Jamie Oliver

I have no tagline suggestions because all I have is problematic jokes about British people. Because I lived there, I feel like that gives me a license to be kind of mean. I'm guessing some British listeners will disagree. It's very funny. It's like whenever anybody asks me about like, some country I haven't spent much time in Thailand, I'm like, oh, a beautiful country with noble people. But if they ask me about Britain or Denmark, I'm like, first of all, I have this long rant. Ready? That's true. I did ask you if I should go to Denmark for a work trip. Absolutely not. That is not something you need in your life. Keep it moving. The minute you asked, I was like, I tapped on my little keyboard. I was like, okay, all caps. I'm going to need all caps for this answer. No. So, but okay, does Jamie Oliver even have like a catchphrase? I was going to use like one of his like little cooking catchphrases like bam or whatever. He's got a few, it's less of a catchphrase and more of like a lexicon that he'll call things like wicked or slamming. Welcome to Maidens Phase, the podcast that is wicked slamming. Oh, look at him go. We can cut everything before this and make it seem like I knew, I knew his little catchwords. I'm Aubrey Gordon. Hi, that's Michael Hobbs. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at Patreon or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content in both places. Same stuff. Today, Michael. At long last. At long last. Talking about Mr. Jamie Oliver. We are talking about Jamie Oliver and we're particularly talking about his influence in talking about school food and kids diets. Oh yeah. Like tell me what you know about Jamie Oliver. He's a TV chef who started with a show called The Naked Chef, which I genuinely believed was a naked man cooking for a very long time. Oh, Tiny Baby Gay was like, I'm listening. Yeah, exactly. That's like when exactly is it on in America? He became like one of the early sort of TV chef celebrities. He then did a TV series where he was going to reform school. They say school dinners, which is kind of confusing, which I was actually very into. I was like, I was Jamie Oliver Pilled. Were you? We talked about this before we were recording, but like I have kind of a soft spot for Jamie Oliver because he seems like a genuinely nice guy who is like trying. But then I know that since I've kind of stopped paying as much attention to him, he's made a series of blunders that are like less defensible. But I don't actually know like the scope and nature of the blunders. Yeah. I will say I came in similarly. I did not have a soft spot for him mostly just because he was part of that wave of like late 2000s, early 2010s. Like the problem is fat kids. 100%. Kind of media. And as someone who at that point was like a fat person in their 20s, that felt too close to home for me. And then you went on a film tour in the UK and people in the signing line were like, you should do an episode on Jamie Oliver 200 times. I told people I was thinking of doing an episode on Jamie Oliver and I used the sign lines to like ask people. OK, like the closest you got to defenders was, I guess his heart's in the right place. And for the most part, people were just like, fuck this dude. Yeah. It really felt like when you had talked to people from the UK about James Corden before the Balthazar thing happened. Yeah. Or me talking about Elon Musk at any period up until the present. Yeah. The world has finally caught up to you, Michael. This is becoming a California high speed rail podcast. This is always in danger of becoming such a thing. So Jamie Oliver was born in 1975. He was born and raised in Essex. His parents ran a pub. He went to a grammar school, which is like a sort of middle classy thing to do. Right. It's so confusing. There are so many kinds of schools. It's like public and private, but they mean different things. He starts off as a pastry chef at Neal Street Restaurant and overtime moves on to become the sous chef at the super acclaimed River Cafe. Are you familiar with the River Cafe? Is this in London? Mm hmm. Oh, no, I had no money and I ate out of the sales bin at Sainsbury's on my way home because they had sandwiches for 49p. Did you get the smoked salmon one? Why don't we have smoked salmon sandwiches here? It's at the River Cafe that he makes his first TV appearance in a show called Christmas at the River Cafe. He sort of pops on screen as sort of the way that this story gets told, which like, I believe it, he's a charismatic dude, right? Yeah, that leads to his first TV series, the aforementioned The Naked Chef, which premiered in 1999. In 2005, he launches a campaign called Feed Me Better, which is his campaign to change school children's meals. OK, as a result of that, they have a Channel 4 viewers poll and they name him the most inspiring political figure of 2005. Who political figure? That's a transformation. Right. I think there's a little bit of a sort of Dr. Oz leaning story here of like, by all accounts, he's a very good chef. Yeah. And he gets into hot water when he veers away from that thing. Yeah. And also, he's very likable. He has the sort of the combination of fine dining and then this every man quality. Right. Since the sort of start of his career, he has published 32 cookbooks. Oh, wow. He has presented forty four TV shows of more than one episode and nineteen single episode specials. He's almost like a Twitch streamer at that point. Just on is on. He has also faced in that time, more and more critique. In addition to getting more and more successful, he's faced more and more critique. When I started this episode, I texted you and was like, hey, I think I'm going to do Jamie Oliver and you were like, oh, cool influencer episode. I was like, yeah, it'll be like a light little influencer episode. OK. No. It was like Gwyneth Paltrow volumes of media that have written about this guy. Think pieces, op eds. So much ink has been spilled over every little thing that Jamie Oliver does. Some of it, I think, like is really, really on point. OK. Some of it, I think is like, as you would say, we're in bitchy and crackers territory with some of it. Yeah, this is always the thing with like British influencers is that like some of them are really garbage, but then on the other hand, they have a super garbage media environment. And so it's it's hard to separate like does this person suck or does the coverage of them suck? Yes. So we're going to do a little rundown of some of the things that he has been criticized for. OK. And then we're going to dig into our school dinners. OK. Stuff. One of his big critiques is he's been criticized many times for being a hypocrite. OK. He had a whole show about the conditions in which chickens are raised and produced after making the show about chickens. He then signed a multi million pound deal with Sainsbury's, who at that point did not conform to the RSPCA standards at the time. In 2015, he worked with the UN Environment Program as a quote unquote environmental champion. Two years later, he signed a five million pound deal with Shell. OK. Again, it's money. That's quite bad. There are also plenty of complaints about racism, colonialism and appropriation in his recipes. This is from a piece on CNN. It is a brick. In the Sunday Times interview, Oliver acknowledged that his empire roast chicken, chicken recipe involving coriander, turmeric, garam masala and cumin would no longer be appropriate today. In the episode titled Empire roast chicken, bombay, roasties and amazing Indian gravy, Oliver set out to celebrate what he called our Indian love affair by making a full on collision between beautiful British roast dinners and gutsy Asian spices. Oliver also celebrated the trade routes he said led to Indian spices making their way into British dishes and which he used in his lemon scented roast empire style tandoori chicken. Toward the end of the episode, while carving the chicken, Oliver said, this is empire food. You can use your hands and then raised a toast to the empire while clinking beers with members of his camera crews. Although originally billed in the episode as lemon scented roast empire style tandoori chicken, the recipe has now been renamed on Oliver's website as Spiced Roast Chicken. Oh, this didn't seem that bad to me until we got to know. Let's toast to the empire. Right, right, right. There are so many versions of this kind of thing that have happened. There have also been critiques and perhaps the most pervasive critique of Jamie Oliver is around class and classism. One of the big if you sort of talk to people about Jamie Oliver, one of the big things that comes up is they're like, he's charging eight pounds for beans on toast. OK, for US listeners who are unfamiliar with beans on toast, it's literally canned baked beans on a piece of toast. