The Moral Geographies of Children, Young People and Food

Beyond Jamie's School Dinners

J. Pike,P. Kelly

• Éditeur: Palgrave Macmillan
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137312310
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: Social Policy

This book takes Jamie Oliver's campaign for better school meals as a starting point for thinking about morally charged concerns relating to young people's nutrition, health and well-being, parenting, and public health 'crises' such as obesity. The authors show how these debates are always about the moral project of the self.

Part I
The Government of Young People and the Battle for Healthy Bodies, Minds and Souls

1

Jamie’s School Dinners: Celebrity Culture, Food and the Problem of Healthy Eating

The Problem with Jamie Oliver is …

Jamie Oliver is undoubtedly one of the most influential and well-known figures in relation to concerns about eating habits, food production, processing and preparation, health and well-being and the food that we (who live in the UK, the US, Australia/New Zealand) feed our children in school and elsewhere. In 2005 his reality TV show Jamie’s School Dinners attracted some of the highest viewing figures for Channel 4, with an estimated 5.3 million UK viewers tuning in to watch his crusade to improve school meals in the London Borough of Greenwich, UK. Further television series followed with the UK-based Jamie’s Return to School Dinners in 2006, Jamie’s Ministry of Food in 2008 and Jamie’s American Food Revolution in 2010, which aired in the US and Australia as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. The response from the public, media commentators, nutritionists and school food professionals was mixed and Oliver’s campaigns and interventions were both applauded and criticised. While some commended his efforts to bring school food to the fore of the political agenda, other reactions ranged from the outspokenly critical to the savagely judgemental. And yet, Jamie Oliver is by no means the only celebrity chef to venture into such campaigning territory (see, for example, Gordon Ramsay’s Behind Bars, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight and Chicken Run). He is also not the only celebrity to attempt to promote healthy eating (see, for example, Liverpool FC captain Steven Gerrard’s support for school cookery lessons, and Welsh world champion and Olympic medallist hurdler/sprinter Colin Jackson’s support for the School Food Trust). And he is not the only celebrity chef to directly influence UK government policy on school food (see, for example, Prue Leith, ex-Chief Executive of the School Food Trust, Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent, The School Food Plan). So it is perhaps worth considering why the figure of Jamie Oliver remains synonymous with school meals in a way that other celebrities and celebrity chefs don’t. Why is it that this young, successful, multimillionaire chef continues to provoke such wildly opposing and often vitriolic reactions? In short, what is the problem with Jamie Oliver?

For some, Jamie Oliver is simply too difficult to define. As Sarah Rainey (2012) writes in the Telegraph, his professional role cannot easily be categorised and this leads some to question the motivations behind his campaigns:

Fifteen years later, Oliver has starred in 23 television shows that have been screened in 40 countries. He has written 15 cookery books (selling 30 million copies), a best-selling magazine (which recently doubled its print run) and has 38 restaurants around the world, from Amsterdam to Dubai, serving 100,000 customers a week. His personal wealth is estimated at £150 million, making him the 501st richest person in Britain …

Admirers have likened him to Elizabeth David, a modern-day food evangelist who has more in common with Bob Geldof than Gordon Ramsay. His high-profile campaign to improve school meals catapulted him on to the political scene, where he garnered overwhelming cross-party support. Despite a recent falling out with the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, whom he claims ‘does not understand food in schools’, Oliver’s star shows no sign of dimming …

Yet some people aren’t convinced. Fellow chefs are sceptical of Oliver’s ‘good work’, pointing out the unhappy clash between his saintly food ethos and his steely business sense. Clarissa Dickson Wright accused him of being a ‘force for spin’ and a ‘whore’ for promoting farmed Scottish salmon in a 2004 Sainsbury’s advert. One writer who interviewed Oliver was similarly unimpressed. ‘He’s a showman’, she says. ‘As soon as he walked away from the crowds, he seemed to switch off that side of his personality. I can’t say I found him nearly as engaging as he is on our TV screens’.

The problem critics have with Oliver is that he’s notoriously difficult to define. Chef? Politician? Entrepreneur? Philanthropist? And many are scornful of his repeated rants against Gove: what right, they ask, does a celebrity chef have to be indignant about the Government’s school meals policy?

For others, particularly in the US, the targets of his campaigns are misguided. For commentators such as Bettina Siegel (2011) he simply fails to grasp the bigger picture in the US school meals system:

I recently met (via email) Justin Gagnon, CEO of Choice lunch, a California school food catering company mentioned on TLT last week. Somehow he and I got to chatting about flavored milk, and Justin summed up beautifully my overall feeling about Jamie Oliver’s crusade:

I’ve walked the floor of the CSNA [California School Nutrition Association] and SNA [School Nutrition Association] national show multiple times, and I’m frankly a little bummed that the best Jamie came away with was chocolate milk. What about ‘Uncrustables’? Or ‘pancake and sausage sandwiches’? Or ‘commodity processors’? Processors are in business simply to take your government chicken and grind it, pump it with soy fillers to offset fat, and mold it into a dinosaur. These are kinds of issues are far more problematic than flavored milk in my view … I get that chocolate milk is an easy target – there’s a viable alternative (white milk), there’s a singular enemy (sugar), and there’s a like for like comparison to another villain (soda, when compared strictly on a gram by gram basis).

