Jamie Oliver

Summary

Maintenance Phase Podcast Summary: Jamie Oliver
Released: April 4, 2024

Hosts: Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Podcast Title: Maintenance Phase

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Introduction

In this episode of Maintenance Phase, hosts Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes delve deep into the life and career of renowned British chef Jamie Oliver. They explore his influence on school food and children's diets, scrutinizing the effectiveness and motivations behind his well-intentioned yet controversial initiatives.

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Overview of Jamie Oliver's Career

Jamie Oliver, born in 1975 in Essex, England, embarked on his culinary journey as a pastry chef before rising to prominence as the sous chef at the acclaimed River Cafe in London. His charismatic personality and approachable cooking style led to the creation of his flagship show, The Naked Chef (00:39). Over the years, Oliver expanded his brand, publishing 32 cookbooks and presenting 44 TV shows, establishing himself as a significant influencer in the culinary world (05:51).

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Criticisms of Jamie Oliver

a. Hypocrisy and Corporate Deals

Oliver's transition from a beloved chef to a commercial figure hasn't been without backlash. Hosts highlight his endorsements and partnerships that appear contradictory to his public stances. For instance, after advocating for better poultry conditions, he entered into a multimillion-pound deal with Sainsbury's, which at the time didn't adhere to RSPCA standards (07:12). Similarly, his collaboration with the UN Environment Program was followed by a lucrative deal with Shell, raising questions about his commitments (07:43).

Notable Quote:
"The minute you asked, I was like, I need all caps for this answer. No." - Michael Hobbs on Oliver's catchphrases (00:48)

b. Racism, Colonialism, and Appropriation in Recipes

Oliver has faced accusations of cultural appropriation through his recipes, such as his Empire Roast Chicken. Originally celebrating British-Indian culinary fusion, the episode later faced backlash for seemingly glorifying colonialism, leading Oliver to rename the dish to Spiced Roast Chicken on his website (08:02).

Notable Quote:
"These are scientific and therefore sort of foreign sounding names... if you don't recognize the name of an ingredient, it is inherently sinister." - Discussion on processed foods (33:41)

c. Classism

One of the most pervasive critiques revolves around classism. Oliver's attempts to "dress up" simple dishes like beans on toast in high-end ingredients and pricing (£8 for a gourmet version) have been met with disdain. Critics argue that his approach alienates the very demographics he aims to help, portraying them as incapable or unknowing about healthy eating (09:28).

Notable Quote:
"It's just like rich people dumb shit and I'm a cheapskate, so I would just never go to this restaurant anyway." - Michael Hobbs on classism (10:03)

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Jamie Oliver's School Meals Initiatives

a. Genesis of UK School Meals

The UK has a long history of school meal programs, with significant changes occurring post-World War II. Jamie Oliver entered this landscape in the early 2000s, aiming to revamp the deteriorating standards of school lunches that had been eroded by austerity measures since the Thatcher era (19:05).

b. Jamie's School Dinners Show

Premiering in 2005, Jamie's School Dinners aimed to revolutionize the nutritional standards of UK school meals. Oliver's approach involved dramatic overhauls of existing menus, introducing healthier options under tight budgets.

Notable Quote:
"I'm going to make Rotherham the culinary capital of the UK by teaching its residents how to cook." - Jamie Oliver in Ministry of Food (40:58)

However, the hosts criticize the show's execution, pointing out that Oliver's changes often ignored the systemic constraints faced by schools, such as limited budgets and resources. The introduction of labor-intensive meals without corresponding funding led to staff burnout and menu inefficiencies (30:51).

c. Results and Shortcomings

While Jamie's School Dinners secured £280 million in funding from then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and led to the establishment of the National Children's Food Trust, the long-term impact remains questionable. Studies showed marginal improvements in student performance, which quickly backtracked once initial enthusiasm waned (37:38).

