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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Jamie's School Dinners

  
 
Benny the Ball
20:05 / 23.02.05
So what do we think?

I really have a lot of time for Jamie Oliver, even with all the mockney cheeky chappy stuff. And this new series at least brings up the subject of how terrible the food we chuck at our kids at school.

I liked the programme.

Also, as a vested interest sidenote, one of my nephews was suspended from school recently, with the school saying that he was over-active (he is a very bright kid, with lots of nervous energy) anyway - the only food available at the school is from vending machines...which I think is an outrage.
 
 
Spaniel
20:12 / 23.02.05
As do I. Unfortunately, Jamie Oliver's not going to change anything.

Can't comment on the show, I was busy watching The Apprentice.

Cor, that Lindsey, what a berk.
 
 
■
12:37 / 24.02.05
He might just be able to change something, but I wouldn't hold your breath. The problem is not the menu. The problem is the bloody awful competetive tendering system which is designed to make services progressively worse over time. You can't just reverse 20 years of budgets being slashed thanks to a hellish feedback of dropping quality and costs. When chickpea and leek soup comes in at nearly twice the maximum budget, something is very fucked.
I'm surprised he's not gone to see any of the winners of the Food Programme awards, but I suppose they'd steal his thunder.
 
 
Spaniel
13:15 / 24.02.05
The problem is the bloody awful competitive tendering system which is designed to make services progressively worse over time.

Swhat I'm talking about. Doesn't stop the programme being fun, though. I committed, however.
 
 
Smoothly
08:26 / 14.03.05
The more I see of Jamie Oliver, the more I admire him and increasingly fail to understand why he gets such a hard time from so many quarters. And he *does* seem to be making a difference. Not just to the meals provided in one school (which, with familiarity, seem to get decent reviews), but to the people preparing the food, the catering firms supplying the food, the teachers, parents, local councils...
But my question is: What's to hate about Jamie Oliver?
 
 
Ganesh
10:40 / 14.03.05
What's to hate about Jamie Oliver?

Even I, a committed hater of the Fat-Tongued One, am forced to admit that many of the reasons for hating him are rooted in past rather than present behaviour. For me, it was a mixture of oversaturation and an apparent attempt, in his hideous range of supermarket adverts, to sell us a patently false At Home With Jamie Oliver cringeingly masquerading as authentic cockernee geezerdom. Whipping up a back-from-the-pub curry for his aesthetically pleasing (if suspiciously RADAesque), tastefully ethnically diverse young friends, he was on a par with Jacko from Brush Strokes and his perpetual Flash-aided one-man War against Dirt ie. patronising crap.

There are still traces of that irritating Being Jamie Oliver angle in his current series: we're treated to several at-home-with-Jools segments which seem both irrelevant and weirdly exhibitionistic (in the needy-celeb-hungry-for-exposure sense), and which I wish he'd avoid. Yes, I know taking on a big project is stressful; I don't need to see domestic spats about it. If I want that, there's always Wife-Swap.

But yeah, his objective seems a worthy one - and y'never know, he might spark some sort of wider 'parent power' style movement. Last week, the Guardian ran a feature explaining how to go about changing the dinner policy at one's child's school...
 
 
Eloi Tsabaoth
11:16 / 14.03.05
Start by sending letters asking to change the dinner policy in Ohio?
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
11:21 / 14.03.05
I never get this 'needy-celebs-hungry-for-exposure' thing when it comes to Oliver and his family - as far as I can tell, he's a chef running a business he wants to expand, and happens to have acquired a celebrity profile he's attempting to parlay into expansion for his business (cf Sainsbury's ads obviously providing increased capital for his restaurant ventures ; the various TV appearances and that 'train-a-twat-to-be-a-chef' TV series all helping to raise the public profile of said restaurants). He's a young guy with a family to raise, who can blame him? It's not like Jamie Oliver can really sell out like, say, Jello Biafra could...

Regarding the new show - he seems to have a genuine hatred for and problem with the muck so many kids get raised on, and recognises that this may be the only hot meal they get that day. His comments that seeing what they're asked to eat makes him hate food and not want to be a chef were heartfelt, in that they were obviously from an emotional response to what he'd seen... and to a large extent, this is what the programme is really hinging on. Not an expose of the shit in school cafeterias, but a celebrity chef who's regularly in the papers and what he thinks about it. That's why the series shows him at home, and shows his wife's reaction to (for example) the tabloid story about his supposed affair in Amsterdam. The current media climate rates celebrity human interest far higher on their cultural barometer than the actual human interest involved in the story of the kids and their dietary requirements...
 
 
Ganesh
11:40 / 14.03.05
That's why the series shows him at home, and shows his wife's reaction to (for example) the tabloid story about his supposed affair in Amsterdam.

But why put that stuff in the programme at all? Presumably Oliver himself exerts some control over what goes into Jamie's School Dinners, particularly where footage of his wife and kids is concerned? If he were being doorstepped by tabloid journalists that'd be one thing; when he's apparently made the decision to pad out a perfectly engaging subject with irrelevant personal-life candyfloss himself, that's quite another.

