Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Tears before lunchtime

Oliver adjourned to the local school, where children were tucking into their daily breakfast: pizza and chocolate milk. "I have never seen pizza served for breakfast," he said, shocked. Oliver then watched aghast as the dinner ladies whipped up a lunch of chicken nuggets and reconstituted "pearls" of processed potato. "It's that kind of food that's killing America," he announced.
In which 
Jamie Oliver discovers America. Of course, if he were really as laddish as he makes out, he would know that left-over pizza is the breakfast of champions - when those champions had been drinking the previous night.

3 comments:

Hans Versluys said...

A Mockney without street savvy

Richard T said...

He's no mockney - for us men Brits, breakfast is left over curry carry out rechauffe avec un oeuf saute. Two if you can get away with it before authority notices.

Peter in Dundee said...

You should have seen the look on his face when the overweight woman with the overweight kids opened her freezer to reveal tightly packed ranks of pizzas and heat 'em up burgers. And nothing else. Vegetables? they didn't eat them, ditto fruit.

His success on shaming the govt down South to improve school meals (it had already been done up here in Scotland) had either gone to his head or that of his production company. He definitely bit off more than he could chew.

A more interesting piece of comparative anthropology was Louis Theroux getting to know kids on ritalin, with bi polar diagnoses and other psychoactives (often all at once) and their families.

The most chilling was one middle class mother who said that they had normal parenting skills so what were they to do with difficult kids other than medicate them to hell and back? The idea of improving their parenting skills seems never to have occurred to her. Louis had trouble with his facial expressions.

All the kids were intelligent, bored and unhappy. The tragedy was that they were saddled with parents who didn't want to try and had too much money so were easy prey to a medical profession eager to write prescriptions, and make more money.