Notable Quote:
"This is the output of the choices you've made politically." - Critique on budget constraints in school meals (34:34)

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Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food in the U.S.

a. Approach and Tactics

Following his UK endeavors, Oliver expanded his mission to the United States with Ministry of Food. Focusing on Huntington, West Virginia—a city labeled as America's unhealthiest—Oliver employed the same reality TV tactics: critiquing existing school lunches, introducing healthier options, and confronting school staff.

Notable Quote:
"Look how much better it can be," - Oliver's stance despite budget constraints (31:13)

b. Criticism and Backlash

The U.S. edition faced intense scrutiny for its insensitivity and lack of understanding of local socioeconomic dynamics. Oliver's portrayal often painted a grim picture of the communities he entered, accusing them of poor choices without addressing the underlying systemic issues. His methods, including public shaming and dramatic demonstrations, were seen as ineffective and sometimes harmful.

Notable Quote:
"We're talking about shortening their life by 30, 40 years. They may be dying in their 30s." - Oliver's statement on a child's potential health outcomes (54:43)

Furthermore, the introduction of healthier meals led to decreased lunch participation, resulting in financial strains for schools dependent on lunch sales, echoing the pitfalls faced in the UK (56:08).

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Systemic Issues and Jamie Oliver's Limitations

The hosts emphasize that Jamie Oliver's approach, while well-intentioned, overlooks the broader systemic barriers that contribute to poor school nutrition. Issues such as inadequate funding, insufficient staffing, and ingrained socioeconomic disparities cannot be resolved by celebrity-led initiatives alone. Oliver's focus on individual behavior change fails to address these foundational problems.

Notable Quote:
"You can't solve this stuff by berating people in the school kitchen." - Michael Hobbs on systemic challenges (30:18)

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes conclude that Jamie Oliver's efforts, although impactful in raising awareness, often fall short due to a lack of comprehensive understanding and addressing of systemic issues. Oliver's repetitive strategies over two decades highlight the complexity of transforming school nutrition standards without substantial policy and financial support.

Notable Quote:
"If you could incorporate the realities of the United Kingdom into your work, that would be wicked. Scrummy." - Michael Hobbs on the need for systemic integration (62:04)

The episode serves as a critical examination of celebrity influence in public health initiatives, advocating for more nuanced and structurally sound approaches to solving entrenched societal problems.

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This summary captures the essence of Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes' in-depth discussion on Jamie Oliver, highlighting both his contributions and the criticisms he faces in his endeavors to improve school food and children's diets.

Transcript

[Michael Hobbs]

I have no tagline suggestions because all I have is problematic jokes about British people. Because I lived there, I feel like that gives me a license to, like, be kind of mean.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'm guessing some British listeners will disagree.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's very funny. It's like, whenever anybody asks 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 ask me about Britain or Denmark, I'm like, first of all, have this long rant ready.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's true. I did ask you if I should go to Denmark for a work trip, and you were like, absolutely not. That is not something you need in your life. Keep it moving.

[Michael Hobbs]

The minute you asked, I was like, I, like, tapped on my little keyboard. I was like, okay, all caps. I need all caps for this answer. No. So. But okay. Does Jamie Oliver even have, like, a catchphrase? I was gonna use one of his little cooking catchphrases, like bam or whatever.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He's got a few. It's less of a catchphrase and more of a lexicon that he'll call things like wicked or slammin'welcome.

[Michael Hobbs]

To maintenance phase, the podcast that is wicked Slammin'oh.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Look at him go.

[Michael Hobbs]

We can cut everything before this and make it seem like I knew I knew his little catch words.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

[Michael Hobbs]

I'm Michael Hobbs.

[Aubrey Gordon]

If you would like to support the show, you can do that at Patreon or you can subscribe through Apple Podcast. The same audio content in both places, Same stuff Today, Michael, at long last.

[Michael Hobbs]

At long last, talking about Mr. Jamie Oliver.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We are talking about Jamie Oliver, and we're particularly talking about his influence in talking about school food and kids diets.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Mike, tell me what you know about Jamie Oliver.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, tiny baby gay. Was like, I'm listening.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Were you?

