"Properly, with love, from scratch": Jamie Oliver's food revolution

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 110, 2011, Pages 178-191

  Slocum, Rachel ^a   Shannon, Jerry ^b   Cadieux, Kirsten Valentine ^b   Beckman, Matthew ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN LA CROSSE   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

^c AUGSBURG COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79959323180     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2010-033     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Associated Press, "West Virginia Town Shrugs at Being Fattest City: Huntington Characterized as Obese, Toothless and Poor in Recent Report, " November 17, 2008, msnbc. com, www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27697364.
2. Jamie Oliver, "Jamie's Food Revolution, " JamieOliver. com, www.jamieoliver.com/campaigns/ jamies-food-revolution (accessed July 6, 2010).
3. The show, which won the 2010 Emmy for best reality show, initially had 6.2-7.5 million viewers, putting it at 4 out of 5 in the Nielsen rankings; as we write this article, over six hundred thousand people have signed his petition from an initial ten thousand in March.
4. Kim O'Donnel, "Jamie Oliver's 'Food Revolution' Stirs the Pot, " True/Slant, March 26, 2010, www.trueslant.com/kimodonnel/2010/03/26/jamie-olivers-food-revolution-stirs-the-pot.
5. E. Melanie DuPuis, "Food Politics, " Gastronomica 7 (2007): v, and also see the rest of this Gastronomica issue.
6. Oliver uses this phrase in episode 5, describing his method of making nachos for students.
7. Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
8. Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1986).
9. Susan Levine, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America's Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
10. Janet Poppendieck, Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Poppendieck also notes how the limited distribution of free lunch vouchers produces a stigma for its recipients that somewhat offsets its benefits.
11. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, chap. 8.
12. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, chap. 9. Levenstein has also noted how the scale was designed to overstate the malnutrition problem so as to increase its political potency, while also outlining the scale's construction using the bodies of northern Europeans as a norm.
13. See Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food (New York: Penguin Press, 2009).
14. Gyorgy Scrinis, "On the Ideology of Nutritionism, " Gastronomica 8 (2, 2008): 39-48. Much is known about how nutrients work in the body, but merely adding nutrients to the body through intravenous drip (total parenteral nutrition) does not result in a healthy body.
15. Clare Herrick, "Risky Bodies: Public Health, Social Marketing and the Governance of Obesity, " Geoforum 38 (January 2007): 90-102.
16. Susan J. Smith and Donna Easterlow, "The Strange Geography of Health Inequalities, " Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 173-190.
17. For the period 2003-2006, 33 percent of children ages 6 to 11 and 34 percent of youth ages 12 to 19 are overweight or obese; Ronette R. Briefel, Ander Wilson, and Philip M. Gleason, "Consumption of Low-Nutrient, Energy-Dense Foods and Beverages at School, Home, and Other Locations among School Lunch Participants and Nonparticipants, " Supplement to the Journal of the American Dietetic Association 109 (2009): S79-S90.
18. Concern over malnourishment of war recruits resulted in the National School Lunch Program, authorized in 1946. Katherine Ralston et al., The National School Lunch Program: Background, Trends, and Issues, ERS Report 61 (Washington, DC:USDA Economic Research Service, 2008) summarizes the program as operating in over one hundred thousand, or 94 percent of, U.S. schools, providing over 28 million low-cost or free lunches per school day, and serving about 60 percent of U.S. children ages 5-18 at least once weekly (30 million children in 2006). U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err61/err61.pdf (accessed August 28, 2010).
19. Briefel, Wilson, and Gleason, "Consumption of Food and Beverages".
20. Donka M. Mirtcheva and Lisa M. Powell, "Participation in the National School Lunch Program: Importance of School-Level and Neighborhood Contextual Factors, " Journal of School Health 79 (2009): 485-94.
21. Mirtcheva and Powell, "Participation in School Lunch Program".
22. Antonia Demas, Dana Kindermann, and David Pimentel, "School Meals: A Nutritional and Environmental Perspective, " Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 53 (2010): 249-56. The 1995 guidelines established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services (Dietary Guidelines for Americans) limited total fat in school lunches to 30 percent of total calories and saturated fat to less than 10 percent of total calories. In the school year 2004-2005, 85 percent of schools offered lunches that met the standards for protein, vitamins, calcium, and iron, but only one-quarter of schools met the total fat requirements while 34 percent and 26 percent, respectively, of elementary and secondary schools met the saturated fat requirements. There are no uniform nutrition standards for the school lunches that apply to the cafeteria as a whole; there are only specific guidelines for the NSLP. In 2003, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that over 75 percent of schools exceeded the requirement that only 30 percent of calories come from fat. In the school year 2004-2005, only one-quarter of schools even met the total fat requirements.
