LA’s disgraceful attempt to keep Jamie Oliver out of its schools

It was always going to be a challenge, trying to teach the hamburger-chomping inhabitants of the world’s fattest nation to swap fried junk food for fruit and veg. But, despite having been enthusiastically-endorsed by Michelle Obama earlier this year, Jamie Oliver’s ambitious and commendable “Food Revolution” has run into a political brick wall.

As a follow-up to his Emmy-winning US television show in which he attempted to change the lardy eating habits of a city called Huntingdon, in West Virgina, the Naked Chef announced a few months back that he was going to record a second series set in the most deprived areas of inner-city Los Angeles.

That, however, was before clipboard-wielding bureaucrats at the LA Unified Schools District got in on the act. These folk, who run the city’s failing state schools, have refused to co-operate with Oliver’s plans to help improve the artery-clogging junk churned out by their under-resourced canteens.

According to the Los Angeles Times, one Melissa Infusino, the District’s “Director of Partnerships,” wrote to the chef’s production company saying she wouldn’t play ball because: “We believe our direct work with nutrition experts, health advocates, the community, schools and students is the most effective strategy for our continued success and improvement.”

Her letter, written in the classic legalese of a trained pen-pusher, added that time and budgetary constraints mean that if LA’s schools were to participate, it would: “prevent us from committing 100 per cent of our efforts to our students.”

There’s a word for Ms Infusino’s comments, one that could also describe the contents of the LA Unified Schools District’s average canteen meal: crap.

The real reason she wants to keep Jamie Oliver out of LA’s schools is no doubt very simple: Ms Infusino is terrified about the nutritional horrors he’ll find, and too ashamed to allow America’s TV-watching public to see the deep-fried horrors her employer inflicts daily upon the children in its care.

Her tactic for dealing with the chef – namely obfuscation – is true to form for the LA Unified Schools District, a stunningly dysfunctional organisation with some of the nation’s worst-achieving schools under its command and (speaking as a reporter who has tried to deal with it in the past) a comically-bloated and ineffective bureaucracy at its helm.

Jamie Oliver is now hoping that a mixture of “parent power” and the newly-elected Governor of California, Jerry Brown, can over-ride the District’s efforts to ban him from their school campaigns. I, for one, wish him every success.

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• Frogeye

  Certainly, the Los Angeles Unified School District is everything negative that this report states. And then some. With 1,383,744, it is the second largest in America, bringing with it a politicised bureaucracy seemingly intent on building empires (the number of employees rose 25% in 4 years, while the amount going for food declined). Worse, it is filled with competencies that beggars belief, and more than a tad of corrupt. Of the $2.85 per student that the district receives to provide 700,000 meals a year, $2 goes for milk, supplies, salaries and benefits, and only 85 cents for the food! Still, dietitians find that the meals meets or exceeding U.S. Agriculture Department nutrition guidelines.

  Having said this, the fact remains that Oliver’s forte is food preparation and not interpersonal skills. True, he went to Huntington, West Virginia, but left under a very dark cloud. It seems that the city had, on its own initiative, already taken aggressive steps to get its people in better shape. Programs aimed at everyone getting more exercise, steering away from fast foods and courses in better food habits at home had already been delivering results. Oliver, it seems, invaded the city and haughtily began telling the people how terrible they were and embarrassing the people on TV. He is, to say the least, persona non grata in Huntington. However, to hear Oliver, he only whinges that they “misunderstood” him, and did not appreciate what he was doing.

  When he stormed into Los Angeles (which is to be his TV home on the ABC TV network), he got off on the wrong foot in denigrating district officials and and parental practices. The district is composed primarily of minorities (Caucasian European Americans are only 9% of the enrollment. Many among the minorities saw the rich white guy coming in and arrogantly that he could be their food saviour. It is hardly surprising that the district gave him short shrift!