[Michael Hobbs]

We talked about this before we were recording, but, like, I have kind of a soft spot for Jamie Oliver because, yeah, 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 2000s. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 forever. It really felt like when you had talked to people from the UK about James Corden before the Balthazar thing happened.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah. Or me talking about Elon Musk at any period up until the present.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The world has finally caught up to you, Michael.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is becoming a California high speed rail podcast immediately. This was always in danger of becoming such a thing.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's so confusing.

[Aubrey Gordon]

There are so many kinds of schools.

[Michael Hobbs]

And there's so confusing public and private, but they mean different things.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He starts off as a pastry chef at Neil 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?

[Michael Hobbs]

Is this in London?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Mm.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, no. I had at no money and I ate out of the sales bin at Sainsbury's on my way home. Cause they had sandwiches for 49p.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 is sort of the way that this story gets told, which, like, I believe it. He's a charismatic dude, right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

As a result of that, they have a Channel 4 viewers poll and they name him the most inspiring political figure of 2005.

[Michael Hobbs]

Ooh, political figure. That's a transformation.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And he gets into hot water when he veers away from that thing. Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

And also he's very likable. He has the sort of the combination of fine dining and then this everyman quality.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right. Since the sort of start of his career, he has published 32 cookbooks.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, wow.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He has presented 44 TV shows of more than one episode and 19 single episode specials.

[Michael Hobbs]

He's almost like a twitch streamer at that point. He's just on. He's on.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 gonna do Jamie Oliver. And you were like, oh, cool, Influencer episode. I was like, yeah, it'll be like a light little influencer episode.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

No, it was like Gwyneth Paltrow. Volumes of media that have been 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes. So we're going to do a little rundown of some of the things that he has been criticized for.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And then we're going to dig into our school dinners stuff. One of his big critiques is he's been criticized many times for being a hypocrite.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 5 million pound deal with Shell.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay. Again, it's Money that's quite bad.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 raised a 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 Tandoori Chicken, the recipe has now been renamed on Oliver's website as Spiced Roast Chicken.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Ooh.

[Michael Hobbs]

This didn't seem that bad to me until we got to the let's toast to the Empire.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Right, Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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. Mm. 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 £8 for beans on toast.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

For us listeners who are unfamiliar with beans on toast, it's literally canned baked beans on a piece of toast.

[Michael Hobbs]

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, it is exactly what it sounds like.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 for us to put something cool made with baked beans on the menu.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, it's more money stuff, Janie.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That funds one student for a whole year. Am I going to do it? Of course I am.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, my God. He's doing the speech from Schindler's List. Oh, my gosh. 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right?

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

I don't give a shit.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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, what he calls the government's U turn on obesity policies, quote, unquote.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, I remember this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What do you remember about this protest, Michael?

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

But you don't wanna 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

So he stages this big protest outside 10 Downing street and the theme for the protest is this policy is a total eaten mess.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, that's actually not that bad.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Sorry. Pardon me. Excuse me.

[Michael Hobbs]

Look, I am a man with a podcast that has never had a good tagline. If there's one thing I know.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Okay, okay.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's wordplay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You're like, wow, he really did a thing that we have not delivered that we've not achieved. So here's. I'm going to send you a little screen grab from Sky News of this protest.

[Michael Hobbs]

The fuck? Oh my God. So it's Jamie Oliver in the front of a crowd and he's holding an eaten mess.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, A giant like trifle dish full of eton Mess.

[Michael Hobbs]

But then one of the signs that somebody has in the background is give peas a chance, which is also good.

[Aubrey Gordon]

There's Boris, keep your promise.

[Michael Hobbs]

That one's bad.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh.

[Aubrey Gordon]

His restaurant chain, Jamie's Italian, which was sort of a high street chain, closed in the 2010s with debts of £83 million. And he gets big headlines at the time for closing his restaurants without having paid his staff.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, that's bad. That's real bad.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They lay off 40, 44 employees at Christmas. The last two sort of general critiques. Oh, my God, Mike. This has been the longest.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, I know. The longest table. So we're still table setting.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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, like, just like dozens and dozens and dozens of these stories. Being like, Annie sucks for this. On top of all of that, he's kind of cringe.

