"You can get a burger for 410 calories instead of 800 and it can taste good and it can be affordable."
-- Deno answering Jamie Oliver's question on advice for fast food purveyors in America.
If you missed the first half-hour of the final epsiode of Season 2, this sentence was the only real advice you missed. The show was "interrupted" for a significant stretch by a cooking contest where students from 7 Los Angeles high schools, including West Adams, competed to win a trip to New York and the Culinary Institute of America.
This contest was designed to impress the new superintendent of LA schools, John Deasy. Though we never saw a correlation that Deasy even knew there was a contest. While it might have made for good TV, this had very little to do with the Food Revolution.
The best highlight of the first half-hour was Jamie Oliver inviting 7 top LA chefs with the ruse of cooking lunch for them. Of course, Jamie has something up his sleeve and serves them school lunch food. These chefs aren't used to "regular" food much less what the kids in the LAUSD are getting.
Strawberry milk: "It smells crazy, candy synthetic. The milk doesn't even taste like milk. It's just like sugar artificial strawberry right at the front." That same chef wouldn't feed the burger to his dog.
Hamburger "It's so flat in flavor. You taste the wheat, the bun more than you taste the beef."
Chicken nuggets: "I can't eat that, This is gross."
Gee, the audience at home wants to help, much less these chefs. Then again, we can't smell the food.
This would have been good like three weeks ago to have the chefs work with the students over a longer period of time.
West Adams High School was one of the 7 schools in the contest, and the school had a leg up just because the students had worked with Jamie for some time. But you feel like all along that the West Adams was going to win the whole thing.
After the first round, Jamie announces the three finalists "in no particular order." Amazingly, West Adams is read last. The smell from this scenario got worse when the commercial element was added (details coming tomorrow at BalanceofFood.com).
Flavored milk was the theme of the second half of the episode. Parents were protesting because a meeting was canceled at the last minute to deal with the flavored milk issue. If you didn't know in real life that the LAUSD is getting rid of flavored milk at the end of this week, you might have been in suspense.
For those of us who knew what was going to happen, seeing behind the scenes was still fun. Deasy was more in step with what Jamie was looking for, which makes you wonder why Jamie couldn't have postponed the LA experience to get more classroom time into the episodes.
There was video footage of the appearance with Jamie Oliver and Deasy on Jimmy Kimmel Live, set in Los Angeles on the very network that the Food Revolution runs on. What a tie-in!
Jamie gets to go back to West Adams and see the new organic garden and finally get into a school kitchen. He is greeted by a lunch lady with a hug, something that would have be seen as radical in the Huntington experience. The students get to try new quesadillas with spinach tortillas.
We do think Jamie Oliver and the show got seriously distracted in Season 2. This shouldn't have been about whining or having a nice place for Jamie to have his family. But there was moments of brilliance, the great potential for a show to make a difference.
"It's a war, it's definitely a war against obesity." -- Jamie tells us toward the end. Too much of Season 2 was a war against the LAUSD and other authority figures. We need more of that war spirit against obesity and flavored milk and deceptive food marketing and secret ingredients in our food and an overall corporate-speak that determines what regular people consume in their daily lives.
Don't let the bashing get you down. We would welcome a Season 3 of "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution." But once again, we want more help and a whole lot less hype, especially from a certain frozen vegetable company (more on that tomorrow right here at BalanceofFood.com).
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