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, it is exactly what it sounds like. His version is definitely dressed up. It's on ciabatta. There are cherry tomatoes. There's basil and arugula and balsamic and all kinds of stuff. But it's still beans on toast. He has since sort of reconsidered, but he's also kind of doubled down. He tells the BBC, quote, I should have been brighter. Hines came to us and offered 15,000 pounds for us to put something cool made with baked beans on the menu. Oh, it's more money stuff. Jamie, that funds one student for a whole year. Am I going to do it? Of course I am. Oh, my God, he's doing the speech from Schindler's list. But also it's such a weird defense, because like whatever, if you don't want to buy the eight dollar fucking beans on toast, don't buy the eight dollar beans on toast. These sorts of things don't really bother me that much. It just seems like rich people dumb shit and I'm a cheapskate. So I would just never go to this restaurant anyway. This is where we start to get into bitch eating crackers territory. I'm like, why are you monitoring his menus? I don't really care. I don't give a shit. But I will say the classicism stuff also sort of seeps into how he shows up politically in January of 2022. He stages this protest outside of number 10 Downing Street because of what he calls the government's U-turn on obesity policies. Quote unquote. Oh, I remember this. What do you remember about this protest, Michael? Wasn't this a whole Boris Johnson getting COVID and being like, if I wasn't so fat, I wouldn't have had this problem or something. And then they were going to do a bunch of stuff and they just didn't do it or something. Sort of. I feel like you're being nice and I'm totally wrong. No, you're not totally wrong. You're not totally wrong. So Boris Johnson gets COVID. He has all of this messaging about how like this wouldn't have happened if I weren't fat. So therefore we have to have a quote unquote obesity plan. Jamie Oliver in January 2022, the government, he says, is doing a quote unquote U-turn on their obesity policies. And the thing that he is mad about the policy in question is that the government had pledged to restrict higher calorie foods in supermarket promotions of buy one, get one free items. OK, he's he's mad that people are getting high calorie foods for free. OK, so he stages this big protest outside 10 Downing Street and the theme for the protest is this policy is a total eaten mess. Oh. That's actually not that bad. Sorry, pardon me. Excuse me. Look, I am a man with a podcast that has never had a good tagline. If there's one thing I know, OK, OK, word play, you're like, wow, he really did a thing that we have not delivered. We've not achieved. So here's I'm going to send you a little screen grab from Sky News of this protest. The fuck. Oh my God. So it's Jamie Oliver in the front of a crowd and he's holding an eaten mess. Yeah, a giant like trifle dish full of eaten mess. But then one of the signs that somebody has in the background is give peas a chance, which is also good. There's Boris, keep your promise. That was bad. There are a number of signs when you sort of zoom out on these pictures of like this policy is an hashtag eaten mess. And they all have hashtag. Yeah, the hashtag doesn't work if it's not. If it's you're writing it in real life, you can't you can't click on a hashtag. In addition to and sort of overlaying this classism critique are some genuine sort of reportings about what I would consider to be wage theft. Oh, his restaurant chain, Jamie's Italian, which was sort of a high street chain closed in the 2010s with debts of 83 million pounds. And he gets big headlines at the time for closing his restaurants without having paid his staff. Oh, that's bad. That's real bad. They lay off forty four employees at Christmas. The last two sort of general critiques. Oh, my God, Mike, this has been the longest. Yeah, I know the longest table set. We're still table setting. This is so I texted you this morning and was like, oops, I need another hour. And then I was like, I need another. It's because I was sorting through that, like just like dozens and dozens and dozens of these stories being like, and he sucks for this. On top of all of that, he's kind of cringe. Ha ha ha ha ha. We we finally get to people's real beef with this person in 2012. This is so fucking funny, Mike. It's not like a like every corporate restaurant chain has shit like this, where they're like famously at Chick-fil-A, for example, if someone says, thank you, you don't say you're welcome. If they ask you for something, you don't say no problem. You just say it's my pleasure. Really? Yes, absolutely. Oh, I've never been to Chick-fil-A. Oh, look at you. I don't think we have it in Seattle. We have one in Oregon and I went one time and then I was like, sorry, this is the reason that people are so worked up about like, oh man, I love gay people, but that chicken is so good. I'm like, it's a fast food chicken sandwich. Especially in a world of Popeyes chicken sandwiches, get out of town. So in 2012, a tweet goes up. It gets picked up by media. That is allegedly a list of words that servers at Jamie Oliver's restaurants are supposedly required to use. OK, I am sending you a link to a piece from Eater. OK, has the list in it. Oh, man. OK, it says servers at Jamie Oliver restaurants told to use words like scrummy, slamming, wicked. I saw this list of words and I was like, immediately transported to the like pieces of flair scene. Yeah, yeah, totally. If you're going to subject people to this, pay them like $100,000 a year. Oh, God. What? I just noticed the third entry on this list. Pimp. This food is pimp. Yeah, it says it's just a list. It says melt in mouth, fresh pimp, juicy, legendary, messy magic dollop. Whatever. Silky, wicked, radical treasure. It could not be more 2000s if it. Yes, I know exactly. Remember when the word deadly was going around as like cool? Like, oh, that's deadly. The new album is deadly. I was trying to make Malignant happen for a while. That thing is Malignant. So mad that it never come. Anyway, it's never too late. It's never too late. One of the things that is cut off from this list are some other phrases, including proper rustic. Oh, yeah, that that's hella artisanal. That's homemade, no cap for real for real. Mega is on the list. And so is scrummy. Yeah, that's something British people say, even though it sounds like an STD. Boy, oh, fuck. This is like calling it Crimbo, not Christmas Crimbo. What's happening