Jamie's School Lunch Project

This is a show on The Learning Channel. I saw it tonight for the first time. Madam B told me about it last week. I was really impressed with Chef Jamie Oliver.

He's taken on the School System in London to try and persuade the children to eat healthier. The School officials have told him that the reason they serve children junk is that, that is what the children want! Yeah. Right. Since when do kids know best? Over the government, no less!?

I found it interesting to watch the reaction of the children as he tried to find ways to get them to eat the healthy foods. Kids are just great at being honest. And Chef Jamie was very kind to a little girl who cried because she didn't want to give up her lunch to eat his food! She was won over in the end.

He challenged everyone, but with kindness, and with style and humility. He's appalled that they are served the types of food the country has allowed to pass for inspection as okay for kids to eat, and he told them so.

But the kids were won over! He was able to persuade them to try new things. Many of them rejected him right off, but he was patient and talked them into it. He taught a class at one of the schools. He let them do the cooking!

Actually, he could tell you better than I ~ Jamie has a blog.

Chef Jamie also has a cookbook and a show called The Naked Chef, but don't let that scare you off. He puts it this way, to quote him, "It's basically stripping back to the bare essentials."

What I've seen so far is brilliant. Just Brilliant. His efforts that is, not so much the show itself.

The show that followed next was Honey We're Killing The Kids. That's an American Show on which a nutritionist comes in and tries attempts to lead a family with an (extremely) unhealthy lifestyle into a better way of living and eating. It's okay. But it seems that it's set up to appeal to one's vanity.

The nutritionist shows the parents a time sped up photo of what the children will look like at 40 if they continue on the current diet and no-exercise path. Then after three weeks of correct diet and exercise, another photo is shown of what the children will look like at 40. Of course, it's better, and everyone seems happy.

But vanity is how most diets are pitched to us anyway. It seems that every diet plan ad features someone in a bathing suit. Yeah. Right. That's how _I_ dress most of the time, right? Ha Ha.

Anyway, the shows are interesting enough but I couldn't watch them every week. They do what a lot of those shows do and turn 25 minutes worth of footage into an hour show by showing the same clips over and over and over again.