• NicNiewart

  If the USA were left to its own devices, this , the fattest and most unhealthy nation on earth, where its citizens chow down of gargantuan portions of crap several times a day- and drink big glasses of milk with their dinners,will continue to preach about everything on earth to the ends of the earth. The incredibly bad diet has to be linked to its strange views about OTHER people getting it wrong, when the whole thing starts at its front door. This is the nation that willingly sends its sons to war at the slightest provocation. Maybe it’s a reaction to anything and anywhere is better than seeing things as they are at home, huh, boys?

• http://www.propertyleadersuk.com property lady

  The way these goofs “LA Unified Schools District” are dealing with this is completely irresponsible. I bet they’re own children don’t go to these schools.

• Jasonsmith17

  We should feel ourselves luckily that we have you and Jamie to tell us how to live our lives I guess. We are all so stupid and incapable that without Susangalea and Jamie Oliver we’d probably be eating our own fat children because we just don’t know any better. Thank heavens for do-gooding, morally superior types who can talk down to us and tell us how our lives really look from on high.

• susangalea

  This is just petulant foot stamping. I do not patronize or tell others how to lead their lives. I just think that if someone like the irritating Jamie Oliver or anyone else can do something to help these children get some decent food instead of the crap (that is slowly killing them) fed to them by their clearly inadequate parents then that can’t be bad.

  I am not sure what your reaction is based on. Is it perhaps just an allergy to what you perceive as being patronized? I don’t watch Jamie on the TV because I find him too manic with a phony accent and bonhomie that is tiresome, but I don’t dispute that if he can do something to help these miserable children, old before their time, that I should be condoning and not condemning him for petty reasons.

  The children, and not the possibility of the hurt feelings of the parents who are allowing this to happen to them when not doing it to themselves, trump all other considerations.

  If you are a doctor in a diabetes clinic or a heart specialist the notion that your ten year old patient is in such poor health because of the fear of being seen to be patronizing or hurting the child’s mother or father’s feelings will be viewed as the total denial of the children’s human rights for the sake of the spurious abuse of human rights accorded to the parents. Call it what you will, Jason. Good morning, by the way!

• susangalea

  It is disappointing that like anyone who has lost the art of rational exchange you have resorted to ad hominem attacks. If you could just consider your argument then perhaps the glaring contradictions would disappear. You cannot state that you are sure Jamie has good one intentions in one paragraph to saying that his motives are not altruistic in the next. You are arguing from an emotion that comes off as jealousy, but then you keep saying how much you like Jamie but complain that he is too successful…. This is jealousy, in far too many words.

  As for your attempts to tell me to ” go and be a bull in a china shop somewhere else” I think, you should understand that in a democracy you are unable to tell others what to do in that dismissive and rude way with any success; you are only able to express your viewpoint as coherently as possible. Something you have signally failed to do. I would, however, fight for your right to do so.

• Jasonsmith17

  Susan. Morning. You are right the patronising moralism is annoying but this is not my problem with Oliver. It’s not even Oliver particularly but he’s the example of nonsense food advice that we have here. My issue is with the information he is giving out – it’s wrong. There have been masses of studies around ‘junk food’, obesity, long-term health effects etc and no evidence has been found to correlate them. Amazing I know considering a link is considered common sense these days – but it is wrong regardless. A precursory glance at the scientific evidence makes this clear. Here is a good article I saw today:
  http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9871/

  The food scares and moralism are therefore not about the reality of the food we eat or the health effects. They are patronising, morally superior, falsehoods being peddled by a TV chef who knows nothing about nutrition and what he does know he’s got wrong. This is my problem.

• Guest

  None

• N.Ali

  Is Jamie interested in what’s on the menu in old-folks homes in this country?
  Hospital-wards?
  Children’s homes?
  Various centres & institutions up and down the land?
  Or are these situations less ‘groovy’, and make less palatable TV?
  No judgement or criticism involved, just straightforward questions…

• http://www.filmschoolrejects.com RobertFure

  Your contempt for America is palpable.