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!