Maintenance Phase - Jamie Oliver

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

In the 2000s, Jamie Oliver made a big splash with his work reforming kids’ meals in the UK and US. Was his work wicked slammin’, or just proper rustic?Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastLinks!BBC Profile - Jamie OliverJamie Oliver Puts America's Diet on a DietAll The Times Jamie Oliver Made Everyone AngryUnpacking School Lunch: Understanding the Hidden Politics of School FoodA brief history of school meals in the UKTurkey Twizzlers: A Complete HistoryMarcus Rashford Is Fighting the Government on Free School Meals. He’s Also Fighting Jamie Oliver’s LegacyHas Jamie Bitten off More Than He Can Chew?Jamie Oliver, you haven’t tasted real povertyJamie Oliver’s campaign against childhood obesity has classist undertonesJamie’s jerk rice is a recipe for disasterThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

I have no tagline suggestions because all I have is problematic jokes about British people. Oh! Because I lived there, I feel like that gives me a license to be kind of mean. I'm guessing some British listeners will disagree. It's very funny. It's like whenever anybody asked me about like some country I haven't spent much time in like Thailand, I'm like, oh, a beautiful country with noble people. But if they asked me about Britain or Denmark, I'm like, first of all, I have this long rant ready. That's true. I did ask you if I should go to Denmark for

a work trip. Absolutely not were like, absolutely not. That is not something you need in your life. Keep it moving. The minute you asked, I was like, I tapped on my little keyboard. I was like, OK, all caps. I'm going to need all caps for this answer. No.

But OK, does Jamie Oliver even have a catchphrase? I was going to use one of his little cooking catchphrases, like bam or whatever. It's less of a catchphrase and more of like a lexicon That he'll call things like wicked or okay slamming. Welcome to maiden's phase the podcast that is wicked slamming. Oh Look at him go We can cut everything before this and make it seem like I knew I knew his little catchwords I'm abri cordon. I'm Aubrey Corden. I'm Michael Hobbs. If you would like to support the show you can do that

at Patreon or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content in both places. Same stuff. Today Michael. At long last. At long last. Talking about Mr. Jamie Oliver. We are talking about Jamie Oliver, and we're particularly talking about his influence in talking about school food and kids' diets. Oh, yeah. Mike, tell me what you know about Jamie Oliver. He's a TV chef who started with a show called The Naked Chef,

which I genuinely believed was a naked man cooking for a very long time. Oh, Tiny Baby Gay was like, I'm listening. Yeah, exactly. I was like, when exactly is it on in America? He became like one of the early sort of TV chef celebrities. He then did a TV series where he was going to reform school. They say school dinners, which is kind of confusing,

which I was actually very into. I was like, I was Jamie Oliver-pilled. Were you? We talked about this before we were recording, but like I have kind of a soft spot for Jamie Oliver because he seems like a genuinely nice guy who is like trying, but then I know that since I've kind of stopped paying as much attention to him, he's made a series of blunders that are like less defensible, but I don't actually know like the scope and nature of the blunders. Yeah, I will say I came in similarly.

I did not have a soft spot for him, mostly just because he was part of that wave of like late 2000s, early 2010s. Like the problem is fat kids, 100% kind of media. And as someone who at that point was like a fat person in their 20s, that felt too close to home for me. And then you went on a film tour in the UK and people in the signing line were like, you should do an episode on Jamie Oliver 200 times. I told people I was thinking of doing an episode on Jamie Oliver and I used the sign lines

to like ask people. Okay. Like the closest you got to defenders was, I guess his heart's in the right place. And for the most part, people were just like, fuck this dude, further. It really felt like when you would talk to people from the UK about James Corden

before the Balthazar thing happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or me talking about Elon Musk at any period up until the present. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The world has finally caught up to you, Michael. This is becoming a California high speed rail podcast immediately. This is always in danger of becoming such a thing. So Jamie Oliver was born in 1975.

He was born and raised in Essex. His parents ran a pub. He went to a grammar school, which is like a sort of middle classy thing to do, right? It's so confusing. There are so many kinds of schools, and they're so confusing. Public and private, but they mean different things.

He starts off as a pastry chef at Neal Street Restaurant and over time moves on to become the sous chef at the super acclaimed River Cafe. Are you familiar with the River Cafe? This is in London? Mm-hmm. Oh, no, I had no money and I ate out of the sales bin at Sainsbury's on my way home

because I had sandwiches for 49p. Did you get the smoked salmon one? Why don't we have smoked salmon sandwiches here? It's at the River Cafe that he makes his first TV appearance in a show called Christmas at the River Cafe. He sort of pops on screen as sort of the way that this story gets told, which, like, I believe it. He's a charismatic dude, right?

Yeah. That leads to his first TV series, the aforementioned The Naked Chef, which premiered in 1999. In 2005, he launches a campaign called Feed Me Better, which is his campaign to change school children's meals. OK, as a result of that, they have a Channel four viewers poll and they name him the most inspiring political figure of 2005. Oh, political figure? That's a transformation. Right? I think there's a little bit of a sort of

Dr. Oz leaning story here of like, by all accounts, he's a very good chef. Yeah. And he gets into hot water when he veers away from that thing. Yeah, and also he's very likable. He has the sort of the combination of fine dining and then this everyman quality.

Right. Since the sort of the combination of fine dining and then this every man quality. Right. Since the sort of start of his career, he has published 32 cookbooks. Oh wow. He has presented 44 TV shows of more than one episode and 19 single episode specials. He's almost like a Twitch streamer at that point.

He's just on, he's just on. He has also faced in that time more and more critique. In addition to getting more and more successful, he's faced more and more critique. When I started this episode, I texted you and was like, Hey, I think I'm going to do Jamie Oliver. And you were like, Oh, cool. Influencer episode. I was like, Yeah, it'll be like a light little influencer episode. OK. No. It was like Gwyneth Paltrow.

Volumes of media that have written about this guy. Think pieces op eds. So much ink has been spilled over every little thing that Jamie Oliver does. Some of it I think, like is really really on point. And some of it I think is like, as you would say, we're in bitch eating crackers territory with some of it. Yeah, this is always the thing with like British influencers is that like, some of them are really garbage. But then on the other hand, they have a super garbage media environment.

And so it's hard to separate. Like, does this person suck or does the coverage of them suck? Yes. So we're going to do a little rundown of some of the things that he has been criticized for. OK. And then we're going to dig into our school dinners. Okay. Stuff. One of his big critiques is he's been criticized many times for being a hypocrite.

