"Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution"

Did anyone see Jamie Oliver's preview of his new show, "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" last night? I wasn't terribly hopeful going into it, but it was FANTASTIC! Jamie has challenged and improved the school lunches in his home country of England and he's come to America to try to do the same. He started with the town of Huntington, WV, as it was deemed by government statistics as the worst town for overall obesity and overall bad health. To say he was welcomed with opened arms would be a HUGE lie.

He is currently working with five "lunch ladies" in one of the area elementary schools. They took great offense at the term "lunch lady" and wanted to be known as cooks. But in my opinion, anyone, whether at school, restaurant, institution or home that only heats up food or reconstitutes food, isn't cooking. One lunch lady hung her attitude on the fact that in the LONG list of ingredients of everything Jamie was trying to point out as extremely processed, thus "not real" foods, the first ingredient was always the "real" food that the item was suppose to be. It wasn't pointed out that the one real food ingredient was followed by thirty other ingredients that the majority of us cannot pronounce or have a clue what is. Being a gluten and multiple other food-intolerant person, myself, I can attest that many, many things have wheat and milk added as fillers, so we are being hugely overdosed on some items we don't even realize would have those things in them. But I digress.

These ladies were nearly giddy when Jamie's first attempt at feeding the children baked chicken, roasted potatoes, salad and apples was a large failure. What few children chose this lunch, threw much of it out. Of course they did. They have had nothing but chicken nuggets and pizza their whole lives. And the school serves pizza for breakfast everyday. Jamie asked different children what they had for supper the night before and they unanimously said chicken nuggets, pizza, chicken tenders, etc. They are eating the same foods day in and day out, no matter where they are. Convenience items. Things we all throw at our kids when we have no time or energy to cook. By the time this preview show was over I likened feeding our children in this manner no better than opening a bag of feed and tossing on the ground for the chickens or slopping the pigs. Something that has to be done, but do it as quickly and easily as possible. I would hope we care more about our kids than the chickens and pigs.

"Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" actually premiers this Friday on ABC at 9pm ET. I challenge everyone to watch and be as grossed out as I was about the state of our diets and what we are feeding our children. We should be outraged and demand standards to change. If we don't not only are our children dying before we will, but their children, our grandchildren will die even younger. Our laziness and habits shouldn't be so self-important to kill future generations for no good reason.

Just Stopping In

Hi everyone! I just felt the need to stop in and say howdy! I really have been missing Biscotty's. My NaNoWriMo writing started out with a bang but has dwindled to just a fizzle by now. I haven't given up, though. My story plot and direction didn't have any. I do have some ideas and intend to hit it again in the morning. I have discovered that writing with family around and the weekends is more than challenging. At least, for me.

I was reading a blog this morning by someone that doesn't have children yet about children. Don't you just love people like that? They have definitive opinions about parenthood and how things really should be with children when they don't have children. The subject was public schools serving doughnuts to children for breakfast. Of course, the jest of the blog was that there should be healthier menus for "our" children than fat-laden and sugar-laden doughnuts. Now, I totally understand the extreme obesity problem we are seeing in the American public, much less our children. And I totally understand the lack of nutritional value of the typical doughnut. I should probably say that I LOVE doughnuts and have had my fair share, along with a few other people's fair share of doughnuts through the years. But I am paying for such gluttony, and family genes. I no longer can have gluten, thus doughnuts of any nature is off-limits for me. That said though, I also have to say I have worked in public schools and I know, for a fact, that most schools are much too aware that many of their children's only meals are the ones they get at school. I don't recall offerings of breakfast for students when I was a student, but that was way too long ago to mention. Times have changed. Greatly. Now for the added snafu in this equation.

Here, in Michigan, the state's public education budgets have been cut twice just in the past month or so. Greatly. Entire curriculums and programs have been offed with the signature of a pen in the governor's office. Our schools are down to the bare bones. Teachers have long been using their own money to buy school supplies for their students, as have most schoolteachers across the country. Now, if you consider the hunger issue and how it affects the school students across the nation, what would you want for those that cannot afford to eat at home? Don't consider YOUR child, as we all know that only the best is what you want for your child. We all want healthy options for our children. But we all want our children to have full stomachs so they can stay on-task and not be thinking about the hunger pains and growling stomachs all day. We all have seen the study results that say that hungry children suffer academically. But what do you want for those children in your area that go home everyday and have no meals? Do they even eat at all during the weekends? Have you ever considered that? Are you still so concerned about the nutritional value of what they may be served for breakfast now to protest doughnuts?

We have to be practical enough to realize that offering a breakfast program at all is still a real trick for any school district in these days and economic times. And most of us are educated enough to know that cheap foods and stretched budgets doesn't allow for many healthy options. But isn't a full stomach, which allows a child to get their minds off their tummies and on-task of learning, better than protesting feeding these children doughnuts? Would you personally go into a cafeteria and deprive a child of the last breakfast they may have on Friday morning till they return on Monday because it's not "healthy"? How many meals will you miss during the next two days?

Don't get me wrong. I understand the need to educate and do what we can to change our society's views of food and nutrition. But until we solve the disparity of the haves and have nots and virtually walk in another's shoes, how can we go about protesting that that is fed to children? If you do have the nerve to do so, I suggest you also find ways and solutions to the problem. Work with your local grocers, farmers, coops, mothers groups, church groups, whomever that may donate or spend time and personal money to change the situation in your area. There is never a cut and dried answer to such issues these days. There can be a politically-correct answer but it rarely solves all the needed aspects of a problem. Don't be myopic without considering that for most of us....there but for the grace of God, go us!