here? What are you guys doing? You know what I've started to spot in the wild lately is unfortunate. Oh, I can't make it on Thursday. Unfortunate. You really saved yourself a lot of time by shortening out. I mean, I think the headline about all of the Jamie Oliver stuff is he is a polarizing dude. Yes, people really love him or they really hate him. This honestly just seems kind of like standard to me. Yeah, he sort of becomes famous as this kind of every man, working class guy, making fancy food, and then eventually he becomes like a multimillionaire and a giant empire. And of course, that's going to attract scrutiny. Yes. And like most public figures and most corporations do not hold up to scrutiny. I think you're in a similar place that I was at this point in the research. You're taking me on a journey. None of them are get this guy off our TVs immediately, kind of shit necessarily. Right. Right. It's a tale as old as time that like dudes like this get to make big mistakes that would absolutely end the careers of people who had less power and less privilege than him. And yet he just gets more money. He just gets more famous, right? Like all of these things just sort of keep accruing and accruing and accruing. Right. Question. How does he generally deal with these things? Because of course, people are going to fuck up as public figures, whatever. Does he just like apologize? Like, yeah, I shouldn't have done the empire toast. It was fucking cringe. I'm really sorry. Or is he like weird about like pushing back against his critics and all this kind of stuff? He gets really defensive. And I think that's part of what sets people off. Yeah. There's a quote that he gives at one point where he's like, sometimes I think it would actually be easier to be somebody like Gordon Ramsay. Whose persona is like a miserable bastard. I think he's correct about that, honestly. I think he's right. But he's saying it after he's talking about like wage theft. Yeah. After he's like, he's using it as a defense. Yeah. And you're like, I think you're right. But I don't think that's the main issue here. Yeah. So those are the general critiques of Jamie Oliver. OK. We're about to dive in to Jamie's school dinners and Jamie's ministry of food. His two UK shows about feeding kids. Both of which I've seen. You've seen both of them. Yeah. Back in my Jamie Oliver days. I mean, this would have been like more than 10 years ago, though. I mean, I saw him when they when they aired. I'll tell you what, I have not because that shit has been scrubbed from the Internet. Wait, really? Even if you have a VPN, even if you're willing to pay for it, even if even if you can find little clips, but you cannot find the whole shows. It's wild. That and Plandemic are the two that are just scrubbed from the Internet. Plandemic, you can get at their website. It's actually the easiest thing to get. You just can't get on YouTube. No way. I want to sort of take you through a little bit of the genesis of school meals in the UK and sort of how they like what the policies around those have looked like. Primary school, like just as education, isn't made mandatory in the UK until 1870. It was not uncommon at that point for students to go to school underfed or just unfed entirely, particularly poor and working class kids. By 1880, this becomes enough of a known problem that they actually start piloting free school meals. And the first free school meals are served to poor folks and students in Bradford. The meal is just straight up porridge. That's oatmeal and bread. OK, the cost was limited to one penny per student according to the independent. In today's money, that'd be about 37 pence. By 1906, a liberal government passed the Education Provision of Meals Act, which allowed local governments to serve free school meals. Most of them ultimately did not provide those free meals. And by the start of World War Two, you know, decades later, only half of local schools in the UK offered free school meals. Again, this is just like allowing people to do it. Should they so choose? And many of them do not so choose. In 1944, a new law was passed requiring schools to feed all children, not just low income kids, but like all kids. They also had nutrition standards that required them to provide 40 percent of the kids daily protein and 33 percent of their daily calories. That usually looked like steak, two veg and a rhubarb crumble, which sounds so fucking good. Yeah, we got hamburger and fries for $1.25. We got Tater Tot Tuesdays. Oh, yeah, I remember what it talks to. I have like not eaten Tater Tot since. What? That's such a like school food for me. Like in my mind, turkey tetrazini and Tater Tot are like school food and cannot be consumed elsewhere. Turkey tetrazini? I've never seen that on a menu anywhere else in my entire life. I met, there are a couple of foods I met for the first time in college. We did not have turkey tetrazini at school. So I saw that for the first time at college and I was like, what the fuck? Is this fancy ass name for this goopy ass? Dude, it's like prison food. It is good. Midwest-y food. Yeah. The other thing I met for the first time at college was I went through. There was like a little sandwich bar. You know, there's like all the savory stuff and then also the sweet stuff for making sandwiches. And I was like, guys, somebody really fucked up. They put some marshmallow fluff out. Oh, I was going to school in New England and they were like, it's a fluffer nutter. And I was like, what are you talking about? And I absolutely thought that people were pranking me that they went to school with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich. Dude, I still think that's a prank. Candy sandwich. I feel like it's something like rainbow parties where it's something that like there's a name for it, but nobody's ever actually done it. And like nothing will convince me otherwise. In 1971, Margaret Thatcher is around. She removed free milk from schools. This is sort of the beginning of the erosion of the school lunch program. Just a fucking nightmare of a person. So she gets this nickname in the press that is Thatcher the Milk Snatcher. It is fully just like taking fucking milk away from poor children. Yes. Just like cartoon evil. By 1980s Thatcher passes her Education Act, which ended the requirement to provide school meals. Of course. From here on out, only kids whose parents were on benefits or income supplements qualified for school meals. Of course. That is a really, really low income threshold. And also it stigmatizes the kids because if it's only the poor kids, like it basically announces to all of your classmates that you are the poor kid who doesn't have to pay for school lunch. And actually they later pilot like within the last, I don't know, 15 years, they piloted a free school lunch program again in the UK. And they found that uptake of school lunches was higher amongst students in all income brackets when it was free for everyone. There's also there's something that comes up in America too, where it's there's something so fucking weird about this thing where we are providing children with free education to the tune of billions of dollars. And then you're like, these freeloaders want to lunch. Yeah. And then it's like, oh, but feeding them is like where we draw the line and they have to fucking pay for it. And it's like, it's so it's like, why? Like, why is this the fucking hill we want to die on? Like we don't charge kids to ride the school bus. So in 1986, the Social Security Act passes. That may seem unrelated, but because meals, school meals are now means tested, right? And like tied to an income level and a level of benefits. They're cutting