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 like be kind of mean i'm guessing some british listeners will disagree it's very funny it's like whenever anybody asked me about like uh some country i haven't spent much time in like thailand i'm like oh uh 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 and you're like absolutely not that is not something you need in your life keep it moving the minute you asked i was like i i like tapped on my little keyboard i was like okay all caps i'm gonna need all caps for this answer no so but okay does does jamie oliver even have like a catchphrase i was gonna 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 oh that he'll call things like wicked or okay slamming welcome to maintenance 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 catch words i'm aubrey gordon i'm michael hobbs if you would like to support this podcast please subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon you can do that at patreon or you can subscribe through apple podcast 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 mike tell me what you know about jamie oliver he's 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 i was 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 really we talked about this before we were recording but like i have kind of a soft spot for jamie oliver because yeah 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 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 post-war era and he was like i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know 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 okay 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 would talk 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 immediately this was 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 and there's like public and private but they mean different things he starts off as a pastry chef at neil street restaurant and over time moves on to become the sous chef at the super acclaimed river cafe are you familiar with the river cafe this is in london 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 yeah 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 um which is his campaign to change school children's meals okay as a result of that they have a channel 4 viewers poll and they name him the most inspiring political figure of 2005 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 44 tv shows of more than one episode and 19 single episode specials he's almost like a twitch streamer at that point he's just on he's 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 gonna do jamie oliver and you were like oh cool influencer episode i was like yeah it'll be like a light little influencer episode okay no it was like gwyneth paltrow volumes of media that have been 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 and some of it i think is like as you would say we're in bitch eating 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 the coverage of themselves yes so we're gonna do a little rundown of some of the things that he has been criticized for okay and then we're gonna dig into our school dinners okay stuff one of his big critiques is he's been criticized many times for being a hypocrite okay 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 okay 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 a 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 the 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 okay for u.s 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 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 heinz 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 like why are you monitoring his menus i don't really care i don't give a shit but i will say the classism 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 you like wasn't this a whole uh 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 gonna 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 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 okay he's he's mad that people are getting high calorie foods for free okay 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 okay it's wordplay you're like wow he really did a thing that we have not delivered we've not achieved so here's i'm gonna 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 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 one's 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 hashtags 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 a lot of people saying that it's 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 44 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 so 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 oops i need another half hour 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 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 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 my man i love gay people but that chicken is so good i'm like it's a fast food chicken sandwich you get a hold of yourself especially in a world of popeyes chicken sandwich get out of town so in 2012 a tweet goes up it gets uh picked up by media that is allegedly a list of words that servers at jamie oliver's restaurants are supposedly required to use okay i am sending you a link to a piece from eater okay that has the list in it oh man okay 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 gonna subject people to this pay them like a hundred thousand dollars 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 like that thing is malignant i'm so mad that it never caught on 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 crimbo what's happening here what are you guys doing you know what i've started to spot in the wild lately is unforge oh i can't make it on thursday unforge you really saved yourself a lot of time i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm out of time by shortening that 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 like he sort of becomes famous as this kind of every man working class guy making fancy food and then eventually he becomes like a multi-millionaire 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 yes and like most public figures and most corporations do not hold up to scrutiny yes and like most public figures and most corporations do not hold up to 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 right 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 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 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 right and you're like i think you're right but i don't think that's the main issue yeah so those are the general critiques of jamie oliver 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 i mean i've seen both of them i've seen both of them i've seen both of them i mean i saw them 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 scrubbed on the internet plandemic you can get at their website it's actually arguably the easiest thing to get you just can't get it on 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 schools and they're not going to be able to do that because they're not going to be able to do 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 okay 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 ii 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 two veg two veg and a rhubarb crumble which sounds so fucking good yeah we got hamburger and fries for a dollar 25 we got tater tot tuesdays okay i remember i have like not eaten tater tots since what that's such a like school food for me like in my mind turkey tetrazzini and tater tots are like school food and cannot be consumed elsewhere turkey tetrazzini 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 tetrazzini at school okay i'm not sure if that's true i'm not sure if that's true i'm not 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 midwesty 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 fluffernutter 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 it's like cartoon evil by 1980 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 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 this 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 a 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 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 of course 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 he hasn't taken food from millions of children he's not a politician he's not a politician he's not a politician he's not a super villain yeah the uh the wage theft 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 rid of the food that's going to go to the 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 there was a whole thing where it was like kids were bringing lunchables to school but the show had to bleep the word lunchable yeah 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 bringing fucking lunchables to school because they're so unhealthy but it was like they're bringing beep to school but you could tell he was saying lunchable they replaced a bunch of it with packed lunch oh really as a person who just just watched it they dubbed it there is such funny adr in the u.s 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 melan 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 in 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 u.s 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 u.s one as well he revamps the school meals and he does this sort of song and dance that he gets into 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 oh shucks and he's like okay 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 gonna be like yum yum eat it up get him some like carrots or something like some like nice roasted veggies you could do so 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 likely dressed bitter green salad is like maybe not the like easy entry point i'm a 40 year old man and i 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 law but it's also about the fact that it's 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 gonna be you do i do because this is such a big deal in the british media yeah yeah yeah yeah 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 and chips okay whatever it is it's like foods that those kids shouldn't be having to the point that there are like daily mail pieces about the woman who is foregrounded the mom okay 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 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 i feel like the 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 u.s 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 job yes i feel like i would also rebel against this 100 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 you'd be like give me a break dude get out of town it also shows that 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 