[Michael Hobbs]

We finally get to people's real beef with this person in 2012.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Really?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes, absolutely.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, I've never been to Chick Fil.

[Aubrey Gordon]

A. Oh, look at you.

[Michael Hobbs]

I don't think we have it in Seattle.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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. Get a hold of yourself. 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 that has the list in it.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, man. Okay. It says, servers at Jamie Oliver restaurants told to use words like Scrummy, slamming, wicked.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I saw this list of words and I was, like, immediately transported to the, like, pieces of flair scene from Office Space. Yeah, totally. If you're gonna subject people to this, pay them like, $100,000 a year.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, God.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What?

[Michael Hobbs]

I just noticed the third entry on this list.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Pimp. This food is pimp.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, it says. It's just a list. It says melted mouth, fresh pimp, juicy, legendary, messy, magic dollop, whatever, Silky, wicked, radical, treasure.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It could not be more 2000s if it dropped.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know, exactly. Remember when the word deadly was going around as, like, cool, like, ooh, that's deadly. The new album is Deadly. I was trying to make Malignant happen for a while. Like, that band is malignant. I'm so mad that it never came. Anyway, it's never too late. It's never too late.

[Aubrey Gordon]

One of the things that is cut off from this list are some other phrases, including proper rustic.

[Michael Hobbs]

Ooh, yeah, that's hella artisanal. That's homemade. No cap. For real? For real.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Meg. Mega is on the list, and so is Scrummy.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, that's something British people say, even though it sounds like an STD boy.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, fuck. This is like calling it Crimbo, not Christmas Crimbo. What's happening here? What are you guys doing?

[Michael Hobbs]

You know what I've started to spot in the wild lately is Unforch. Oh, I can't make it on Thursday. Unforch.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You really saved yourself a lot of time by shortening that. I mean, I think the headline about all of the Jamie Oliver stuff is he is a polarizing dude.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

People really love him or they really hate him.

[Michael Hobbs]

This honestly just seems kind of, like, standard to me. 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 going to attract scrutiny.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes.

[Michael Hobbs]

And like most public figures and most corporations do not hold up to scrutiny.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I think you're in a similar place that I was at this point in the research.

[Michael Hobbs]

You're taking me on a journey.

[Aubrey Gordon]

None of them are get this guy off our TVs immediately kind of right. Shit. Necessarily right. It's a tale as old as time that, like, 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. Like, all of these things just sort of keep accruing and accruing and accruing. Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

Question, how does he generally deal with these things? Because of course people are going to fuck up as public figures, whatever. Does he just like, apologize like, yeah, I shouldn't have done the Empire toast. It was fucking cringe. I'm really sorry. Or is he like, weird about, like pushing back against his critics and all this kind of stuff?

[Aubrey Gordon]

He gets really defensive and I think that's part of what sets people off.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

I think he's correct about that. Honestly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I think he's right. But he's saying it after he's talking about like wage theft. Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

After he's like, he's using it as a defense. Yeah, right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And you're like, I think you're right, but I don't think that's the main issue here.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

So those are the general critiques of Jamie Oliver.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We're about to dive in to Jamie's school dinners and Jamie's ministry of food. His two UK shows about feeding kids.

[Michael Hobbs]

Both of which I've seen.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You've seen both of them?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, back in my Jamie Oliver days. I mean, this would have been like more than 10 years ago, though. I mean, I saw him when they aired.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'll tell you what, I have not. Because that shit has been scrubbed from the Internet.

[Michael Hobbs]

Wait, really?

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

That and Plandemic are the two watch recently that are scrubbed on the Internet.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Plandemic, you can get at their website. It's actually arguably the easiest thing to get. You just can't get it on YouTube.