people off of benefits, which means that the kids of those people are losing access to free school meals. Right. So as a result of this Social Security Act, half a million kids from low income families lost access to free school meals. The thing is, you've stacked the deck because now compared to Margaret Thatcher, Jamie Oliver seems fine. Yeah. He hasn't taken food from millions of children. He's not a political super villain. Yeah. The the way stuff doesn't seem so bad now. Without that national mandate to provide free meals, the systems around food shifted really dramatically throughout the 1980s and 90s in Britain. Schools aren't funded the way that they need to be at any point in this. Certainly not school food programs. So there's kind of a race to the bottom price wise that happens, right? Where schools are like, oh fuck, our federal mandate went away, which means that some amount of federal funding went away, which means we got to get this shit on the cheap. Right. And this is also when a famed star slash villain, depending on who you ask, of UK school food comes around, the Turkey Twizzler. Oh, God, yes. This was a big thing in the show. This was a big thing in the show. We'll talk about the Turkey Twizzler in a minute. Oh my God, do you know what I remember about the West Virginia one, the version of this that he did in America? What? There was a whole thing where it was like kids were bringing lunchables to school, but the show had to bleep the word lunchable. I don't know what the legality is or if they were just like two chicken shit, but it was like Jamie went on this big long rant about like kids being fucking lunchables to school because they're so unhealthy. But it was like they're bringing a school, but you could tell he was saying lunchable. They replaced a bunch of it with packed lunch as a person who just just watched it. They dubbed it. There is such funny ADR in the US one. It's so funny. That's like remember when you used to watch Die Hard on TV and it would be like it would be like Yippee Ki-Yay, terrible person. Melon farmers. Yeah. By this point in the early 2000s, nutritional standards for school meals in the UK have been pretty well decimated, right? They're not non-existent, but they are a shell of their former selves. That's when Jamie's school dinners premieres. Jamie's school dinners is a four episode docu series that airs on the BBC in early 2005 and February and March of 2005. It is set at Kidbrook Comprehensive School in Greenwich, which is a borough of London. Comprehensive schools are sort of like US public schools. The daily budget for students at Kidbrook was 37 pence per child per day. Adjusted for inflation, that is functionally the same budget as those 1880s meals in Bradford. He gets into the schools. He does this sort of song and dance that he ends up doing at several other schools. This is part of the US one as well. He revamps the school menu. He has a day where the existing school menu goes head to head with his new healthy menu. Right. And all the kids pick the foods they know. Aw, shucks. And he's like, OK, well, then we just have to keep going. We got to make even better healthy, quote unquote healthy food. Weirdly, almost every meal that I see him serve in these clips and includes like a green salad with plain vinaigrette as one of the options. And I'm like, buddy, in what world did you think six year olds were going to be like, yum, yum, eat it up? Get him some like carrots or something, like some like nice roasted veggies. You could do some make a stir fry that has vegetables in it with a good sauce. Like there's a bunch of ways to do this. A like French style, like dressed, green salad is like maybe not the like easy entry point. I'm a 40 year old man and I would skip that. So one of the most famous images that comes out of this is not only of students sort of rebelling against the menu, but of parents. I'm sending you a picture. Oh, I know what this is going to be. You do. I do because this is such a big deal in the British media. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it is. This is this fucked up thing where like parents would pass their kids candy bars like through the school fence. Yeah, people report different things. This one appears to be burgers. People say other passing chips. OK, whatever it is, it's like foods that those kids shouldn't be having to the point that there are like daily male pieces about the woman who is foregrounded, the mom. OK, in this picture being like now her kids are fat now what? And you're like, oh my god. If parents want to send their kids to school with whatever food they have, that honestly seems fine to me, like whatever. But it's like if kids are in your care, you should be feeding them healthy stuff. That's not fucking deranged. But it's weird that these became stories. Like I feel like the right wing media was like really against him like doing this in this way that like how dare this celebrity medal. But it's also like he's trying to get kids to eat fruits and vegetables. Are you really fucking against this? I think another thing that happened in Jamie's school dinners and this also happens in the US version. He is dramatically increasing the workload of school cooks and then sort of characterizing them as sticks in the mud and or lazy. Yeah, they object so strenuously that some of them threaten to resign. To be fair, having some fucking reality show person coming in and fucking cameras in my job. Yes, I feel like I would also rebel against this 100 percent. And it's like some dude with a bunch of money telling you without a bunch of money and resources, how to fucking do it. Yeah, he'd be like, give me a break, dude, get in town. It also shows the extent to which these problems are so entrenched that even somebody with the clout of Jamie Oliver can't really come in and fix them. Right. Because on some level, yeah, you want to be feeding the kids healthier food, but it's really not a problem of like the lunch ladies being better. It's like a much broader problem of like they should be hiring more lunch ladies and having different training. And it's like, you just can't solve this stuff by berating people in like the school kitchen. Can you solve it with a boot camp for school cooks run by the catering division of the British army? Is that what they did in the show? They bring in the catering division of the British army to show them how to cook large amounts of food efficiently. Oh my fucking god. As I learned this, I was like, ah, yes, the famously delectable food of the British army. Hell first. Now I get why this is taken off the internet. This is really bad. I do not remember all of this like problematic shit, probably because I was really problematic back then. Sure. Well, so here's the other thing and they really don't like they sort of acknowledge it in the shows themselves, but they never really dig in on it. He just fucking explodes the budget. Oh, right, of course. He just blows the fuck. He's not making these meals for 37 pence. He's just not. Right. He's making much more expensive foods and is working folks really hard without any additional extra staff or pay. And then he's like, look how easy it is. And people are like, I'm tired. I'm not getting paid more and we don't have the money for this shit. Yeah. And that's the whole fucking point is that people would be doing better meals if they had the resources. You can't just come in and be like, you should make better meals without the resources to match. As part of the show, one of the things that happens on the show is that he confronts a dude from one of the nation's largest distributors of school foods. It's called scholar rest