Okay. He had a whole show about the conditions in which chickens are raised and produced. After making the show about chickens, he then signed a multimillion pound deal with Sainsbury's, who at that point did not conform to the RSPCA standards at the time. In 2015, he worked with the UN Environment Program as a quote unquote environmental champion. Two years later, he signed a five million pound deal with Shell. Okay.

Again, it's money. That's quite bad. There are also plenty of complaints about racism, colonialism, and appropriation in his recipes. This is from a piece on CNN. It is a brick. In the Sunday Times interview, Oliver acknowledged that his Empire roast chicken, a chicken recipe involving coriander, turmeric, garam masala, and cumin, would no longer be appropriate today. In the episode titled Empire Roast Chicken, Bombay Roasties, and Amazing Indian Gravy,

Oliver set out to celebrate what he called our Indian love affair by making a full-on collision between beautiful British roast dinners and gutsy Asian spices. Oliver also celebrated the trade routes he said led to Indian spices making their way into British dishes, and which he used in his lemon-scented Roast Empire-style Tandoori chicken. Toward the end of the episode, while carving the chicken, Oliver said, this is empire food, you can use your hands, and then raise the toast to the Empire while clinking beers with members of his camera crews. Although originally billed in the episode as lemon scented roast Empire style tendoury chicken, the recipe has now been renamed on Oliver's website as spiced roast chicken. Oh, this didn't seem that bad to me until we got to the let's toast to the Empire. Right, right, right.

There are so many versions of this kind of thing that have happened. There have also been critiques and perhaps the most pervasive critique of Jamie Oliver is around class and classism. One of the big if you sort of talk to people about Jamie Oliver, one of the big things that comes up is they're like, he's charging eight pounds for beans on toast. Okay. For us listeners who are unfamiliar with beans on toast, it's literally canned baked beans on a piece of toast.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, it is exactly what it sounds like. His version is definitely dressed up. It's on ciabatta. There are cherry tomatoes, there's basil and arugula and balsamic and all kinds of stuff, but it's still beans on toast. He has since sort of reconsidered, but he's also kind of doubled down. He tells the BBC, quote, I should have been brighter. Heinz came to us and offered 15,000 pounds for us to put something cool made

with baked beans on the menu. Oh, it's more money stuff, Janie. That funds one student for a whole year. Am I going to do it? Of course I am. Oh my God, he's doing the speech from Schindler's List. Oh my God. Oh my God.

But also, it's such a weird defense, because like, whatever, if you don't want to buy the $8 fucking beans on toast, don't buy the $8 beans on toast. Right. These sorts of things don't really bother me that much. It just seems like rich people dumb shit, and I'm a cheapskate, so I would just never go

to this restaurant anyway. This is where we start to get into bitch-eating crackers territory. Where I'm like, why are you monitoring his menus? I don't really care. Yeah, I don't give a shit. But I will say the classism stuff also sort of seeps into how he shows up politically.

In January of 2022, he stages this protest outside of number 10 Downing Street because of what he calls the government's U-turn on obesity policies, quote unquote. Oh, I remember this. What do you remember about this protest, Michael? Wasn't this a whole Boris Johnson getting COVID and being like, if I wasn't so fat,

I wouldn't have had this problem or something, and then they were gonna do a bunch of stuff and they just didn't do it or something. Sort of. I feel like you're being nice and I'm totally wrong. You don't want to say that. You're not totally wrong. You're not totally wrong. So Boris Johnson gets COVID. He has all of this messaging about how like this wouldn't have happened if I weren't fat. So therefore we have to have a quote unquote obesity plan. Jamie Oliver in January, 2022.

The government, he says, is doing a quote unquote U-turn on their obesity policies. And the thing that he is mad about, the policy in question, is that the government had pledged to restrict higher calorie foods in supermarket promotions of buy one, get one free items. Okay. He's mad that people are getting high calorie foods for free.

Okay. So he stages this big protest outside 10 Downing Street and the theme for the protest is, this policy is a total eatin' mess. Oh. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. That's actually not that bad. Sorry. Pardon me. Excuse me.

Look, I'm a man with a podcast that has never had a good tagline. If there's one thing I know, it's wordplay. You're like, well, he really did a thing that we have not delivered on. That we've not achieved. So here's, I'm going to send you a little screen grab from Sky News of this protest. The fuck? Oh my God. So it's Jamie Oliver in the front of a crowd and he's holding an eaten mess. Yeah, a giant trifle dish full of eaten mess.

But then one of the signs that somebody has in the background is give peas a chance, which is also good. There's Boris, Keep your promise. That one's bad. There are a number of signs when you sort of zoom out on these pictures of like this policy is an hashtag eaten mess. And they all have hashtag. Yeah, the hashtag doesn't work if it's not if it's you're writing it in real life.

You can't you can't click on a hashtag. In addition to and sort of overlaying this classism critique are some genuine sort of reportings about what I would consider to be wage theft. Oh, his restaurant chain, Jamie's Italian, which was sort of a high street chain, closed in the 2010s with debts of 83 million pounds. And he gets big headlines at the time for closing his restaurants without having paid his staff. Ooh, that's bad.

That's real bad. They lay off 44 employees at Christmas. The last two sort of general critiques, oh my God, Mike, this has been the longest. Yeah, I know, the longest table, we're still table setting. This is, so I texted you this morning and was like, oops, I need another hour. And then I was like, oops, I need another half hour.

It's because I was sorting through that, like just like dozens and dozens and dozens of these stories being like, and he sucks for this. On top of all of that, he's kind of cringe. We finally get to people's real beef with this person in 2012. This is so fucking funny, Mike. It's not like a like every corporate restaurant chain has shit like this where they're like famously at Chick-fil-A. For example, if someone says thank you, you don't say you're welcome. If they ask you for something, you don't say no problem.

You just say, it's my pleasure. Really? Yes, absolutely. Oh, I've never been to Chick-fil-A. Oh, look at you. I don't think we have it in Seattle. We have one in Oregon. And I went one time and then I was like, sorry, this is the reason that people are so worked up

about like, oh man, I love gay people, but that chicken is so good. I'm like, it's a fast food chicken sandwich. Especially in a world of Popeyes chicken sandwiches. Get out of town. So in 2012, a tweet goes up. It gets picked up by media. That is allegedly a list of words that servers at Jamie Oliver's restaurants are supposedly required to use. Okay. I am sending you a link to a piece from Eater. Okay. That has the list in it. Oh man. Okay. It says servers at Jamie Oliver restaurants told to use words like

scrummy, slamming, wicked. I saw this list of words and I was like immediately transported to the like pieces of flair scene from office space. If you're going to subject people to this, pay them like $100,000 a year. Oh God. What? I just noticed the third entry on this list.