I mean, I agree with you that Jamie Oliver himself has never seemed particularly hungry for exposure for the sake of exposure - I assumed the odious Sainsburys ads were a means to an end - but I'm finding the here's-me-arguing-with-the-wife stuff unnecessary and distracting, and wondering why he did include it.
 
 
Smoothly
12:58 / 14.03.05
I think to some extent he will see the 'Jamie Oliver, Husband and Father' stuff to be relevant to his crusade and also signifies how he's grown-up - that he's not just a poncey young chef screwing his face up at what ordinary families eat. I also expect that some of the footage illustrating the strain caused by tabloids hacks pissing on his calor gas while he's busy trying to stop their children from vomiting faeces because they haven't been able to shit for 6 weeks, is a plea for sympathy. Pretty self-serving on one level, but perhaps forgivable. I don't think he is a celebrity who's ever grumbled about press intrusion per se, just the press making up lies to try and wreck his life. I don't really blame him.
 
 
Joetheneophyte
21:15 / 14.03.05
yeah, he has won me over somewhat with this series

all the points Ganesh made and more I could level at Oliver for his previous series'

One episode (I think it was the very same one where he had all his 'down to earth' mates with him) had his friend go for a piss, come out without seemingly washing his hands and then proceed to dibby in in the communal feeding trough ...... not nice

another that got up my nose was when Jamie came in on his skateboard, lifted it up by the wheel and then without washing his hands (and no apparent editing was done), he commenced on making the meal. The wheels of his skateboard, presumably having traversed dog shit, spit and a myriad of other delights one sees on the streets

Excellent chef or not, his hygiene has been a concern of mine ever since

That said, this new series is excellent and I disagree that it will not achieve anything. I can see this having a real impact if the impetus is built upon. In a world of multi media brainwashing, this virtual nobody has exposed a crime that successive governments and local authorities have swept under the carpet and not addressed

I know from viewing my relatives kids that even one glass of Coke or Pepsi drives the kids bloody la la. This little three year old will be happily playing, then his idiotic mother will give him a glass of cola and he turns into devil child from hell.

I know from my own experience that my own parents who are ignorant where dietaary concerns come into play, fed me gallons of coke to keep me quiet as a youngster.......then I wondered why I was fat and couldn't settle down in school

I don't blame them as they kjnew no different and didn't intentionally do me any harm. Like the parents on this new show, they were doing what they could afford and thought they were offering me a balanced diet. The difference was, that in school all those years ago, the school food was pretty good and was proper food, so I was getting at least one good and balnaced meal a day

We had mashed potato rather than chips....and it was proper spud , you could tell by the fact that they left the eyes in the potato! We had pies some days but others we had proper meat, not great cuts by any means but better than the chicken nuggets and crap they get today



so kudos to Jamie, if he achieves even a 10% improvement in the quality of the food then he has achieved more than I probably ever will in my life, so good luck to him
 
 
■
21:29 / 14.03.05
Yeah, he used to tick me off with his smugness in the first couple of series, but he seems to have grown up, even if he is still a bit of a meeja whore. I have rather a big soft spot for Jules, though, and I don't like seeing her upset. I think the family angle was probably to emphasise the fact that Jamie cares for his kids, but that it spiralled out of control a little.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
11:16 / 15.03.05
I think you'd probably be surprised exactly how little control Oliver has over things like editing and production - the cameras were following him around, and unless he specifically asked them not to include the moment where his wife cried on TV, they'd have left it in because, for them, it's the best part of the show. Same as the bit in the same episode where he refuses to meet n' greet Bill Clinton at his restaurant, despite having dressed up a bit to do precisely that, because Clinton and his entire entourage insist on ignoring the menu and ordering stuff that isn't on it, and he thinks the guys an ignorant prick as a result.
 
 
Rawk'n'Roll
12:20 / 15.03.05
Loving this series and I am a vehement anti-celeb chef person. Delia, Gordon, Jamie, Nigella, they can all burn in hell as far as I'm concerned.
BUT.
This series really makes me think Jamie's doing something worthwhile... or at least attempting to do something worthwhile.
The family moments, especially anything with his too cute to be human baby, grate on my nerves.
They're obviously included so that you can understand that he's not just some poncey famous chef person sneering at what parents make their kids eat but a fellow father who is appauled at what the schools are having to feed the kids to keep on budget.

It makes us sympathise rather than alienates us because of his social standing.
Still hate all those snotty children though, especially the ones that refused to even try the new food at the first school. They deserve their future malnutrition.
 
 
Ganesh
12:51 / 15.03.05
I think you'd probably be surprised exactly how little control Oliver has over things like editing and production - the cameras were following him around, and unless he specifically asked them not to include the moment where his wife cried on TV, they'd have left it in because, for them, it's the best part of the show.

I'm surprised he didn't say, "don't include footage of my wife and kids because it's intrusive and irrelevant", then.
 
 
Smoothly
13:25 / 15.03.05
I think you'd probably be surprised exactly how little control Oliver has over things like editing and production

But Jack, Jamie owns the production company (Fresh One). As the producer's boss, I'm pretty confident that he'd have been well abreast of those kind of production decisions.
 
  
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