I will refrain from my Jamie Oliver rant, except to say that OF COURSE when you're a trained chef with the money and access to purchase organic, local, free-range, blah-di-blah food, it's a hell of a lot easier to "eat better" than the barely employed non-chef comparatively rural townspeople who you're condescending to "help" with your elitist foodie ways.

Very much this.

He's also ranting about the American health care system without really being clear who he thinks the problem is (mostly because he obviously doesn't know enough about American health insurance to know who to blame), so he's blaming the parents for not taking their kids to a doctor who will tell them that they're fat.

Yeah Jesse, I think some may be too old. I should just toss those, right?

A show like this could be good if it focused on systematic food issues -- food deserts, subsidies, the funding of the school lunch program, and so on. But he sees some of the actual systematic problems and then blames them on individual people -- like, he sees all the kids drinking chocolate milk at school, and he blames this on the stubborn lunch ladies who insist on following the silly rules, rather than on the dairy subsidies that lead to those rules in the first place, and which also guarantee that the school will get NO food to feed these kids if they don't follow the rules.

Eh, it's shock and awe. Made for tv. And most school lunch programs are really abysmal and the fact that highly processed, poor nutrition stuff is cheaper and more easily available (says she who ate a frozen lasagna for dinner) is problematic. I've actually been impressed at the produce section of the SuperWalmart in the far-out burbs of Birmingham where my brother lives.

And most school lunch programs are really abysmal

But this is because of the federal structure of the program, not the individual cafeterias.

Yup. And it is a problem.

See, I don't know Jamie Oliver from Adam, so I am coming into this blind.

He just said "I cannot believe the government allow this." Wrong. The government doesn't allow this. The government mandates this.

OK, this is actually vaguely useful. He went into a first grade classroom and tested the kids and found that practically none of them could identify any fresh vegetables, so the teacher decided to have a vegetable unit to teach the kids what the different vegetables are. And he did not call anything "disgusting" or "outrageous" or tell anybody "You are killing your children!" throughout that entire segment.

I think Jamie is just working with one cafeteria to be able to put a face on it. It seems clear to me that he knows it's the federal guidelines that are at fault, and not the people working in the cafeterias.

I think Jamie is just working with one cafeteria to be able to put a face on it. It seems clear to me that he knows it's the federal guidelines that are at fault, and not the people working in the cafeterias.

But it's totally framed as "Can Jamie change Huntington?" not "What needs to change at the federal level to change Huntington?"