[Michael Hobbs]

No way.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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. Hmm. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. We got hamburger and fries for $1.25.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We got tater tot Tuesdays.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, yeah, I remember tater tots too. I have like, not eaten tater tots since.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What?

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Turkey tetrazzin, I've never seen that on.

[Michael Hobbs]

A menu anywhere else in my entire life.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I met. There are a couple of foods I met for the first time in college. We did not have turkey tetrazzini 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?

[Michael Hobbs]

It's like prison food.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It is goopy midwesty food.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Dude, I still think that's a prank.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Candy sandwich.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Just a fucking nightmare of a person.

[Aubrey Gordon]

So she gets this nickname in the press that is Thatcher the Milk Snatcher.

[Michael Hobbs]

It is fully just like taking fucking milk away from poor children.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's like cartoon evil.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's also, there's something this 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And then you're like, these freeloaders want a lunch too. Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 on? Like, we don't charge kids to ride the school bus.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Of course.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right. So as result of this Social Security act, half a million kids from low income families lost access to free school meals.

[Michael Hobbs]

The thing is, you've stacked the deck because now compared to Margaret Thatcher, Jamie Oliver seems fine. Yeah, well, he hasn't taken food from millions of children.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He's not a political super villain.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, the, the wage theft stuff doesn't seem so bad.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Now without that national mandate to provide free meals, the systems around food shifted really dramatically throughout the 1980s and ninet 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh God, yes. This was a big thing in the show.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This was a. In the show. We'll talk about the Turkey Twizzler in a minute.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh my God. Do you know what I remember about the West Virginia one? The version of this that he did in America?

[Aubrey Gordon]

What?

[Michael Hobbs]

There was a whole thing where it was like kids were bringing lunchables to school, but the show had to bleep the word lunchable. I don't know what the legality is or if they were just two chicken shit. But it was like Jamie went on this big long rant about kids bringing fucking lunchables to school cause they're so unhealthy. But it was like they're bringing BLP to school. But you could tell he was saying lunchable.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They replaced a bunch of it with packed lunch.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh really?

[Aubrey Gordon]

As a person who just, just watched it, they dubbed it. There is such funny ADR in the US 1. It's so funny that's like, remember when.

[Michael Hobbs]

You used to watch Die Hard on TV and it would be like, it would be like, yippee ki yay, terrible person.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 Kidbrook Comprehensive School in Greenwich, which is a borough of London. Comprehensive schools are sort of like US public schools. The daily budget for students at Kidbrook 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 got to make even better healthy, quote unquote, healthy food. Weirdly, almost every meal that I see him serve in these clips and meals includes, like a green salad with plain vinaigrette as one of the options. And I'm like, buddy, in what world did you think 6 year olds were going to be like, yum, yum, eat it up.

[Michael Hobbs]

Get them some, like, carrots or something. Like some, like, nice roasted veggies.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You could do. So 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, lightly dressed, bitter green salad is like, maybe not the easy entry point.

[Michael Hobbs]

I'm a 42 year old man and I would skip that.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, I know what this is gonna be.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You do?

[Michael Hobbs]

I do. Because this is such a big deal in the British media. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. This is this up thing where, like, parents would pass their kids candy bars, like, through the school fence.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah. People report different things. This one appears to be burgers. People say, oh, they're passing in chips.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 moment. Okay, in this picture being like, now her kids are fat, now what? And you're like, oh, my God.

[Michael Hobbs]

If parents want to 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 fcking 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 meddle. But it's also like, he's trying to get kids to eat fruits and vegetables. Are you really fcking against this?

[Aubrey Gordon]

I think another thing that happened in Jamie's school dinners, and this also happens in the US 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

To be fair, having some fucking reality show person coming in and fucking cameras in my job, Yes. I feel like I would also rebel against this 100%.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Can you solve it with a boot camp for school cooks run by the catering division of the British Army?

[Michael Hobbs]

Is that what they did in the show?

[Aubrey Gordon]

They bring in the catering division of the British army to show them how to cook large amounts of food efficiently?