Pimp. This food is pimp. Yeah, it says it's just a list. It says melt-in-mouth, fresh pimp, juicy, legendary, messy magic dollop. Whatever. Silky, wicked, radical treasure. It could not be more 2000s if it tried. I know exactly. Remember when the word deadly was going around as like cool like, oh, that's deadly. The new album is deadly. I was trying to make malignant happen for a while. Like that thing is malignant. I'm so mad that it never caught on.

Anyway, it's never too late. It's never too late. One of the things that is cut off from this list are some other phrases, including proper rustic. Oh, yeah, that that's hella artisanal. That's homemade No cap for real for real mega is on the list and so is Scrummy. Yeah, that's something British people say even though it sounds like an STD boy. Oh fuck This is like calling it crimbo You know what I've started to spot in the wild lately is unfortch Oh, I can't make it on Thursday.

Unforch. You really saved yourself a lot of time. I mean, I think the headline about all of the Jamie Oliver stuff is he is a polarizing dude. Yes. People really love him or they really hate him. This honestly just seems kind of like standard to me. Yeah, like he sort of becomes famous as this kind of every man,

working class guy making fancy food. And then eventually he becomes like a multimillionaire and a giant empire. And of course that's gonna attract scrutiny. And like most public figures and most corporations do not hold up to scrutiny. I think you're in a similar place that I was at this point in the research.

You're taking me on a journey. None of them are, get this guy off our TVs immediately, kind of shit necessarily, right? It's a tale as old as time that dudes like this get to make big mistakes that would absolutely end the careers of people who had less power and less privilege than him, and yet,

he just gets more money, he just gets more famous, right? All of these things just sort of keep accruing and accruing and accruing right question How does he generally deal with these things because of course people are gonna fuck up as public figures whatever does he just like? Apologize like yeah, I shouldn't done the Empire toast it was fucking cringe I'm really sorry or is he like weird about like pushing back against his critics all this kind of stuff He gets really defensive and I think that's part of what sets people off. Yeah. There's a quote that he gives at one point where he's like, Sometimes I think it would actually be easier to be somebody like Gordon Ramsay

whose persona is like a miserable bastard. I think he's correct about that, honestly. I think he's right, but he's saying it after he's talking about like, wage theft. Yeah, after he's like he's using it as a defense. Yeah. And you're like, I think you're right, but I don't think that's the main issue here. Yeah. So those are the general critiques of Jamie Oliver.

We're about to dive in to Jamie's school dinners and Jamie's Ministry of Food, his two UK shows about feeding kids. Both of which I've seen. You've seen both of them? Yeah, back in my Jamie Oliver days. I mean, this would have been like more than 10 years ago, though. I mean, I saw them when they aired.

I'll tell you what, I have not because that shit has been scrubbed from the internet. Wait, really? Even if you have a VPN, even if you're willing to pay for it, even if, even if, even if you can find little clips, but you cannot find the whole shows. It's wild. That and Plan-Demic are the two,

the two that we watched recently that are scrubbed on the internet. Plan-Demic you can get at their website. It's actually arguably the easiest thing to get. You just can't get it on YouTube. No way. I want to sort of take you through a little bit of the genesis of school meals in the UK

and sort of how they, like what the policies around those have looked like. Primary school like just as education isn't made mandatory in the UK until 1870. It was not uncommon at that point for students to go to school underfed or just unfed entirely, particularly poor and working class kids. By 1880, this becomes enough of a known problem that they actually start piloting free school meals. And the first free school meals are served to poor folks and students in Bradford.

The meal is just straight up porridge. That's oatmeal and bread. Okay. The cost was limited to one penny per student, according to the independent. In today's money, that'd be about 37 pence. By 1906, a liberal government passed the Education Provision of Meals Act,

which allowed local governments to serve free school meals. Most of them ultimately did not provide those free meals, and by the start of World War II, you know, decades later, only half of local schools in the UK offered free school meals. Again, this is just like allowing people to do it. Should they so choose? And many of them do not so choose. In 1944, a new law was passed requiring schools to feed all children, not just low income kids, but like all kids.

They also had nutrition standards that required them to provide 40% of the kids daily protein and 33% of their daily calories. That usually looked like steak, two veg and a rhubarb crumble, which sounds so fucking good. Yeah, we got hamburger and fries for a dollar 25. We got tater tot Tuesdays. Oh, yeah, I remember tater tots too. I have like not eaten tater tots since. What? That's such a like school food for me. Like in my mind, turkey tetrazzini and tater tots are like school food and cannot be consumed elsewhere.

Turkey tetrazzini. I've never seen that on a menu anywhere else in my entire life. I met there are a couple of foods I met for the first time in college. We did not have turkey Tetra Zini at school. So I saw that for the first time at college and I was like, what the fuck is this fancy ass name for this goopy ass dude? It's like prison food. It is good Midwest food. Yeah. The other thing I met for the first time at college was I went through

there was like a little sandwich bar. You know, there's like all the savory stuff and then also the sweet stuff for making sandwiches. And I was like, guys, somebody really fucked up. They put some marshmallow fluff out. I was going to school in New England and they were like, it's a fluffernutter. And I was like, what are you talking about? And I absolutely thought that people were pranking me

that they went to school with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches. Dude, I still think that's a prank. Candy sandwich. I feel like it's something like rainbow parties where it's something that like there's a name for it but nobody's ever actually done it. And like nothing will convince me otherwise.

In 1971, Margaret Thatcher is around. She removed free milk from schools. This is sort of the beginning of the erosion of the school lunch program. Just a fucking nightmare of a person. So she gets this nickname in the press that is Thatcher the milk snatcher. It is fully just like taking fucking milk away from poor children. Yes. It's like cartoon evil.

By 1980, Thatcher passes her Education Act, which ended the requirement to provide school meals. Of course. From here on out, only kids whose parents were on benefits or income supplements qualified for school meals. Of course. That is a really, really low income threshold. And also it stigmatizes the kids

because if it's only the poor kids, like it basically announces to all of your classmates that you are the poor kid who doesn't have to pay for school lunch. And actually, they later pilot like within the last, I don't know, 15 years. They piloted a free school lunch program again in the UK, and they found that uptake of school lunches was higher amongst students in all income brackets when it was free for everyone.

