We've seen a few side trips on the road to "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution." This week, we delved into a world involving a flash mob and a choreographer. In the second half, we turn to a remake of an old classic: "Scrooge."
This week's focus is DJ Rod, the number 1 morning show in Charleston. We've seen snippets of Rod being less than melancholy about Oliver's efforts in Huntington. DJ Rod's reasoning: people just won't change.
Oliver sees Rod as a symbol and to some extent, this is true. Rod has no clue about how bad things are, even if he lives in a city that has a lot of unhealthy people.
In this week's episode, we see Rod ranting against Jamie Oliver's efforts and then take a big bite from a sandwich out of a Styrofoam container during his morning show. I can tell you from personal experience that radio station DJs don't always eat well, especially when given the opportunity for "free" food, especially during the morning-drive show.
But Rod is in decent shape; Rocky, his female sidekick, is even in better shape. Rod seems like the kind of guy who says to himself, "I'm not fat, they must be fat because they are lazy."
Oliver sets out to teach him otherwise, acting out the part of Jacob Marley's ghost to Rod's Scrooge. Oliver takes him to a mortuary to show him double-wide caskets. Rod is moved by the size. In what might be a wise-cracking moment, Rod asks about cremation. The look on the funeral directors is one of horror as they describe a body that size burning. Oliver's summary: a "massive great human candle."
The clincher is when Rod meets some of the other characters of Oliver's play: Marisa and Britney from last week, Stacey and Justin Edwards. They share their stories that are seriously worse than anything Marley showed Scrooge.
Stacey Edwards steps up and talks about taking her son, Justin, to the doctor. Well, Oliver and the ABC cameras did the work. But Stacey tells us that she was horrified to find out that 12-year-old Justin weighed 318 pounds. That was this week's first OMG moment.
For all the scary stuff about huge caskets — the funeral people point out that cemeteries might insist on two plots instead of the usual one — this story was much scarier than caskets.
Marisa has told us about the deaths of her father and uncle from obesity. We now get a vision as to why. We find out that Marisa, who appears to be African-American, was adopted by white parents. Her mom is fairly normal sized, but Marisa shows us a picture of her father when she was a small child.
His image is startling to Rod, Jamie, the others in the room, and everyone in the TV audience. His widow estimates his weight at the time at about 400 pounds. If Justin is 318 pounds, this guy is closer to 500 pounds.
Marisa tells us her tearful story about how her dad got gastric bypass surgery. And then, one day Marisa heard a sound; her father had collapsed and later died.
Like in the Scrooge story, there are three ghosts to visit. Britney is the last ghost. I don't mean to say this in a bad way, but Britney has watched a lot of reality TV. She has her few catch phrases and says them in a brief manner. To regular viewers, she repeats them all the time. But for Rod, this is the first time and she is sitting right next to him.
There was a new line this week that made an impact with me: "My mom, being a single mom all of her life, she's always, you know, trying to find different ways to feed us all for cheap."
This sentence underlines and illustrates the problem. At dinnertime and school lunches, those who struggle to make money make nutrition choices based on cost. And since we, as a society and government, subsidize starchy food to make it cheap, we suffer accordingly.
The clincher for Rod is that if she doesn't start to eat well, thanks to problems with her liver, she might only live another 5-7 years. This last line was used to promote the show long before episodes aired, so even though I recognized the clip, her words are still very moving.
The path of the episode revolves around the bet that Oliver made with Rob over whether Oliver can teach 1,000 people to cook in a week.
This leads Oliver to enact a couple of scenes more reminiscent of "Glee" (or "Fame" for older viewers) than a cooking reality show. There is a lot of outdoor fixing of stir-fries. In this episode, you get the feeling that the revolution is more about stir-fries than anything else.
The recipe features ginger, chile, garlic — all good things for your health — and as Oliver puts it "good ol' American beef." Those first three ingredients are not normally connected to this part of the country. And Oliver is not that familiar with our corn-hormones-antibiotics "good ol'" American beef.
We see some of the previous week's "characters" make an appearance. In the outdoor sessions outside Jamie's Kitchen, we see Marisa, Pastor Steve, and the Edwards family (Justin and Stacey). The Central City elementary school people come out, including the principal and America's newest favorite lunch lady, Alice, to cook inside Jamie's Kitchen.
A lot of this episode is extremely hokey: Rod loses the bet because he ends up being the 1,000th person. In fact, Rod and the morning show gang broadcast from Jamie's Kitchen on the final day.
"At this point, it's not about Jamie Oliver anymore. It's about us as a community." DJ Rod has seen the light.
But let's leave this episode with one nice story. Steel workers don't seem like the kind of guys you would expect to see in this scenario of eating healthy. But that was Oliver's point. In the sea of 1,000 people, 50 of them were steel workers. And Oliver took the cooking to them, bringing it to the people.
"They bend steel for crying out loud. And they're the guys that you want in your revolution, not just all the kind of ones that look like they should be in your revolution. You want steel benders," said Oliver.
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