Culinary Revolutions

Filed in archive People Who Cook , Trends on February 25, 2006

"Long, long ago, in the 1990s, a new invention was unleashed on an unsuspecting world, an invention so loathsome, so corrupt that it would come to undermine the health of millions. This repugnant but fiendishly clever idea, was the brainchild of Prof. F. Rankfurter. His story begins one stormy night, in his mountain-top lair, Castle Filth..."

So begins Food Most Fowl, the animated section on Jamie's School Dinners from the UK's Channel 4.

I love the way this site was conceptualised. It's a series on how Salad Boy (a.k.a. Jamie Oliver) "busts a gut persuading schools to ditch the processed, ready-made junk the students are used to eating, and replace it with fresh, tasty, nutritious food, prepared from scratch every day". It's very informative yet highly entertaining. The campaign has reached its peak last year but the objectives are timeless. We can all learn a thing or two on how to stage a succesful campaign. No wonder Salad Boy was awarded one of the UK's top prizes for public health.

Why am I harping on this now? Very timely, especially after Alice Waters Eating for Credit an Op-Ed piece on the NY Times (registration required - it's free). Here's an excerpt:

We need a revolution, a delicious revolution, that will induce children - in a pleasurable way - to think critically about what they eat. The study of food, and school lunch, should become part of the core curriculum for all students from kindergarten through high school. Such a move will take significant investment and the kind of resolve that this country showed a half-century ago. It will be costly, but if we don't pay now, the health care bill later will be astronomical.

Ms. Waters wants schools to teach food as an interactive, hands-on academic subject - from the history, the botany, the mathematics and so forth. What for? To keep healthy food from being tossed into the bin.

As to how to do this successfully? Perhaps we should review the multi-media and multi-sectoral Feed Me Better campaign. We can pick a few things and adapt it to our purpose.

Graphic from Channel 4