or school arrest. They're the ones who make turkey twizzlers. OK. A turkey twizzler is like a chicken nugget kind of thing, but instead of being in boot or oval shape, right? It is in a corkscrew sort of shape. It looks like a little pig's tail. It is a mainstay of UK school meals at this point. Yeah. It's like a deep fried breaded, like turkey thing. Turkey thing. It is worth noting that turkey twizzlers are a distinctly classed food in the UK. I would think about for a US analog, I might think about Mountain Dew. Oh, is that classed? If you say Mountain Dew, there's like a gender. There's a race. There's a class. There's like a kind of person that comes up. Really? Is there I was not aware of this Mountain Dew at all. Do you not think about this? Holy shit. I used to drink like three Mountain Dews a day. So are they are they from five foot four gay men? Is that the way that they're? No, I mean, I think Mountain Dew is often used in like political cartoons and shit like that to denote like a stupid poor person as a member of the drinking Mountain Dew community. Wow, my people. The response from the company is really funny and silly. It's always fascinating to me when terrible actors appropriate anti diet rhetoric or sort of like wind up using it. The company said in a statement quote, we believe that there is no one food that is bad for you and it is the balance of food you eat that makes for a good or bad diet. Oh, I've seen this. They're doing sort of like an all foods fit sort of approach. Hashtag all foods matter here. I'm going to send you a little example of the way that people were talking about Turkey Twizzlers in the media following this show. OK, it says one third Turkey, two thirds Twizzler. The product contains Turkey, 34 percent water, pork fat, rust, coating, and then it lists like 4000 fucking ingredients, vegetable oil, turkey skin, salt, wheat flour, dextrose, stabilizer, mustard, yeast extract, antioxidants. Hey, it's good for you. Herb extract, spice extract and color. So just like a bunch of shit. It's like this this list of ingredients is probably like, I don't know, 25 things. This appears in like every article about Turkey Twizzlers at the time. People are just like, get a load of this list of ingredients. Yeah, it is doing this really facile, really common critique of foods at the time. This is sort of the quote unquote, Franken foods era, right? It's easy to go. These are scientific and therefore sort of foreign sounding names. Right. The implication of stuff like this is that if you don't recognize the name of an ingredient, it is inherently sinister, right? And also harmful to your health. Yeah. Right. But there's not any real analysis of like this thing is in it at this quantity, which is known to have these effects. Like people are not doing that. They're just like, look at this fucking load of shit. Yeah. Also, the thing is when you have to feed kids for fucking 37p, right, you're going to have food with a bunch of like fillers in it. Yeah. This is the output of like the choices you've made politically. So the company that makes Turkey Twizzlers ends up first cutting the fat content in Turkey, they're like, OK, OK, OK, we'll make them lower fat, which is like a very 2000s thing, right? Yeah. There's a quote from the managing director that I'm like, you're a piece of shit who runs a giant food company, but also you're not wrong in this one instant. I'm going to send it to you. The then managing director, David Joel, insisted at the time that the company had been unfairly treated. Turkey is the least fatty of all meats, he said. The new Twizzlers have only a third of the fat level of the average pork sausage. Yet you don't hear Jamie Oliver telling people not to eat sausages. This is true. That's like a fair point. That is a fair point, right? Like pork sausages, a real cornerstone of British cuisine, right? Yeah. Pork sausages would have been served in his parents' pub, right? Those are like OK foods, right? And Jamie Oliver is not telling people not to eat sausage. And in fact, in a number of these schools, he goes in and he's like in the US when he goes, oh, they're having pizza for breakfast. And he says at one point, it's not so much what's in the pizza. It's the fact that it's pizza for breakfast. It's sending all the wrong signals. OK. And then he goes in and makes a meal. And one of the first things that he makes is pasta with red sauce and cheese. So basically pizza. But pizza with boiling water instead of an oven, right? Yeah. He's doing this sort of very two thousands and twenty tens thing of like we got to handle the number of fat kids. We there have to be fewer fat kids. Therefore, just throw shit at the wall. And the shit to throw at the wall is the stuff that feels right to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels right to you that these sort of like foods that are processed in this way and that have this long list of ingredients are worse than a pork sausage, which is also very processed. I mean, the thing is I'm actually like, I don't think kids should be eating chicken nuggets, which is basically what turkey twisters are. Like at school, I also don't think they should have like chocolate milk at school. I think they should be getting like very nutritious, well made meals. I also feel like another like very early 2000s thing about this is that there was this fantasy that you could solve these problems without investing extra money. Yeah, I feel like the school lunches problem is mostly a problem of money. This is the credit where credits do section. This show really leads to some real change in the UK. On the show, he meets with Tony Blair, who's the prime minister at the time. He secures two hundred and eighty million pounds for school meals. That is genuinely a huge deal. It's really good. It shouldn't take a celebrity having a TV show to do it. Yes. But it happened. And that's a good that's a net benefit, right? It also leads to the establishment of a National Children's Food Trust, which was operational from 2005 until 2017. There's also some conflicting data on the impact of Jamie's school dinners and that whole sort of shift. OK, there is one study over the course of a year that shows that more students, like slightly more students, it's like five or six percent more students get kicked into a higher grade bracket. Right. Like they're sort of like generally scoring higher. Then they were. But it's small. Yeah. And then there's a bunch of other studies that show some backsliding like almost immediately. Oh, OK. So the effects on student performance, I think, are disputed and murky at best. One of the great finds in my research on Jamie's school dinners and Ministry of Food was a phenomenal piece from a former student at Kidbrook that was published in Eater London, OK, who was like, I was at this school when this show was filmed. OK, one of the famous sort of scenes in the show is him showing vegetables to kids and them guessing incorrectly as to what those vegetables are. And he's like, oh, no, I remember that. Yeah, Peter, he says, quote, in another memorable piece of sneering superiority, friends of mine were pulled into a classroom and asked to identify vegetables. What the editors decided to air was a blooper reel of misidentified broccoli edited together to make it look like the burger fiends had never seen fresh food. The reality was that there were students in the room who identified produce correctly. But in most cases, these examples were not included in the montage, which aired, which is like, of course, race. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where they like where they walk around a mall or whatever they ask Americans, like, can you find Iraq on a map? Yeah, it's like they only use the times that people can't do it to be like, oh, Mary, look how dumb Americans are. Like it is very standard issue. Reality TV, Antics, sort of cherry picking of like the most dramatic shit. I don't want to like over blow it on that front, but it's stepping into a context of classism that is reinforcing really regressive, shitty ideas about poor and working class people. This is such an amazing example of how like when you have a real social problem, a celebrity and a reality show are literally the worst ways to address it. Because you would imagine like a documentary about the same thing that would have that would have actually like educated the audience. Whereas a reality show, of course, they're going to fucking edit it in this way. Like, of course, they're going to set up these fucking stunts. There's a scene in the West Virginia season where he like opens up this mom's fridge and freezer and there are just like a bunch of frozen pizzas in it. And he's like, this is disgusting. I can't believe you're feeding your kids this. You're killing your kids by feeding them this stuff. And he then cooks all of the food. He fries all the corn dogs. He bakes all the pizzas and he piles them up on their kitchen table. And it's like, look at this. Look how disgusting it is. Look how it's like a month's worth of food, Jamie. Anything is going to be a big pile on the table if you cook it all at once. Right. And he's like, it's all brown. It's all the same color and. But this is a very frequent interaction that he has on each of these shows. And actually, we're going to watch one of them from Jamie's Ministry of Food, which is the one in Yorkshire. OK, so in Ministry of Food, Jamie Oliver says that he wants to make rather them the culinary capital of the UK. And the way that he's going to do that is by teaching its residents how to cook. OK, we're going to watch a little clip. OK, clip, clip of one of the many trips that Jamie Oliver makes into the homes of like low income moms. OK, God, yeah, sorry. To be really bleak. Sorry, pal. Natasha has never cooked a meal for her children, Kaya and Robbie. Dinner is nearly always a cabal. Give me the low down then, because like the fact that you've sort of let us turn up tells me that you're open minded and. I'm sick of this. You might. Yeah, right. So you're sick of the junk food. You're sick of the repetition. Right. In what sort of way? Well, she's not healthy. She's been in twice for a tea taken out because they've got to have gone back. Right. What's your favourite pop? That's pepper. Doctor Pepper will love it, don't we? And what happens if you don't do nothing about it? What? Where do you see it going? I see her being obese. I see her being really, really unhealthy. Really. And it's not good. So how much are you on a budget? To be honest, if you're spending 12 quid, 10 quid a night, seven days a week, that's 70 quid. That's quite a lot of money, actually, just on food. Say you only get eight spend a week, as it is. Yeah. So you get eight quid a week. I get eight quid a week. I'm on benefits. You're on benefits. So as you can tell, I'm spending more than what I get. I don't know. I just know I can't keep doing it. I really don't want to do it. I don't want to do it ever again. I want to learn how to cook and just be healthy. Yeah. This is the one cup of all this thing happens in every episode that I was able to see. There was a great op-ed that I read about this that was just like when you are this poor, your entire life is no. Yeah. Your kids are having a birthday. Can you have a birthday party? No. A new movie is coming out and you want to see it. Can you see it? No. Food is like one of the only affordable pleasures that people have when they have absolutely like deeply limited access to almost everything else in their lives. Right. His response to this isn't to go, oh, holy shit, you're on benefits and you only get 80 pounds a week. Yeah. You got to get a cooking class. Yeah. This is a show that's produced for an audience. And this plays into a longstanding dynamic of more class privileged people sort of leering at what poor people eat. Dude, I know it feels really Victorian. This is like a fundamentally conservative approach and fundamentally like not an upstream approach. Right. It says it's talking about systems and it's proposing once again, as so many things on this show have, an individual solution to a systemic problem. There's also an interesting shift in him, too, because the first show seemed like it at least somewhere acknowledged that like this is a resources issue and we need to go right to the top and like talk to Tony Blair about giving more money to this. But then by the time we get to ministry of food, it seems like he's basically abandoned that and it's like, let's teach people to cook. It just feels like he is sort of losing the thread. And or he's following the thread of reality TV and losing the thread of like policy solutions, right? And like actually fixing the problem, because ultimately his job is to make a TV show. Yeah. At the end of the day, the people who are paying him are people who are paying him for a TV show, right? In the same way that like our bottom line is to release episodes for our listeners, which are really good. Which we're really good at, which we've never failed. So fucking good at. We just like our schedule is perfect. So following his TV success in the UK, Jamie Oliver follows the James Corden path. Yeah, comes on over to the US, right? They're like, look, we have poor people in America that we also love to gawk at. Let's send let's send Jamie to West Virginia. The first season focuses on Huntington, West Virginia, which is the fattest city in America, right? Isn't that why they choose it? It was listed as America's unhealthiest city. Oh, who decides that? And he's like, it's a government statistic based on death rates. Oh, really? What? But also there is like it is true that at this point, Huntington had the nation's highest rates of heart disease, diabetes, that the highest rates of seniors who had lost their teeth. Oh, God, this show really sort of opened the door to some very naked anti-fatness and classism and made way for the time honored tradition of people outside of Appalachia sort of gawking and telling them how they're doing it wrong. Yes. So Jamie Oliver heads to an elementary school in West Virginia and essentially does Jamie's school dinners all over again. I remember this. He's like berating the lunch ladies and then there's one lunch lady who's like, you're a celebrity, you don't care. And he starts like crying. It's like, I swear on my children that I care. Right. He says, I swear on my children's lives. And she just shakes her head and goes, don't do that. Like I was so hard on the school cooks team. I was like, yeah, man. At one point he says, so they get pizza for breakfast and chicken nuggets for lunch. Welcome to America. Oh, nice. He's also doing the whole like Americans are gross and fat and dumb thing. Also, I make fun of Britain constantly, but also like the problems that Britain has are the same as the problems that America has. So I mean, no position to like talk shit. And Jamie is similarly in no position to talk shit. So he does his usual sort of set of things. He does the thing where he shows kids vegetables and they can't say what they are. He does the thing where he takes there's like a dump truck of fat and he empties it into a dumpster in front of a bunch of parents and kids and are like, this is how much fat you're eating. It's like Oprah's wagon of fat on steroids. But now like two decades of reality TV have gone