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 as i learned this i was like ah yes the famously delectable food of the army of the british army health first now i get why this was taken off the internet this is really bad i 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 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 okay 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 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 u.s 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 i used to drink like three mountain dews a day so are they from are they from five foot four gay men is that the way that they're no i mean i think mountain dew is often uh used in like a lot of places but i think it's like a kind of like a kind of like a kind of 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 okay it says one third turkey two thirds twizzler the product contains turkey 34 water pork fat rusk coating and then it lists like four thousand fucking ingredients vegetable oil turkey skin and then it lists like four thousand 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 and it is doing this really facile really common critique of foods at the time this is sort of the quote-unquote frankenfoods 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 right yeah 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 gonna have food with a bunch of like fillers in it yeah this is the output of like the 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 okay okay okay we'll make them lower fat which is like a very 2000s thing right yeah there's a quote from the you're a piece of shit who runs a giant food company but also you're not wrong in this one instant i'm gonna 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 corner stone of british cuisine right yeah pork sausages would have been served in his parents pub right those are like okay 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 u.s one 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 okay and then he goes in and makes a meal and one of the first things that he makes is a pizza and then he goes in and makes a meal is pasta with red sauce and cheese so basically pizza pizza with boiling water instead of an oven right yeah he's doing this sort of very 2000s and 2010s thing of like we gotta 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 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 twizzlers 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 280 million pounds for school meals that is genuinely a huge deal it's really good yeah it shouldn't take a celebrity having a tv show to do it yes but it happened and that's like 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 okay 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 than they were but it's small yeah and then there's a bunch of other studies that show some backsliding like almost immediately oh okay 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 kid brook that was published in eater london okay who was a former student at kid brook who was a former student at kid brook who was like i was at this school when this show was filmed okay 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 the inner piece 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 right 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 and 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 and sort of cherry picking of like the most dramatic shit i don't want to like overblow 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 can imagine like a a documentary about the same thing that would have It 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 is like, look at this. Look how disgusting it is. That'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 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. In Ministry of Food, Jamie Oliver says that he wants to make Rotherham 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, little clippy clip of one of the many trips that Jamie Oliver makes into the homes of like low income moms. OK, God. Yeah, sorry. It's going to be really bleak. Sorry, pal. Natasha has never cooked a meal. She has never had a meal in her life, but she has a lot of her children, Kaya and Robby. Dinner is nearly always a kebab. Give me the lowdown 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 rotted, they've gone bad. Right. What's your favorite pot? That's pepper. You don't do nothing about it. 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? Tight budget. Because to be honest, if you're spending 12 quid, 10 quid a night, seven days a week, that's 70 quid. I know. That's quite a lot of money, actually, just on food. So you only get £80 a week as it is. Yeah, so you get 80 quid a week. I get 80 quid. I'm on benefits. You're on benefits. Yep. 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. Place me so uncomfortable. 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. 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. He's like, you got to get a cooking class. Yeah. This is a show that's produced for an audience. Yeah. And this plays into it. 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. Right. 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. Right. In the same way that, like, our. Bottom line is to release episodes for our listeners, which we're really good at, which we're really good at, which we've never failed. So we just like our schedules. Perfect. So following his TV success in the U.K., Jamie Oliver follows the James Corden path. Yeah. Comes on over to the U.S., 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, somebody 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. They had 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. 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. They're so similar. I'm in 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 a 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 they're 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. He does a bit where he shows kids how he says chicken nuggets are made. What he does is he butchers a chicken. He takes off the breasts. 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. You're just adding 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% 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, ew, gross. No. 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 lunchtime and they haven't eaten? This is a real marshmallow test moment. Yeah. It's worth noting that in addition to being totally fucking hilarious, this moment also leads to a humongous lawsuit. Wait, really? A $1.2 billion lawsuit filed by Beef Products Incorporated. Of course. They're a processor in South Dakota. They sue ABC. ABC ends up settling the suit for $177 million. No way. So it was easier to draw. It was easier to 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 us when we have to fact check something. Come on. Like everything completely changes. Like a YouTuber who cuts out on the show. 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 gonna make us do we don't want to sit around and eat lettuce all day okay and at one point in the radio interview he goes you gotta tell us what to do who made you king and i was like oh yeah yeah he unfortunately went on paul revere radio yeah this is the 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 okay 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 who 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 gotta get this guy on board he's the biggest naysayer and i gotta get him yeah he takes the radio dj to a funeral home okay 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 in a hearse and 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 just be set up for fat people in addition to the fact that they're not prepared for fat people they just 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 and 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 that's actually a point against right what you're arguing here right i think the darkest moment on this 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 kids and he's like 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 gross he then takes this 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 gonna have amputations he's probably gonna 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 and he's painting this like ghoulish picture at this point he hasn't even taken a blood sample he hasn't even run oh 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 levels 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 30s 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 yeah one of the least effective ways to motivate people to do fucking anything like it 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 okay here's an example of the kind of rhetoric i just sent you a quote it's as we came across a table of crispy cream donuts they're a treat they're 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 this all went through 77 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 the kids aren't eating on top of all of that his menu changes didn't meet the usda standards oh and was way higher than the budget that they had oh so he did the same thing where he just like he yada yada yada's 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 oh my god it's like oh my god 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 eighty thousand dollars from u.s foods which is like a big food supplier to schools in the u.s 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 percentage right and then if you break it down like kid by kid it's like 75 cents it's nothing it's not anything and it's again one 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 80k 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 heroes because they're going on abc and it's a press gig because they're getting a shitload of free promotion great at the end of the final episode of the u.s one you're going to get a shitload of free promotion jamie like receives this like reporting from the u.s 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 right 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 yeah 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 but then he just keeps being like well you should have other options then it's like yeah they should have other options then it's like yeah they should have other options then it's 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 yeah 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 of the vote it was like should the city have like a giant disaster befall it and like some people were like i'm not saying yes but i'm not saying no yeah 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 the 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 uh 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 Bye.