14 DAY TRIAL // A few years ago, Jamie Oliver started a program that would prove as controversial as it would eventually be successful. The celebrity chef set out to change the way children ate in school by making sure they got home-cooked meals for lunch, thus spend less money on snacks and junk food – and he achieved all he aimed to do. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley doesn’t quite feel the same, but it’s not like Oliver will take insults without putting up a fight, the Daily Mail says.
It all started when Lansley said in public that all that Oliver’s criticizing, nagging and lecturing did was to actually talk children out of wanting to eat a home-cooked meal in school. Figures indicated that the number of kids spending more money on snacks and unhealthy junk food was actually on the rise, Lansley also claimed, which effectively made of Oliver’s campaign a failure. To this, Oliver responds, in more or less words: watch my show, because you clearly haven’t seen it yet.
“Jamie Oliver, quite rightly, was talking about trying to improve the diet of children in schools and improving school meals, but the net effect was the number of children eating school meals in many of these places didn’t go up, it went down. Children are actually spending more money outside school, buying snacks in local shops, instead of on school lunches,” Lansley said at a British Medical Association conference in Brighton, as cited by the Mail.
Oliver’s reply did take long to arrive. “I’m not encouraged by the news the new health minister has summed up eight years of hard work in a few lines for the sake of a headline. To say School Dinners hasn’t worked is not just inaccurate but is also an insult to the hard work of hundreds of thousands of dinner ladies, teachers, headteachers and parent helpers who strive to feed schoolkids a nutritious, hot meal for 190 days of the year. I’ll post him a copy of the series as he’s clearly never seen it,” the chef explained.
Oliver is not the one to toot his own horn either, and several public figures are already backing him up in the latest health debate. Professor Alan Maryon-Davis, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, for instance, labels Lansley’s comments very distressing and points that Oliver managed to do what no other individual had done single-handedly before: make a change for the better, while also forcing the government to invest larger amounts of money in kids’ health by offering them more nutritious meals.