by. Everything has to be fucking amplified. He does a bit where he shows kids how he says chicken nuggets are made. What he does is he butchers the chicken. He takes off the breast. He takes off the legs. He takes off the wings, blah, blah, blah. He puts the whole chicken carcass bones and all and sort of trimmings into a food processor. He strains out the solids and ends up with this bowl of like pink goo, right? And then he adds in flour. He calls it stabilizers and I was like, that's just flour. Yeah, yeah, flour. And then he's like, and then you have to add a bunch of flavorings and spices. So it doesn't taste terrible. And then you get to this very famous clip of him asking these kids, do you think that's good for you or bad for you? And the kids all go bad. And he goes, would you still eat it? And they go, yeah, like all of their hands go up. Like 100 percent of them. And then he says, why would you eat it if you know it's bad for you? And one of the kids says, we're just hungry. Yeah, I wonder if this is the real difference between Britain and America because the famous thing about this is that like the kids are supposed to be like, you grow snow. He leads into it by saying, I'm going to do an experiment and this experiment works every time. The kids are supposed to say, no, we don't want to eat it because it's like he's put all this gross shit into it. But then I wonder if the real linchpin of this is just like, are the kids hungry or not? Are you doing this at lunch time and they haven't eaten? This is a real marshmallow test moment. It's worth noting that in addition to being totally fucking hilarious, this moment also leads to a humongous lawsuit. Wait, really? A one point two billion dollar lawsuit. What? Filed by beef products incorporated. Of course. They're a processor in South Dakota. They sue ABC. ABC ends up settling the suit for one hundred and seventy seven million dollars. That was always easier to just write a check, I guess. When you watch it now, there is a very clear ADR insert of Jamie Oliver saying, luckily, this is not the way they're made in America. It's so clumsy. It's clearly like the room tone is all wrong. His voice is all wrong. I'm like, buddy, you're running this ship like a podcast. Get it together. Yeah, this is like awesome. We have to fact check something. Like everything completely changes. Like a YouTuber who cuts in and is like, editing me. Yeah. There is also an incredibly funny scene that happens at the opening of the show where he goes on a local radio show and the DJ is like super antagonistic and says things to him like, what are you going to make us do? We don't want to sit around and eat lettuce all day. OK. And at one point in the radio interview, he goes, you got to tell us what to do. Who made you king? And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He unfortunately went on Paul Revere radio. And this is a thing. It's both very funny, but also it's sort of a hallmark of these shows that he is framing this up as the core problem is that people know what's good for them and they just won't do it. Yeah. At one point, he talks to the food services director for the school district and is like, why are you feeding these kids such terrible food? It's unconscionable. And she's like, well, we have to meet USDA federal standards. And we have a really tight budget. And his response is genuinely, well, I just came here to feed kids. I didn't know I had to take a math test. Oh, my God. Like, why is it so complicated? He's like, OK, poindexter. You just got hundreds of millions of dollars from Tony Blair. You know that there will be math at some point. And also it's not a math test. She's just like, you have to serve a certain amount of protein and you have to serve a certain amount of starch. And like, yeah, this is not an uncommon thing. But he's like, oh, shucks, I'm just a guy who showed up and wanted to cook for some kids and you're giving me all these rules. Right. I'm just a guy who's made this my number one social issue for years now. You can't expect me to know what a budget is. Yeah, yes. The radio DJ becomes this sort of like recurring character in the show. And he's like, I got to get this guy on board. He's the biggest naysayer and I got to get him. Yeah, he takes the radio DJ to a funeral home to see where we've gotten with health in this country. And they talk to the funeral directors and they turn a corner. And then you just see a very large casket for a very fat person. It is filmed and presented as ludicrously large. The funeral director walks through how it won't fit into her. So you actually have to get a cargo van and none of the equipment that they have works with it. And I'm like, you're just saying that you're not prepared for fat people. Shouldn't they should be set up for fat people? In addition to that funeral home moment, he also does a whole personal stories segment. He brings in this young woman and her mom who says that her dad died of being overweight. Then she tells the story and she's like, he was so concerned with his own weight that he decided to go have gastric bypass. And then a week after gastric bypass, he passed out in the hall. They rushed him to the hospital and he died at the hospital. And I was like, oh, wow, I don't think that's a death of being fat. I think that's maybe a death of complications of a major surgery. Yeah, holy shit. That's actually a point against. Right. What you're arguing here, right? I think the darkest moment on the show. And this is where I was like, I need to stop watching and cry for a while. As with other shows, he picks sort of a family to like follow around and talk to about their food choices in this family. The dad is a trucker. The mom raises the three kids. All of the kids are fat. This is the house where he cooks all their frozen food and dumps it on the table and pushes this mom until she weeps about how she's like killing her kids, right? He takes their deep fryer and buries it in the backyard. And then he turns to the mom and he's like, you're a church going lady, right? Why don't we pray over it? And then later he tells the camera that he did that just for a bit of a laugh. It's like, I hate these people. They're like, Rose, he then takes this family to a doctor who tells them on camera and in front of their children that their sixth grade middle child may already have diabetes. That is the language that they use on the show. The doctor talks about all these things and he's like, well, that just means he's going to have amputations. He's probably going to go blind. Like he names all of these things that are possible outcomes of diabetes, but they are outcomes when diabetes is not managed or treated. Right. He is presuming and understanding that these are folks who will not have access to health care. Right. Yeah. And he's painting this like ghoulish picture. At this point, he hasn't even taken a blood sample. He hasn't even run like an A1C test. He hasn't done anything. He's just like, oh, he's got this ring around his neck that can sometimes be characteristic of elevated sugar level. So he might already have diabetes. And if he did, right, these are all the things that would happen. He says, quote, we're talking about shortening their life by 30, 40 years. They may be dying in their thirties. He says to a mom about her own kids in the absence of any test results. Yeah, they're doing this on camera for a show that's going to be prime time on ABC. And you just watch this kid wither and recede into him. Like you just watch the wave of shame take over him. And like the message is that what fat kids need is stigma. It's a scared straight thing, which is one of the least effective ways to