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, my fucking God.

[Aubrey Gordon]

As I learned this, I was like, ah, yes. The famously delectable food of the Army.

[Michael Hobbs]

Of the British Army. Health first. Now I get why this was taken off the Internet. This is really bad. I do not remember all of this, like, problematic shit. Probably because I was really problematic back then.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Sure. Well, so here's the other thing. And they really don't, like, they sort of acknowledge it in the shows themselves, but they never really dig in on it. He just fucking explodes the budget.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, right. Of course.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He just blows the fuck. He's not making these meals for £37 sense. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 School Arrest. They're the ones who make Turkey Twizzlers.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

A Turkey Twizzler is like a chicken nugget kind of thing, but instead of being in boot or oval shape.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, it's basically just like a deep fried breaded like turkey thing.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, is that classed?

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 really.

[Michael Hobbs]

Is there? I was not aware of this with Mountain Dew at all.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Do you not think about this? Holy.

[Michael Hobbs]

I used to drink like three Mountain Dews a day. So are they from. Are they from five foot four gay men? Is that the way that they're. That they're.

[Aubrey Gordon]

No, I mean, I think Mountain Dew is often used in like political cartoons and shit like that to denote like a stupid, poor person as a member.

[Michael Hobbs]

Of the drinking Mountain Dew.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Mountain Dew community.

[Michael Hobbs]

Wow. My people.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The response for the company is really funny and silly. It's always fascinating to me when terrible actors appropriate anti diet rhetoric or sort of like 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, I've seen this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They're doing sort of like an all foods fit sort of approach.

[Michael Hobbs]

Hashtag AllFoodsMatter here.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay. It says 1/3 turkey, 2/3 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 it's just like a bunch of shit. It's like this list of ingredients is probably like, I don't know, 25 things.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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, 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The implication of stuff like this is that if you don't recognize the name of an ingredient, it is inherently sinister. Right. And also harmful to your health. Right. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. Also the thing is, when you have to feed kids for fucking 37p, you're gonna have food with a bunch of like fillers in it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is the output of like the choices you've made politically.

[Aubrey Gordon]

So the company that makes turkey Twizzlers ends up first cutting the fat content in turkey. They're like, okay, okay, okay, we'll make them lower fat, which is like a very 2000s thing, right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

There's a quote from the managing director that I'm like, 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 gonna send it to you.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is true.

[Michael Hobbs]

That's like a fair point.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That is a fair point. Right. Like pork sausages, a real cornerstone of British cuis. Right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 when 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

So basically pizza.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Pizza with boiling water instead of an oven, right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He's doing this sort of very 2000s and 2010s thing of like, we gotta 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. Yeah, 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 have 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

I feel like the school lunches problem is mostly a problem of money.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 for school meals. That is genuinely a huge deal. It's really good.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It shouldn't take a celebrity having a TV show to do it. Yes, but it happened. And that's like a good. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

There is one study over the course of a year that shows that more students, like, slightly more students, it's like 5 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And then there's a bunch of other studies that show some backsliding, like almost immediately.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 Kidbrook that was published in Eater London who was like, I was at this school when this show was filmed.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Eaterpiece 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 examples were not included in the montage which aired. Which, like, of course, right?

[Michael Hobbs]

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?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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, that would have actually like educated the audience. Whereas a reality show, of course they're gonna fucking edit it in this way. Like, of course they're gonna set up these fucking stunts.

[Aubrey Gordon]

There's a scene in the West Virginia season where he like opens up this mom's fridge and freezer and there are just like 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 is like, look at this, look how disgusting it is.

[Michael Hobbs]

Look how months worth of food. Jamie, anything is going to be a big pile on the table if you cook it all at once, right?

[Aubrey Gordon]

And he's like, it's all brown, it's all the same color. And ba da da da da. This is a very frequent interaction that he has on each of these shows. And actually we're going to watch one of them from Jamie's Ministry of Food, which is the one in Yorkshire.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay?