There's also there's something that comes up in America, too, where it's there's something so fucking weird about this thing where we are providing children with free education to the tune of billions of dollars. And then you're like, these freeloaders want a lunch too? And then it's like, oh, but feeding them is like where we draw the line and they have to fucking pay for it. And it's like it's so it's like, why? Like, why is this the fucking Hill?

We want to die. And like, we don't charge kids to ride the school bus. So, in 1986, the Social Security Act passes. That may seem unrelated, but because meals, school meals are now means tested, right? And like tied to an income level and a level of benefits, they're cutting people off of benefits, which means that the kids of those people

are losing access to free school meals, right? So as a result of this Social Security Act, level of benefits, they're cutting people off of benefits, which means that the kids of those people are losing access to free school meals. Of course. So as a result of this Social Security Act, half a million kids from low income families lost access to free school meals. The thing is you've stacked the deck because now compared to Margaret Thatcher,

Jamie Oliver seems fine. Yeah, totally. He hasn't taken food from millions of children. He's not a political supervillain. Yeah, the the wake stuff stuff doesn't seem so bad now. Without that national mandate to provide free meals, the systems around food shifted really dramatically throughout the 1980s and 90s in Britain. Schools aren't funded the way that they need to be at any point in this, certainly not school food programs.

So there's kind of a race to the bottom price wise that happens. So, you know, I think that's a good point. in Britain. Schools aren't funded the way that they need to be at any point in this, certainly not school food programs. So there's kind of a race to the bottom price wise that happens, right? Where schools are like, oh, fuck, our federal mandate went away, which means that some amount of federal funding went away, which means we got to get this shit on the cheap, right? And this is also when a famed star slash villain, depending on who you ask of UK school food comes around, the turkey twizzler. Oh, God, yes. This was a big thing in the show.

This was a big thing in the show. We'll talk about the turkey twizzler in a minute. Oh, my God, do you know what I remember about the West Virginia one, the version of this that he did in America? What? There was a whole thing where it was like kids were bringing Lunchables to school,

but the show had to bleep the word Lunchable. Yeah. I don't know what the legality is or if they were just like two chicken shit. But it was like, Jamie went on this big, long rant about like kids being fucking Lunchables to school because they're so unhealthy. But it was like they're bringing beep to school. But you could tell he was saying Lunchable. They replaced a bunch of it with packed lunch. Oh, really? As a person who just just watched it.

They dubbed it? There is such funny ADR in the US one. It's so funny. That's like remember when you used to watch Die Hard on TV and it would be like, yippee-ki-yay, terrible person. Melon farmers? Yeah. By this point in the early 2000s,

nutritional standards for school meals in the UK have been pretty well decimated, right? They're not non-existent, but they are a shell of their former selves. That's when Jamie's School Dinners premieres. Jamie's School Dinners is a four episode docu-series that airs on the BBC in early 2005, in February and March of 2005.

It is set at Kiddbrooke Comprehensive School in Greenwich, which is a borough of London. Comprehensive schools are sort of like U.S. public schools. The daily budget for students at Kidbrooke was 37 pence per child per day. Adjusted for inflation, that is functionally the same budget as those 1880s meals in Bradford. He gets into the schools, he does this sort of song

and dance that he ends up doing at several other schools. This is part of the US one as well. He revamps the school menu. He has a day where the existing school menu goes head to head with his new healthy menu. And all the kids pick the foods they know, aw shucks. And he's like, okay, well then we just have to keep going and we gotta make even better, healthy,

quote unquote healthy food. Weirdly, almost every meal that I see him serve in these clips and videos includes like a green salad with plain vinaigrette as one of the options. And I'm like, buddy, in what world did you think six year olds were gonna be like, yum yum, eat it up? Get him some like, carrots or something, like some like nice roasted veggies.

You could do some, make a stir fry that has vegetables in it with a good sauce. Like there's a bunch of ways to do this. A like French style, likely dressed, bitter green salad is like maybe not the like easy entry point. I'm a 42 year old man and I would skip that. So one of the most famous images that comes out of this is not only of students sort of rebelling against the menu but of parents. I'm sending you a picture.

Oh I know what this is going to be. You do. I do because this is such a big deal in the British media. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! Oh, it is! This is this fucked up thing where, like, parents would pass their kids candy bars, like, through the school fence.

Yeah, people report different things. This one appears to be burgers. People say, oh, they're passing in chips. Whatever it is, it's like foods that those kids shouldn't be having. To the point that there are like daily mail pieces about the woman who is foregrounded, the mom, in this picture being like, now her kids are fat, now what? And you're like, fuck off.

Oh my God. If parents wanna send their kids to school with whatever food they have, that honestly seems fine to me, like whatever. But it's like, if kids are in your care, you should be feeding them healthy stuff. That's not fucking deranged. But it's weird that these became stories. Like, I feel like the right wing media was like really against him

like doing this in this way that like how dare this celebrity medal. But it's also like he's trying to get kids to eat fruits and vegetables. Are you really fucking against this? I think another thing that happened in Jamie's school dinners, and this also happens in the U.S. version, he is dramatically increasing the workload of school cooks and then sort of characterizing them as sticks in the mud and or lazy. Yeah, they object so strenuously that some of them threaten to resign.

To be fair, having some fucking reality show person coming in and fucking cameras in my job, I feel like I would also rebel against this. 100%. And it's like some dude with a bunch of money telling you without a bunch of money and resources how to fucking do it, you'd be like, give me a break, dude, get out of town. It also shows the extent to which these problems

are so entrenched that even somebody with the clout of Jamie Oliver can't really come in and fix them, right? Because on some level, yeah, you want to be feeding the kids healthier food, but it's really not a problem of like the lunch ladies being better. It's like a much broader problem of like they should be hiring more lunch ladies and having different training. And it's like you just can't solve this stuff by berating people in like the school kitchen. Can you solve it with a boot camp for school cooks run by the catering division of the British Army? Is that what they did in the show?

They bring in the catering division of the British Army to show them how to cook large amounts of food efficiently. Oh my fucking God. As I learned this, I was like, ah yes, the famously delectable food of the Army. Of the British army. Hell first! Now I get why this was taken off the internet. This is really bad.

I do not remember all of this problematic shit, probably because I was really problematic back then. Sure. Well, so here's the other thing, and they really don't, they sort of acknowledge it in the shows themselves, but they never really dig in on it. He just fucking explodes the budget. Oh, right. Of course. He just blows the fuck.

