Jamie Oliver debuts preview, has rough road ahead of him

"I'm here to show America just a little effort can make a massive difference." — Jamie Oliver

ABC brought us a preview of the upcoming "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" on Sunday night. The network was nice to show us a little bit of the help and hype in an hour. Hopefully, you set the DVR for a few extra minutes if you were in the Eastern and Central time slots (a news brief, ironically on health care reform, interrupted the feed for a few minutes).

First, the hype: Jamie Oliver has been renown for cleaning up school lunches in England. Yet, he seemed shocked by what he saw in American schools. Oliver didn't know what the USDA was, and had no clue about strict, odd lunch regulations. Anyone who saw "Super Size Me" wouldn't be that surprised.

Oliver was in a school with amazing facilities with homemade bread and no fast food restaurant fare to be found. And he was going nuts. Trust me, there are worse lunch rooms in America.

Everyone who puts school lunches on TV is shocked. Those of us who remember when "The Biggest Loser" hit the lunchroom remember the reaction from trainer Bob Harper. He was outraged, but her certainly handled it better than Oliver did.

It's okay to be shocked, but Oliver seems to try very hard to be an elephant in the room.

To be fair, his outrage is legitimate: breakfast pizza and mashed potatoes made from potato pearls, pellet shaped "potato product."

When Oliver complains about the ingredients in the processed food, his main nemesis in the lunchroom points out the meat as the main ingredient while ignoring the other elements within the food.

Later in the episode, Oliver makes a lunch to compete against the school lunch. His roasted chicken and brown rice is criticized as not having the USDA guidelines of "2 breads." The brown rice only counts as one.

"The American regulations are all screwed. Why would you want to give kids rice and bread. It's going to make them fat," Oliver said.

More help

Oliver is setting up a cooking center in Huntington. People can come there and learn how to do things better. The beautiful irony is that the cooking center is across from a Five Guys (for more background on Five Guys, check out this look at President Barack Obama and Five Guys). So people really will have a choice.

But the best moments came when Oliver met with the Edwards family. This was what this show should have been. You see the Edwards family (minus dad, who drives a truck). Mother, 3 sons, and young daughter are all fat — no good way to put that.

This family has a deep fryer in its kitchen, which the mom admits is the most used kitchen appliance. Their freezer had 30 Crisp Crust frozen pizzas and a box of corn dogs. I confess this was my OMG moment of the entire show.

Oliver did copy the folks at "You Are What You Eat" (from BBC America) by showing everything that they eat in a week. He noted that the common theme: the color is golden brown.

"I love pizzas. I love burgers. But they're not even good pizzas. It's a load of rubbish," Oliver said.

Everything he did with this family felt right, even when Oliver buries the deep fryer in the backyard. Boy, this seemed cheesy, but in this case, it worked. His tone was spot on, and they were happy to get his help.

Oliver gets them to cook from raw ingredients. We see them fixing a spaghetti dinner with salad. We see one of the sons sauteing garlic in olive oil. Oliver shows him in pouring the olive oil to count to 2 to avoid overpouring.

This wasn't even the healthiest meal, but it was a nice improvement over deep frying processed food.

Based on this preview, we'll see more help and hype, but hopefully, more help than hype. And for Oliver to succeed, he needs to be less confrontational. As the school lunch ladies point out, their part of the country is used to being mocked. Oliver's ignorance might be sincere, but he needed to know more before he got there; his style isn't helping or helpful.

In case you missed the preview or the end of the show, ABC looks like it will rerun this preview at 8 pm Eastern on Friday, its regular night, followed by a new episode in the regular time slot, Friday at 9 pm Eastern.

Comments

[Melissa Graham]

Chad,

I didn't have a chance to see the show, but I very much appreciate your comment about the lunch ladies. We get on them, but it's not their fault - this goes far higher and is very much removed from the lunch room and gets into questions of subsidies and screwed up regulations and of course not enough money.

We've got to go after the big fish especially right now when we've got a president so supportive of our childrens' health. As a society, we need to value the needs of our kids as highly as we do our corporations. Until we do, we'll continue to subsidize the wrong things and put our children's health at risk.

[Chad]

Thanks Melissa. The good news is that the preview gets re-aired Friday at 8pm Eastern.

And this isn't the lunch ladies fault. They are stuck in a bad situation.