[Aubrey Gordon]

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. Okay, we're gonna watch A little clip, little clippy clip of one of the many trips that Jamie Oliver makes into the homes of like low income moms.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

God, yeah. Sorry.

[Michael Hobbs]

Be really bleak.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Sorry, pal. Natasha has never cooked a meal for her children, Kaya and Robbie. Dinner is nearly always a kebab.

[C]

Give me the low down then. Because, like, the fact that you've sort of left, Let us turn up tells me that you're open minded and I'm sick of this. You might. Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right.

[C]

So you're sick of the junk food, you're sick of the repetition.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[C]

In what sort of way?

[D]

Well, she's not healthy. She's been in twice for a tea. Taken out because they've rotted, they've gone bad.

[C]

Right.

[D]

What's your favorite part? Dr. Pepper will love it. Don't we?

[C]

And what happens if you don't do nothing about it? Where do you see it going?

[D]

I see her being obese. I see her being really, really unhealthy. Really. And it's not good.

[C]

So how much are you on a budget? Because to be honest, on 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.

[D]

So you only get 80 pound a week as it is.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[C]

So you get 80 quid. So you want.

[D]

I'm on benefits.

[C]

You're on benefits?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[D]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

Makes me so uncomfortable.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Your kids are having a birthday. Can you have a birthday party? No. A new movie is coming out and you want to 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

His response to this isn't to go, oh, holy shit, you're on benefits and you only get £80 a week. He's like, you gotta get a cooking class.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is a show that's produced for an audience. And this plays into a longstanding dynamic of more class, privileged people sort of leering at what Poor people eat, dude.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know. It feels really Victorian.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 system systemic problem.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 like, 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. In the same way that, like, our bottom line is to release episodes for our listeners. Which we're really good at.

[Michael Hobbs]

Which we're really good at, which we've never failed.

[Aubrey Gordon]

So fucking true.

[Michael Hobbs]

We just like. Our schedule's perfect.

[Aubrey Gordon]

So following his TV success in the uk, Jamie Oliver follows the James Corden path.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Comes on over to the U.S. right.

[Michael Hobbs]

They're like, look, we have poor people in America that we also love to gawk at. Let's. Let's send Jamie to West Virginia.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The first season focuses on Huntington, West.

[Michael Hobbs]

Virginia, which is the fattest city in America. Right. Isn't that why they choose it?

[Aubrey Gordon]

It was listed as America's unhealthiest city. Oh. Somebody's like, well, who decides that? And he's like, it's a government statistic based on death.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, really? What?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Mm. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, God.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

So, so Jamie Oliver heads to an elementary school in West Virginia and essentially does Jamie's school dinners all over again.

[Michael Hobbs]

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. He's like, I swear on my children that I care, right?

[Aubrey Gordon]

He says, I swear on my children's lives. And she just shakes her head and goes, don't do that. Like, I was so hard on the school cooks team. I was like, yeah, ma'am. At one point he. He says, so they get pizza for breakfast and chicken nuggets for lunch. Welcome to America.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, nice.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He's also doing the whole, like, Americans are gross and fat and dumb thing.

[Michael Hobbs]

Also, I make fun of Britain constantly, but also, like, the problems that Britain has are the same as the problems that America has. So I'm in no position to, like, talk shit. And Jamie is similarly in no position to talk shit.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 in front of a bunch of parents and kids and are like, this is how much fat you're eating. It's like Oprah's wagon of fat on steroids.

[Michael Hobbs]

But now, like, two decades of reality TV have gone by. Everything has to be fucking amplified.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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, go choose flour.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You're just adding 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. 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? And they go, yeah. Like, all of their hands go up, 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

I wonder if this is the real difference between Britain and America, because the famous thing about this is that the kids are supposed to be. Ew, gross. No.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He leads into it by saying, I'm gonna do an experiment. And this experiment works every time.

[Michael Hobbs]

The kids are supposed to say, no, we don't wanna 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?

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is a real marshmallow test moment. It's worth noting that in addition to being totally fucking hilarious, this moment also leads to a humongous lawsuit.