He's not making these meals for thirty seven pence. He's just not right. He's making much more expensive foods and is working folks really hard without any additional extra staff or pay. And then he's like, look how easy it is. And people are like, I'm tired. I'm not getting paid more. And we don't have the money for this shit. Yeah. And that's the whole fucking point is that people would be doing better meals if they had the resources. You can't just come in and be like, you should make better meals without the resources to match. As part of the show, one of the things that happens on the show is that he confronts a dude

from one of the nation's largest distributors of school foods. It's called Scholarest or Skola-rest. They're the ones who make turkey Twizzlers. A turkey Twizzler is like a chicken nugget kind of thing, but instead of being in boot or oval shape, it is in a corkscrew sort of shape. It looks like a little pig's tail.

It is a mainstay of UK school meals at this point. Yeah, it's like a deep fried breaded like turkey thing. Turkey thing. It is worth noting that turkey twizzlers are a distinctly classed food in the UK. I would think about for a US analog, I might think about Mountain Dew. Oh, is that classed? If you say Mountain Dew, there's like a gender, there's a race, there's a class.

There's like a kind of person that comes up. Really? Is there? I was not aware of this. Mountain Dew at all. Do you not think about this? Holy shit. I used to drink like three Mountain Dews a day. So are they are they from five foot four gay men? Is that the way that they're? No, I mean, I think Mountain Dew is often used in like political cartoons and shit like that

to denote a stupid poor person. As a member of the drinking Mountain Dew community. Mountain Dew community. Yeah. Wow, my people. The response from the company is really funny and silly. It's always fascinating to me when terrible actors appropriate anti-diet rhetoric

or sort of wind up using it. The company said in a statement, quote, we believe that there is no one food that is bad for you and it is the balance of food you eat that makes for a good or bad diet. Oh, I've seen this. They're doing sort of like an all foods fit sort of approach. Hashtag all foods matter. Here, I'm going to send you a little example of the way

that people were talking about turkey Twizzlers in the media following this show. Okay, it says, one third turkey, two thirds Twizzler. The product contains turkey, 34%, water, pork fat, rusk, coating, and then it lists like 4,000 fucking ingredients, vegetable oil, turkey skin, salt, wheat flour, dextrose, stabilizer, mustard, yeast extract, antioxidants. Hey, it's good for you. Herb extract, spice extract, and color. So just like a bunch of shit. It's like this list of ingredients is probably like, I don't, 25 things. This appears in like every article about turkey Twizzlers at the time.

People are just like, get a load of this list of ingredients. And it is doing this really facile, really common critique of foods at the time. This is sort of the quote unquote, Franken foods era, right? It's easy to go. These are scientific and therefore sort of foreign sounding names.

Right. The implication of stuff like this is that if you don't recognize the name of an ingredient, it is inherently sinister and also harmful to your health. Right. Yeah. But there's not any real analysis of like this thing is in it at this quantity, which is known to have these effects. Like people are not doing that. They're just like, look at this fucking load of shit. Also, the thing is, when you have to feed kids for fucking 37 P, right,

you're going to have food with a bunch of like fillers in it. This is the output of like the choices you've made politically. So the company that makes Turkey Twizzlers ends up first cutting the fat content in Turkey Twizzlers. They're like, okay, okay, okay, we'll make them lower fat, which is like a very 2000s thing, right? There's a quote from the managing director that I'm like, you're a piece of shit who runs a giant food company, but also you're not wrong in this one instant. I'm going to send it to you. The then managing director, David Joel, insisted at the time that the company had been unfairly treated

Turkey is the least fatty of all meats He said the new Twizzlers have only a third of the fat level of the average pork sausage Yet you don't hear Jamie Oliver telling people not to eat sausages. This is true That's like a fair point that is a fair point right like pork sausages a real cornerstone of British cuisine, right? Yeah, pork sausages would have been served in his parents point, right? Like pork sausages, a real cornerstone of British cuisine, right? Pork sausages would have been served in his parents' pub, right, those are like okay foods, right? And Jamie Oliver is not telling people not to eat sausage. And in fact, in a number of these schools he goes in,

and he's like, in the US one he goes, oh, they're having pizza for breakfast? And he says at one point, it's not so much what's in the pizza, it's the fact that it's pizza for breakfast. It's sending all the wrong signals. OK. And then he goes in and makes a meal. And one of the first things that he makes is pasta with red sauce and cheese.

So basically pizza, but pizza with boiling water instead of an oven. Right. Yeah. He's doing this sort of very 2000s and 2010s thing of like, we got to handle the number of fat kids. We, there have to be fewer fat kids. Therefore just throw shit at the wall. And the shit to throw at the wall is the stuff that feels right to you. It feels right to you that these sort of like foods that are processed in this way and that have this long list of ingredients are worse than a pork sausage, which is also very processed. I mean the thing is I'm actually like I don't think kids should be eating chicken nuggets, which is basically what turkey twizzlers are

Like at school. I also don't think they should like chocolate milk at school I think they should be getting like very nutritious, well-made meals. I also feel like another like very early 2000s thing about this is that there was this fantasy that you could solve these problems without investing extra money. I feel like the school lunches problem is mostly a problem of money. This is the credit where credits do section. This show really leads to some real change in the UK. On the show, he meets with Tony Blair, who's the prime minister at the time. He secures 280 million pounds for school meals. That is genuinely a huge deal.

It's really good. It shouldn't take a celebrity having a TV show to do it, but it happened, and that's a net benefit, right? It also leads to the establishment of a National Children's Food Trust, which was operational from 2005 until 2017. There's also some conflicting data on the impact of Jamie's school dinners

and that whole sort of shift. There is one study over the course of a year that shows that more students, like slightly more students, it's like five or 6% more students get kicked into a higher grade bracket. Right? Like they're sort of like generally scoring higher than they were, but it's small. Yeah. And then there's a bunch of other studies that show some backsliding like almost immediately. So the effects on student performance,

I think are disputed and murky at best. One of the great finds in my research on Jamie's school dinners and Ministry of Food was a phenomenal piece from a former student at Kidbrooke that was published in Eater London, who was like, I was at this school when this show was filmed. One of the famous sort of scenes in the show is him showing vegetables to kids

and them guessing incorrectly as to what those vegetables are. And he's like, oh no! I remember that, yeah. The Eater piece says, quote, in another memorable piece of sneering superiority, friends of mine were pulled into a classroom and asked to identify vegetables.