motivate people to do fucking anything. Like it doesn't work for drugs. It doesn't work for food. It doesn't work for anything. And also if it's a kid, that kid doesn't have a lot of control over what he's eating anyway. Jamie Oliver is using like a kind of rhetoric around school food and parents. He uses some of that in a New York Times piece that runs at the time called Jamie Oliver puts America's diet on a diet. OK, here's an example of the kind of rhetoric. I just sent you a quote. It says, we came across a table of crispy cream donuts. They're a treat there to be loved, he said, but start having them every day job done. It's harsh to say, but these parents, when they bend to the doctor and keep feeding their kids inappropriate food, that is child abuse. Same as a cigarette burn or a bruise. Dude, right? Just tone it down, Jamie. It's also worth talking about the results in Huntington. We talked a little bit about the results in the UK. In Huntington, after this all went through, seventy seven percent of kids who were part of West Virginia schools who were part of this program said that they didn't like or eat lunch anymore. Oh, many of the kids were just straight up throwing the lunch away. Right. So there's like a couple of problems there, right? One is this is a town with a high level of poverty, which means a lot of those kids are reliant on those meals, right? Like that's how some of those kids are just getting fed, period. And the other problem is that because no one was buying lunches, staff started to get laid off. It started to be seen as like a less essential position. And they're really strapped for cash, so they're not going to pay people to make lunches that kids aren't eating. On top of all of that, his menu changes didn't meet the USDA standards and was way higher than the budget that they had. Oh, so you did the same thing where you just like he yada, yada, yada over like the actual constraints they're operating under. Right. And he's like, look at how much better it can be. And it's like, yeah, if you ignore the law and money, I guess. It's actually really easy to feed kids if you don't have to think about those two things. Totally. Correct. Sure, dude, whatever. Yeah. There's a couple of things to know about sort of the ending of the show. It ends with a big celebration in Huntington. They do like a big high production value, sort of like festival in the town. At that big celebration, they get a gift of $80,000 from US Foods, which is like a big food supplier to schools in the US. And they're like, we're so proud to present this giant check for 80 grand. And then you find out, first of all, that it's 80 grand. And second of all, that it's meant to be split amongst all the schools in the county. There are 26 schools in Cabell County, West Virginia. So that is a one time payment of three grand. Right. And then if you break it down like kid by kid, it's like 75 cents. It's not anything. And it's again, one time payment, right? Right. And they're like, oh, my God, what a victory. Rascal Flats concert. How much did they pay Rascal Flats more than 80 K? They should have just given that to the fucking kids. Jamie Oliver is very proud to tell the camera, you know, how much they did this gig for? Nothing. Because they get it. Because they want the fat kids to be thin. He wrote because they're going on ABC and it's a press gig. Yeah, because they're getting a shitload of free promotion. Great. At the end of the final episode of the US one, Jamie like receives this like reporting from the US that he's like, oh, my gosh, they're trying to go back to processed foods in Huntington, West Virginia. I can't believe it after all the work that we put in. And then I looked up the article that they're referencing and they also end up saying this on the show. They're like, yeah, we had a year's worth of food sitting in our freezer that we had paid for and this dude just rolled in. And was like, make everything different. And they're like, we already paid for this food. Right. They were talking about like, what if we just do it on Fridays? It's like chicken nuggets and fries or what? Like, how do we get rid of this food? How do we use it up and not contribute to further food waste? He's like, well, what do you need in order to do that? He's they're like, we need them to take the food back or to trade it out for healthier food or something like we got to work out a deal here. This is not like an issue of like, we're just being willful. And then he leaves that meeting and comes out and tells the camera, imagine being an alcoholic and saying it's all right to have a drink on a Friday. Again, people have been like, there are real constraints here. We need to figure out what to do with this food. We would like to have other food. We would like to have the staff to cook it and to pay for it. We would love to have all of that money. We do not have all of that money. He seems to think that people want to feed the kids shitty food. I feel like it's like they're they're they just don't have a lot of other options. Yeah. Then he just keeps being like, well, you should have other options then. Like, yeah, they should. 80 pounds a week on benefits. So is the epilogue to this that everything just reverted back to where it was? Pretty much like a lot of stuff is just sort of back to where it was before. It made a big splash and made some short term changes, mostly for like a few years at a time. That funding, that Tony Blair funding was not necessarily like renewed at the same. Yeah, I know. That's always the problem with these things. Yeah, I live in a town where every two years we're passing a new library levy. Yes, it's like, save our libraries. And it's like, buddies, we should just agree that libraries need money and we should just give them the money that they need. What? Dude, Seattle had a fucking referendum of like to build a sea wall down on the waterfront so like the city wouldn't slide into the sea. And it got like 75 percent of the vote. It was like, should the city have like a giant disaster before that? And like some people were like, not saying yes, but I'm not saying no. So the the place that I wanted to like leave us for this episode, living by his own values and his own code, I think Jamie Oliver really thinks he's doing the right thing. One problem is he has come to that decision about doing the right thing that focuses on fat people and fat kids, and he simply will not listen to them. Right, right. He's not listening to fat people. He's not listening to poor folks. He's not listening to black and brown people. All of these folks who have really legit critiques of him and really legit requests of him. Right. He is sort of either begrudgingly fulfilling them or getting kind of defensive or just shutting down and refusing to acknowledge it. On some level, I think the defense of him with this stuff is that he is up against like massive systemic barriers, right? The fact that one fucking celebrity with one TV show couldn't fix the problem of like school lunches in the UK. Well, like, yeah, of course, right? That's not how you're going to solve a problem like this. But also it seems like people for two decades have been telling him, yo, these problems are systemic. They are bigger than you. And he keeps just being like, well, I can solve them. And like doing basically the same thing over and over again. Right. Have you tried using a walk? Yeah. Maybe the people yelling at Jamie Oliver just need to put it in terms that he understands and be like, Jamie, if you could incorporate the realities of the United Kingdom into your work, that would be wicked, scrummy. I don't think that's correct. I've learned nothing.