the cycle
continues.
Any concerned parent would want their kids to eat healthily. But how do
we do so if we adults can’t set an example? How can we ensure that we
become the “cycle breakers” and not the “cycle perpetuators” (despite
all good intentions)? While I don’t envy Jamie’s crisis, what I do envy
is that he had the courage to quit yapping about the problem and do
something about it.
In my own sphere of influence – our little family of three – we have
had our share of travails weaning ourselves from the lure of
convenience foods and unhealthy fast food restos. I don’t want to play
high and mighty or self-righteously declare that I am eating right …
but in our own little sphere, we have started our own little
revolution.
We have vowed to break the cycle with Dui. I am proud that Dui knows
what most vegetables look like in their natural state, and that she
knows they are grown in soil, and come from plants, or are picked from
trees. Jamie saw this as a root problem – our alienation from the
source of our food - most preschool never knew what a zucchini
(courgette) looked like! How many Filipino urban kids know where beans
come from (a tree, a shrub, from the ground)? Or what “real” chicken
meat looks like if they only know chicken nuggets?
Despite our bad start with Dui (she loved instant noodles when she was
three), we are slowly redeeming ourselves by her now willingly eating
her vegetables. She no longer pesters us to eat at McDo or Jollibee,
but would rather eat fishkatsu or salmon sushi at our favorite resto.
Key to eating right is getting reconnected, impassioned about real
food! The head cook, Nora, in the school of Jamie’s experiment had
gotten stuck in the rut of getting food out quickly, efficiently, and
on budget. She never tasted the food she served. She had lost sight of
the fact that she was feeding growing children. A day with Jamie’s head
chef rekindled her connection to food – the feel and smells and tastes!
You could literally see her delight at tasting great food ... and her
whole demeanor changed after it!
Like Nora, we have regained our passion for food. We love choosing and
holding beautiful ripe tomatoes, handling our bread with such love and
care, savoring the aromas of freshly cut herbs, loving the textures of
fresh carabao cheese, always tasting our food before we serve it.
I will no longer take offence if no one wants to eat what we cook. I
wholly blame our conditioning to convenience foods and fast foods.
And so Jamie’s revolution continues. Our revolution too. I implore you, please start your own!
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