What the editors decided to air was a blooper reel of misidentified broccoli edited together to make it look like the burger fiends had never seen fresh food. The reality was that there were students in the room who identified produce correctly, but in most cases, these that there were students in the room who identified produce correctly, but in most cases, these examples were not included in the montage which aired. Which like of course, right?

Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where they like, where they walk around a mall or whatever and they ask Americans like, can you find Iraq on a map? Yeah. And it's like, they only use the times that people can't do it to be like, oh, Mary, look how dumb Americans are. Like it is very standard issue reality TV antics and sort of cherry picking of, like, the most dramatic shit. I don't want to, like, overblow it on that front,

but it's stepping into a context of classism that is reinforcing really regressive shitty ideas about poor and working class people. This is such an amazing example of how, like, when you have a real social problem, a celebrity and a reality show are literally the worst ways to address it. Because you would imagine, like, a documentary about the same thing that would have actually, like, educated the audience, whereas a reality show, of course they're going to fucking edit it in this way. Like, of course they're gonna fucking edit it in this way.

Of course they're gonna set up these fucking stunts. There's a scene in the West Virginia season where he opens up this mom's fridge and freezer, and there are just a bunch of frozen pizzas in it. And he's like, this is disgusting. I can't believe you're feeding your kids this. You're killing your kids by feeding them this stuff. And he then cooks all of the food.

He fries all the corn dogs. He bakes all the pizzas and he piles them up on their kitchen table. And it's like, look at this. Look how disgusting it is. Look how- That's like a month's worth of food, Jamie. Anything is gonna be a big pile on the table

if you cook it all at once. Right, and he's like, it's all brown. It's all the same color and da-da-da-da-da. This is a very frequent interaction that he has on each of these shows. And actually, we're gonna watch one of them from Jamie's Ministry of Food, which is the one in Yorkshire. Okay.

So in Ministry of Food, Jamie Oliver says that he wants to make Rotherham the culinary capital of the UK. And the way that he's going to do that is by teaching its residents how to cook. We're going to watch a little clip, a little clippy clip, of one of the many trips that Jamie Oliver makes into the homes of low-income moms. OK, gosh.

Yeah, sorry. Because it'd be really ble moms. Okay, God. Yeah, sorry. It's gonna be really bleak. Sorry, pal. Natasha has never cooked a meal for her children, Kaya and Robbie. Dinner is nearly always a kebab. Give me the low down then, because like the fact that you've sort of let us turn up

tells me that you're open-minded and- I'm sick of this. You might, yeah, right. So you're sick of the junk food, you're sick of the repetition. It's affecting yeah. Right, so you're sick of the junk food, you're sick of the repetition. It's affecting her. Right, in what sort of way? Well, she's not healthy.

She's been in twice for a tea taken out, cos they've rattled, they've gone bad. Right. What's your favourite pop? Dr Pepper. Dr Pepper will love it, don't we? And what happens if you don't do nothing about it? Where do you see it going?

I see her being obese. I see her being really, really unhealthy. Really. And it's not good. So how much... Are you see it going? I see her being obese. I see her being really, really unhealthy. Really. And it's not good. So how much are you on a budget? Tight budget. Because to be honest, if you're spending 12 quid, 10 quid a night, seven days a week, that's 70 quid.

I know. That's quite a lot of money, actually, just on food. I say I only get £8 a week, as it is. Yeah. So you get 80 quid a week. I get 80. So you're on benefits. You're on benefits.

Yep. So as you can tell, I'm spending of it. I get 80. So you want benefits. You want benefits. Yep. So as you can tell, I'm spending more than what I get. I don't know, I just know I can't keep doing it. I really don't want to do it. Don't want to do it ever again. I want to learn how to cook and just be healthy. Yeah. Place me some helicopter ball.

This thing happens in every episode that I was able to see. There was a great op-ed that I read about this that was just like, when you are this poor, your entire life is no. Your kids are having a birthday. Can you have a birthday party? No. A new movie's coming out and you wanna see it.

Can you see it? No. Food is like one of the only affordable pleasures that people have when they have absolutely, like deeply limited access to almost everything else in their lives. His response to this isn't to go, oh, holy shit, you're on benefits

and you only get 80 pounds a week? He's like, you gotta get a cooking class. This is a show that's produced for an audience. And this plays into a long standing dynamic of more class privileged people sort of leering at what poor people eat. Dude, I know it. It feels really Victorian. This is like a fundamentally conservative approach and fundamentally like not an upstream approach. Right.

It says it's talking about systems and it's proposing, once again, as so many things on this show have, an individual solution to a systemic problem. There's also an interesting shift in him, too, because the first show seemed like it at least somewhere acknowledged that this is a resources issue and we need to go right to the top and talk to Tony Blair about giving more money to this.

But then by the time we get to Ministry of Food, it seems like he's basically abandoned that. And it's like, let's teach people to cook. It just feels like he is sort of losing the thread. And or he's following the thread of reality TV and losing the thread of policy solutions, right? And actually fixing the problem. Because ultimately his job is to make a TV show.

At the end of the day, the people who are paying him are people who are paying him for a TV show. Right. Right. In the same way that like our bottom line is to release episodes for our listeners. Which we're really good at, which we're really good at, which we've never failed. So we never would just like our schedule is perfect. So following his TV success in the UK, Jamie Oliver follows the James Corden path. Yeah. Comes on over Corden path. Yeah.

Comes on over to the US, right? They're like, look, we have poor people in America that we also love to gawk at. Let's send Jamie to West Virginia. The first season focuses on Huntington, West Virginia. Which is the fattest city in America, right? Isn't that why they choose it? It was listed as America's unhealthiest city.

Somebody's like, well, who decides that? And he's like, it's a government statistic based on death rates. Oh, really? What? But also there is like it is true that at this point, Huntington had the nation's highest rates of heart disease, diabetes. They had the highest rates of seniors who had lost their teeth. Oh, God. This show really sort of opened the door to some very naked anti-fatness and classism.

And made way for the time-honored tradition of people outside of Appalachia sort of gawking and telling them how they're doing it wrong. Yes. So, Jamie Oliver heads to an elementary school in West Virginia and essentially does Jamie's school dinners all over again. I remember this, he's like berating the lunch ladies

and then there's one lunch lady who's like, you're a celebrity, you don't care. And he starts like crying. It's like, I swear on my children that I care. Right, he says, I swear on my children's lives and she just shakes her head and goes, don't do that. Yeah. Like I was so hard on the school cooks team.