Seemingly low hanging fruit here, and I get it. I don’t want my daughter drinking chocolate milk, and if so, only sparingly. But on the macro level, instead of addressing what I feel are much larger issues, we’re bringing the fight to something kids love, and quite frankly, parents are split in terms of their position (even those who are adequately armed with all of the facts). In my view, this is a bad play that is only further polarizing parents on sides of the issues instead of unifying.

To Justin’s list of issues on which Jamie Oliver might have focused this year (complete with an online petition and calls to action) I would add:

• the woeful inadequacy of school food funding – ie., the fact that far more than a six cent increase is needed to ‘revolutionize’ school food;
• the legality of incorporating ammonia-treated ‘pink slime’ in ground beef sold to schools;
• the need for Congress to provide funding to upgrade school kitchens around the country, many of which can do little more than deep fry and reheat;
• the lack of access to drinking water in school cafeterias and the degree to which the new requirement to provide water is an unfunded mandate many schools will have trouble meeting;
• the complete junk sold on cafeteria a la carte lines that passes for ‘healthy’ (even under the new IOM standards) like Baked Flaming Hot Cheetos and Rice Krispie Treats.

and on and on …

Some find his approach patronising. What appeals to certain elements of British audiences as lovable, laddish cockney charm does not appear to travel well across the Atlantic. A blogger identifying herself as rose0red (2010) writes on the Feministing blog that:

Jamie Oliver, aka ‘The Naked Chef’, is a chef and food activist. In Food Revolution he travels to Huntington West Virginia, which is statistically the ‘unhealthiest city in America’. The inevitable reality-show conflict comes from some members of the community that don’t like him and are resistant to the idea of making changes.

A big part of Oliver’s strategy has to do with school food. There are scenes in which he tries to help the schools make changes to their nutrition program (which really appears to be dismal). To do so, he goes in to teach the women that work in the cafeteria.

In the pilot episode, he’s having a hard time winning over the ‘lunch ladies’. Part of this has to do with the fact that the women feel defensive over things they feel they have little control over (they’re trying to work within a budget within a flawed system). Part of the problem is a substantial class barrier between the working-class, southern-American women and the privileged British celebrity chef.

But perhaps part of it was because he insisted on referring to the women – all old enough to be his mother – as ‘girls’. Although the chance that these women identify as feminists is admittedly small, I can’t imagine Oliver’s attitude endeared him to them.

Jamie Oliver has great ideas and apparently has done great things in his country to encourage healthy eating. But unless he finds a way to communicate with the cafeteria workers (and all people of Huntington) in a way that isn’t so patronizing, he’s going to risk losing his message.

In the estimation of others, Jamie Oliver appears a little too media-savvy and publicity-hungry. For commentators such as Dana Woldow (2011), he avoids tackling the real issues in the education system or school meals services, and instead focuses on solving problems which will make good viewing and cast him in the best possible light:

The program [ Jamie Oliver’s Dream School, UK’s Channel 4¹ ] has gotten mixed reviews in Britain, with Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker calling it ‘a shockingly arrogant TV experiment, which exists for no apparent reason other than to demoralise any genuine teachers watching, potentially to the point of suicide’.

Brooker describes Oliver’s goal of fixing Britain’s schools thus:

He wants to make a difference. Not by campaigning against education cuts – which might be boring – but by setting up his own school. Not one staffed by actual teachers – which might be boring – but by celebrities. And it won’t be open all-year round – which might be expensive – but for a few weeks. Thus our education system will be saved.

Sound familiar? Millions of viewers of last year’s sturm und drang first season of Food Revolution saw the TV chef turned education expert take on the town of Huntington, West Virginia (supposedly the fattest town in the US); one of Oliver’s goals was to make a difference in their school cafeteria meals. He did this not by railing against government underfunding of the school meal program – which might be boring – but by shaming the lunch ladies. He didn’t bother explaining that school meal programs which violate any of the myriad complex USDA regulations can lose their government funding, while still being required to feed low income students – which would be boring – but instead attacked the school nutrition director. And he never revealed that the school’s cafeteria budget couldn’t cover the cost of his healthier menu – because it was expensive, requiring both extra labor and higher priced ingredients – so the TV production company just quietly paid those costs.

But what did that prove – that someone operating completely outside the constraints of a regular school meal program (financial, regulatory, and social) can do things differently than someone who is forced to stay on budget and follow the rules?

As the American viewing public can never get enough of manufactured drama and controversy, Oliver is returning with a second season of, well, manufactured drama and controversy.