[Michael Hobbs]

Wait, really?

[Aubrey Gordon]

A $1.2 billion lawsuit?

[Michael Hobbs]

What?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Filed by Beef Products Incorporated.

[Michael Hobbs]

Of course.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They're a processor in South Dakota. They sue ABC. ABC ends up settling the suit for $177 million.

[Michael Hobbs]

No way. So it was easier just write a.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. This is like us when we have to fact check something. Like, everything completely changes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Like a YouTuber who cuts in and is, like, editing me.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And at one point in the radio interview, he goes, you gotta tell us what to do. Who made you king? And I was, ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

He unfortunately went on Paul Revere radio. Damn it. Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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, 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, my gosh.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Like, why is it so complicated?

[Michael Hobbs]

He's like, okay, Poindexter, you Just got.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Hundreds of millions of dollars from Tony Blair. You know that there will be math at some point. And also, 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, yeah, this is not an uncommon thing. But he's like, oh, shucks. I'm just a guy who showed up who wanted to cook for some kids, and you're giving me all these rules. Right?

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 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. And I'm like, you're just saying that you're not prepared for fat people.

[Michael Hobbs]

Shouldn't they just be set up for fat people?

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

And I was like, oh, wow.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I don't think that's a death of being fat. I think that's maybe a death of complications of a major surgery.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. Holy shit.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's actually a point against what you're arguing here. Right? I think the darkest moment on the 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 fat 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

He's like, I hate these people.

[Aubrey Gordon]

They're like, gross. 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, right? He is presuming and understanding that these are folks who will not have access to healthcare, right? 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, right, 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. Yeah, they're doing this on camera for a show that's going to 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Jamie Oliver is using 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

It says, we came across a table of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

Just tone it down, Jamie.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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% 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 gonna pay people to make lunches that kids aren't eating. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh. So he did the same thing where he just like, he yada yada, yadas over, like, the actual constraints they're operating under.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Actually really easy to feed kids if you don't have to think about those two things. Things, yeah, totally correct.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Sure, dude.

[Michael Hobbs]

Whatever. Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 about, 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 time payment of three grand.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right. And then if you break it down like kid by kid, it's like 75 cents kid or something.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

How much did they pay Rascal flats? More than 80k. They should have just given that to the fucking kid.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Kids. Jamie Oliver is very proud to tell the camera, you know how much they did this gig for? Nothing. Cuz they get it.

[Michael Hobbs]

Cuz they want the fat kids to be thin heroes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Cuz they're going on ABC and it's a press gig.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. Because they're getting a shitload of free promotion.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right?

[Aubrey Gordon]

They were talking about like, what if we just do it on Fridays? Is like chicken nuggets and fries or what? Like 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 you need in order to do that? He's, 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. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

But then he just keeps being like, well, you should have other options. Then it's like, yeah, yeah, they should.

[Aubrey Gordon]

£80 a week on benefits.

[Michael Hobbs]

So is the epilogue to this that everything just reverted back to where it was?

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 level.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, I know. That's always the problem with these things. Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I live in a town where every two years were passing a new library levy. Yeah, same.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's like, save our libraries.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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?

[Michael Hobbs]

Dude, Seattle had a fucking referendum of like, to build a sea wall down on the waterfront so, like, the city wouldn't slide into the sea. And it got like 75% of the vote. It was like, should the city have, like a giant disaster befall it? And like, some people were like, I'm.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Not saying yes, but I'm not saying no. So the, 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. One 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right, right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He is sort of either begrudgingly fulfilling them or getting kind of defensive or just shutting down and refusing to acknowledge.

[Michael Hobbs]

It on some level. I think the defense of him with this stuff is that he is up against, like, massive systemic barriers. Right. The fact that one fucking slave celebrity with one TV show couldn't fix the problem of like, school lunches in the uk. Well, like, yeah, of course.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right. Have you tried using a walk?

[Michael Hobbs]

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 in this episode.