I was like, yeah, man. At one point he says, so they get pizza for breakfast and chicken nuggets for lunch. Welcome to America. He's also doing the whole Americans are gross and fat and dumb thing. Also, I make fun of Britain constantly, but also the problems that Britain has

are the same as the problems that America has They're so similar I'm in no position to like talk shit and Jamie is similarly in no position to talk shit So he does his usual sort of set of things. He does the thing where he shows kids vegetables and they can't say what they are He does a thing where he takes there's like a dump truck of fat And he empties it into a dumpster's like a dump truck of fat and he empties it into a dumpster in front of a bunch of parents and kids and they're like, this is how much fat you're eating.

It's like Oprah's wagon of fat on steroids. But now like two decades of reality TV have gone by. Everything has to be fucking amplified. He does a bit where he shows kids how he says chicken nuggets are made. What he does is he butchers a chicken, he takes off the breast, he takes off the legs, he takes off the wings, blah, blah, blah. He puts the whole chicken carcass bones and all and sort of trimmings into a food processor.

He strains out the solids and ends up with this bowl of like pink goo. Right. And then he adds in flour. He calls it stabilizers. And I was like, that's just flour. Yeah. Yeah. You're just having flour. And then he's like, and then you have to add a bunch of flavorings and spices so it doesn't taste terrible. And then you get to this very famous clip of him asking these kids, do you think that's good for you

or bad for you? And the kids all go bad. And then he goes, would you still eat it? kids all go, bad. And then he goes, would you still eat it? And they go, yeah. Like 100% of them. And then he says, why would you eat it if you know it's bad for you? And one of the kids says, we're just hungry. Yeah. I wonder if this is the real difference between Britain and America, because the famous thing about this is that like the kids are supposed to be like, ew, gross, no. He leads into it by saying, I'm going to do an experiment and this experiment works every time.

The kids are supposed to say, no, we don't want to eat it because it's like he's put all this gross shit into it. But then I wonder if the real linchpin of this is just like, are the kids hungry or not? Are you doing this at lunchtime and they haven't eaten? This is a real marshmallow test moment. Yeah. It's worth noting that in addition to being totally fucking hilarious,

this moment also leads to a humongous lawsuit. Wait, really? A one point two billion dollar lawsuit What? filed by Beef Products Incorporated. Of course. They're a processor in South Dakota. They sue ABC. ABC ends up settling the suit for a hundred and seventy seven million dollars. No way. So it's easier just write a check I guess. When you watch it now there is a very clear ADR insert of Jamie Oliver saying,

luckily this is not the way they're made in America. It's so clumsy. It's clearly like the room tone is all wrong. His voice is all wrong. I'm like, buddy, you're running this ship like a podcast, get it together. Yeah, this is like awesome. We have to fact check something.

Like everything completely changes. Like a YouTuber who cuts in and is like editing me. Yeah. There is also an incredibly funny scene that happens at the opening of the show where he goes on a local radio show and the DJ is like super antagonistic and says things to him like,

what are you gonna make us do? We don't wanna sit around and eat lettuce all day. And at one point in the radio interview, he goes, you gotta tell us what to do? Who made you king? And I was like, ooh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He unfortunately went on Paul Revere radio.

This is the thing, it's both very funny, but also it's sort of a hallmark of these shows that he is framing this up as the core problem is that people know what's good for them and they just won't do it. Yeah. At one point he talks to the food services director for the school district and is like,

why are you feeding these kids such terrible food? It's unconscionable. And she's like, well, we have to meet USDA federal standards and we have a really tight budget. And his response is genuinely, well, I just came here to feed kids. I didn't know I had to take a math test. Oh my gosh.

Like, why is this so complicated? He's like, okay, poindexter. You just got hundreds of millions of dollars from Tony Blair. You know that there will be math at some point. It's not a math test. She's just like, you have to serve a certain amount of protein and you have to serve a certain amount of starch. And like, this is not an uncommon thing. But he's like, oh, shucks. I'm just a guy who showed up and wanted to cook for some kids. And you're giving me all these rules, right?

I'm just a guy who's made this my number one social issue for years now. You can't expect me to know what a budget is. Yeah, yes. The radio DJ becomes this sort of like recurring character in the show and he's like, I gotta get this guy on board. He's the biggest naysayer and I gotta get him. He takes the radio DJ to a funeral home to quote, see where we've gotten with health in this country. And they talk to the funeral home to see where we've gotten with health in this country.

And they talked to the funeral directors and they turn a corner and then you just see a very large casket for a very fat person. It is filmed and presented as ludicrously large. The funeral director walks through how it won't fit in a hearse and you actually have to get a cargo van and none of the equipment that they have works with it. And ba-da-da-da. And I'm like, you're just saying that you're not prepared for fat people?

Shouldn't they just be set up for fat people? In addition to that funeral home moment, he also does a whole personal stories segment. He brings in this young woman and her mom who says that her dad died of being overweight. Then she tells the story and she's like, he was so concerned with his own weight that he decided to go have gastric bypass.

And then a week after gastric bypass, he passed out in the hall, they rushed him to the hospital and he died at the hospital. And I was like, I don't think that's a death of being fat. I think that's maybe a death of complications of a major surgery. That's actually a point against what you're arguing here. I think the darkest moment on this show,

and this is where I was like, I need to stop watching and cry for a while. As with other shows, he picks sort of a family to like follow around and talk to about their food choices. In this family, the dad is a trucker, the mom raises the three kids, all of the kids are fat. This is the house where he cooks all their frozen food and dumps it on the table and pushes this mom

until she weeps about how she's like killing her kids, right? He takes their deep fryer and buries it in the backyard. And then he turns to the mom and he's like, you're a church going lady, right? Why don't we pray over it? And then later he tells the camera that he did that just for a bit of a laugh. It's like, I hate these people. He then takes this family to a doctor who tells them on camera and in front of their children that their sixth grade middle child may already have diabetes. That is the language that they use on the show. The doctor talks about all these things and he's like, well, that just means he's

going to have amputations. He's probably going to go blind. Like he names all of these things that are possible outcomes of diabetes, but they are outcomes when diabetes is not managed or treated. He is presuming and understanding that these are folks who will not have access to health care. And he's painting this like ghoulish picture. At this point, he hasn't even taken a blood sample.

He hasn't even run like an A1C test. He hasn't done anything. He's just like, oh, he's got this ring around his neck that can sometimes be characteristic of elevated sugar levels. So he might already have diabetes. And if he did, these are all the things that would happen. He says, quote, we're talking about shortening their life by 30, 40 years.