Some feel he is leaping on a bandwagon that they have been travelling on for some time. In this context Debra Eschmeyer (2010) suggests that Oliver simply fails to acknowledge the efforts of others to improve school meals services:

In the end, I think we all want his show to be effective: meaning Jamie’s School Food Charter becomes a reality instead of a reality show. If folks get angry, great. But generate that anger into a phone call to Congress during the Child Nutrition Reauthorization, which is happening NOW, where we need our elected officials to reauthorize the bill at least at the amount the Obama Administration requested or divert that anger into energy to work with a local nonprofit to make change in the school system.

Diane [Diane Chapeta, Director Child Nutrition Services, Serving Chilton & Hilbert Public Schools] does it every day:

I will continue to work with small and mid-sized farmers, and school districts, and the powers that be to keep making a change in the way our students eat; in real time, in the real world. I don’t need reality television to show me how to ‘get angry’. I’ve been ‘angry’ for quite some time now. I turned my anger into something positive; farm to school. What he (Jamie) should have done on prime-time television is shown the rest of the country what we are doing about this problem, and how much more we could accomplish if we just had their support and assistance. Jamie Oliver can keep his anger; I have no use for it. The food revolution has already begun. I’m in it every day.

In Working in Jamie’s Kitchen, one of us and a colleague (Kelly and Harrison, 2009), spent time trying to make some sense of Jamie Oliver. This ‘sense making’ was part of the contextualising work required to establish that an analysis of the reality TV shows Jamie’s Kitchen and Jamie’s Kitchen Australia could shed light on social enterprises, transitional labour market programmes, and the possibilities they offered marginalised young people for a form of self transformation that might secure some sort of parlous redemption in the precarious labour markets of the 21st century. In that context we asked, as Sarah Rainey does above, Jamie Oliver, Celebrity Chef: Who/What is the Real Naked Chef? Is he the celebrity chef? The transformative and/or charismatic leader? The social entrepreneur? The food revolutionary? The lad? The husband? The father? All of these figures are representations produced in a range of media texts. In one sense they are all fictions (can we know the real Jamie Oliver?) but they all have effects in the everyday (Couldry, 2006; Hage, 2003). In some respects, then, it doesn’t matter if the representations of Jamie Oliver that we see across a range of media are real, but that these representations come to signify certain aspects of contemporary forms of the self, and of the array of social, economic and political forces that shape our lives, and the environments in which these lives – with their different choices and chances – take shape and are lived.

In the first part of this chapter we revisit some of this discussion from Working in Jamie’s Kitchen to explore the ambiguous figure of Jamie Oliver, ‘mockney’, laddish celebrity chef and social/moral entrepreneur. Our analysis and discussion aims to situate Oliver as one of a number of actors/‘actants’ (Latour, 2007) who claim some authority or right or interest in shaping what young people eat and are fed in schools and elsewhere. Part of the work we do in this chapter suggests that much of the response to Jamie Oliver can be understood as ‘judgement’. This kind of judgement not only assumes a particular authority in claiming to know the truth about Oliver, but it also conceals and silences other possible interpretations. In addition, we want to suggest that Oliver’s foray into school meals territory calls into question the existing position of the State as the most significant or, in some cases, the only agency that could or should intervene in the school food ‘problem’.

The ambiguous figure of Jamie Oliver: Celebrity chef and moral entrepreneur

From the outset we would suggest that, like most of us, Jamie Oliver is a fundamentally ambiguous figure. Those two words – ambiguous and figure – have a particular meaning and lineage that echoes in our use of them as a means to think and write about Oliver. Donna Haraway (2008, p. 4) argues that we, all of us, along with many other material and symbolic entities, are indeed figures, material-semiotic nodes or knots:

Figures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another. For me, figures have always been where the biological and literary or artistic come together with all of the force of the lived reality. My body itself is just such a figure, literally.

Zygmunt Bauman (1989, 1990, 1991) has written extensively, and over a long period of time, about the ambivalence that is central to the human condition, the hurts, pain, pleasures and joys that variously characterise the ambivalence that shapes our being in the world, and the challenges that a recognition of, and engagement with, ambivalence poses for social scientists who have, throughout enlightenment modernity, tended to try to legislate away, exterminate that ambivalence. Bauman (1991, pp. 1–37) suggests that ‘[l]iving with ambivalence’ most often provokes anxiety. The ‘discomfort’ of learning to live with an awareness that there is ‘no certain exit from uncertainty’ is the ‘source of specifically postmodern discontents: discontent against the condition fraught with ambivalence, against the contingency that refuses to go away, and against the messengers of the news – those who attempt to spell out and articulate what is new and what is unlikely ever to return to the old’. It is ‘because of the anxiety that accompanies it and the indecision which follows that we experience ambivalence as a disorder’ (see also Kelly, 2014a and b).

So, by suggesting that Jamie Oliver is fundamentally an ambiguous figure, we want to signal that we do not want to claim to reveal the truth about Oliver. Nor do we want to develop what Judith Butler (2002) might call a judgmental critique of Jamie Oliver (some of the references used at the opening of this chapter can occupy those spaces). In an essay that was originally delivered as the Raymond Williams lecture at Cambridge University (in May, 2000), Butler (2002) examines the ways in which Michel Foucault’s essays on critique and enlightenment provoke different ways of ...