They may be dying in their 30s. He says to a mom about her own kids in the absence of any test results. They're doing this on camera for a show that's gonna be prime time on ABC and you just watch this kid wither and recede into him. Like you just watch the wave of shame take over him. And like the message is that what fat kids need is stigma.

It's a scared straight thing, which is one of the least effective ways to motivate people to do fucking anything. Like it doesn't work for drugs, it doesn't work for food, it doesn't work for anything. And also if it's a kid, that kid doesn't have a lot of control over what he's eating anyway.

Jamie Oliver is using like a kind of rhetoric around school food and parents. He uses some of that in a New York Times piece that runs at the time called Jamie Oliver puts America's diet on a diet. Okay. Here's an example of the kind of rhetoric. I just sent you a quote. It says, we came across a table of Krispy Kreme donuts. They're a treat, they're to be loved, he said. But start having them every day, job done. It's harsh to say, but these parents,

when they bend to the doctor and keep feeding their kids inappropriate food, that is child abuse. Same as a cigarette burn or a bruise. Dude. Right? Just tone it down, Jamie. It's also worth talking about the results in Huntington.

We talked a little bit about the results in the UK in Huntington. After this all went through, 77 percent of kids who were part of West Virginia schools who were part of this program said that they didn't like or eat lunch anymore. Oh, many of the kids were just straight up throwing the lunch away. Right. So there's a couple of problems there. Right. One is this is a town with a high level of poverty, which means a lot of those kids are reliant on those meals.

Right. Like that's how some of those kids are just getting fed. Period. And the other problem is that because no one was buying lunches, staff started to get laid off. It started to be seen as like a less essential position, and they're really strapped for cash, so they're not going to pay people to make lunches the kids aren't eating. On top of all of that, his menu changes didn't meet the USDA standards and was way higher than the budget that they had. Oh, so you do the same thing where you just like, hey, yada, yada, yada's over like the

actual constraints they're operating under. Right. And he's like, look at how much better it can be. And it's like, yeah, if you ignore the law and money, I guess. It's actually really easy to feed kids if you don't have to think about those two things. Totally correct. Sure, dude, whatever. Yeah.

There's a couple of things to know about sort of the ending of the show. It ends with a big celebration in Huntington. They do like a big high production value sort of like festival in the town. At that big celebration, they get a gift of $80,000 from US Foods, which is like a big food supplier to schools in the US. And they're like, we're so proud to present this giant check for 80 grand. And then you find out, first of all, that it's 80 grand. And second of all, that it's meant to be split amongst all the schools in the county. There are 26 schools in Cabell County, West Virginia.

So that is a one timetime payment of three grand. Right, right. And then if you break it down like kid by kid, it's like 75 cents. It's nothing, it's not anything. And it's again, one-time payment, right? Right. And they're like, oh my God, what a victory!

Rascal Flats concert. How much did they pay Rascal Flats? More than 80K? They should have just given that to the fucking kids. Jamie Oliver is very proud to tell the camera, you know how much they did this gig for? Nothing, because they get it. Because they want the fat kids to be thin heroes.

Because they're going on ABC and it's a press gig. Yeah, because they're getting a shitload of free promotion. Great. At the end of the final episode of the US one, Jamie, like, receives this like reporting from the US that he's like, Oh my gosh, they're trying to go back to processed foods in Huntington, West Virginia. I can't believe it after all the work that we put in. And then I looked up the article that they're referencing, and they also end up saying this on the show. They're like, yeah, we had a year's worth of food sitting in our freezer that we had paid for.

And this dude just rolled in and was like, make everything different. And they're like, we already paid for this food. They were talking about like, what if we just do it on Fridays? It's like chicken nuggets and fries. Or how do we get rid of this food? How do we use it up and not contribute

to further food waste? He's like, well, what do we get rid of this food? How do we use it up and not contribute to further food waste? He's like, well, what do you need in order to do that? They're like, we need them to take the food back or to trade it out for healthier food or something. Like, we gotta work out a deal here. This is not like an issue of like, we're just being willful. And then he leaves that meeting and comes out and tells the camera, imagine being an alcoholic

and saying, it's all right to have a drink on a Friday. Again, people have been like, there are real constraints here. We need to figure out what to do with this food. We would like to have other food. We would like to have the staff to cook it and to pay for it. We would love to have all of that money. We do not have all of that money. He seems to think that people want to feed the kids shitty food. I feel like it's like they're they're they just don't have a lot of other options. Yeah. Then he just keeps being like, well, you should have other options then. Like, yeah, they should. 80 pounds a week on benefits. So is the epilogue to this that everything just reverted back to where it was? Pretty much. Like a lot of stuff is just sort of back to where it was before. It made a big splash.

It made some short term changes, mostly for like a few years at a time. That funding, that Tony Blair funding was not necessarily like renewed at the same time. Yeah, I know, that's always the problem with these things. I live in a town where every two years we're passing a new library levy. Yeah, same, same, same.

It's like save our libraries. And it's like, buddies, we should just agree that libraries need money and we should just give them the money that they need. What? Dude, Seattle had a fucking referendum of like to build a seawall down on the waterfront. So like the city wouldn't slide into the sea. And it got like 75 percent of the vote. Should the city have like a giant disaster befall it?

And like some people were like, I'm not saying yes, but I'm not saying no. Yeah. So the place that I wanted to like leave us for this episode, living by his own values and his own code, I think Jamie Oliver really thinks he's doing the right thing.

The problem is he has come to that decision about doing the right thing that focuses on fat people and fat kids and he simply will not listen to them. He's not listening to fat people, he's not listening to poor folks, he's not listening to black and brown people. All of these folks who have really legit critiques of him and really legit requests of him,

he is sort of either begrudgingly fulfilling them or getting kind of defensive or just shutting down and refusing to acknowledge it. On some level, I think the defense of him with this stuff is that he is up against massive systemic barriers. Right. The fact that one fucking celebrity with one TV show couldn't fix the problem of like school lunches in the UK. Well, like, yeah, of course. Right. That's not how you're going to solve a problem like this.

But also it seems like people for two decades have been telling him, yo, these problems are systemic. They are bigger than you. And he keeps just being like, well, I can solve them and like doing basically the same thing over and over again. Right. Have you tried using a walk? Yeah. Maybe the people yelling at Jamie Oliver just need to put it in terms that he understands and be like, Jamie, if you could incorporate the realities of the United Kingdom into your

work, that would be wicked scrummy. I don't think that's correct. I've learned nothing. It's absurd. you