23. Briefel, Wilson, and Gleason, "Consumption of Food and Beverages, " 82.
24. Mirtcheva and Powell, "Participation in School Lunch Program. "
25. Associated Press, "West Virginia Town Shrugs. "
26. J. D. Latner and A. J. Stunkard, "Getting Worse: The Stigmatization of Obese Children, " Obesity Research 11 (2003): 452-56.
27. J. D. Latner and A. J. Stunkard, "Getting Worse: The Stigmatization of Obese Children, " Obesity Research 11 (2003): 452-56.
28. J. D. Latner, A. J. Stunkard, and G. T. Wilson, "Stigmatized Students: Age, Sex and Ethnicity Effects in the Stigmatization of Obesity, " Obesity Research 13 (2005): 1226-31.
29. R. L. Sjoberg, K. W. Nilsson, and J. Leppert, "Obesity, Shame, and Depression in School-Aged Children: A Population-Based Study, " Pediatrics 116 (2005): e389-e392.
30. Rebecca M. Puhl and Chelsea A. Heuer, "The Stigma of Obesity: A Review and Update, " Obesity 17 (2009): 941-64.
31. R. M. Puhl and C. A. Heuer, "Obesity Stigma: Important Considerations for Public Health, " American Journal of Public Health 100 (2010): 1019-28.
32. Jamie Winders, "White in All the Wrong Places: White Rural Poverty in the Postbellum South, " Cultural Geographies 10 (2003): 45-63.
33. Lucy Jarosz and Victoria Lawson, " 'Sophisticated People versus Rednecks': Economic Restructuring and Class Difference in America's West, " Antipode (2002): 8-27.
34. Robyn Longhurst, "Fat Bodies: Developing Geographical Research Agendas, " Progress in Human Geography 29 (2005): 247-59.
35. for a Foucauldian critique of BMI as a measure of bodies and the focus on obesity, see Bethan Evans and Rachel Colls, "Measuring Fatness, Governing Bodies: The Spatialities of the Body Mass Index (BMI) in Anti-Obesity Politics, " Antipode 41 (2009): 1051-83.
36. The BRFSS is a phone survey that has tracked health conditions and risk behaviors in the United States annually since 1984. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.apps.nccd.cdc.gov/gisbrfss/select_question.aspx (accessed August 29, 2010).
37. See also Tony Rutherford, "Juggling the Numbers: CDC Does Not 'Rank' Cities or Metropolitan Areas; Huntington Fat of Fattest? Unhealthy or Unhealthiest? AP Comparisons Could Be Flawed?" HuntingtonNews. Net, October 11, 2009, www.huntingtonnews.net/local/ 091011-rutherford-localnumberjuggling. html.
38. Associated Press, "West Virginia Town Shrugs. "
39. Percent overweight is 31.5, 34.0, and 34.8 in Tuscaloosa, Jackson, and Huntington MSAs respectively, and the percent obese is 37.5, 29.5, and 35.8 (BRFSS, 2008).
40. Alan Drewnowski, "Obesity, Diets, and Social Inequalities, " Nutrition Reviews 67 (2009): S36-S39.
41. J. Sorof et al., "Overweight, Ethnicity, and the Prevalence of Hypertension in School-Aged Children, " Pedriatrics 113 (2004): 475-82.
42. Cynthia L. Ogden and Margaret D. Carroll, Prevalence of Overweight, Obesity, and Extreme Obesity among Adults: United States, Trends 1976-1980 through 2007-2008 (Atlanta: National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010), 1.
43. Nancy Krieger et al., "Painting a Truer Picture of US Socioeconomic and Racial/Ethnic Health Inequalities: The Public Healthy Disparities Geocoding Project, " American Journal of Public Health 95 (2005): 312-23.
44. Clarence C. Gravlee, "How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality, " American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139 (2009): 47-57.
45. Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y. Smith, and Alan R. Nelson, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care (Washington, DC: Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, 2003).
46. Hilda Kurtz, "Linking Food Deserts and Racial Segregation: Challenges and Limitations, " in Geographies of Race and Food: Fields, Bodies, Markets, ed. Rachel Slocum and Arun Salhanha (unpublished manuscript).
47. David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002). According to Goldberg, the creation, ordering, inclusion, and exclusion of populations based on racial categories are built into the liberal state from its inception.
48. See Levine, School Lunch Politics. JOFR also refers to this in passing, showing how pizza counts as two grains, for example. USDA nutrition guidelines have been considerably influenced by the food industry. See Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
49. Several studies have encouraged flavored milk for its nutritional benefits, despite its increased sugar. See Mary M. Murphy et al., "Drinking Flavored or Plain Milk Is Positively Associated with Nutrient Intake and Is Not Associated with Adverse Effects on Weight Status in US Children and Adolescents, " Journal of the American Dietetic Association 108 (April 2008): 631-39.
50. E. Melanie DuPuis, Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
51. Melvin B. Heyman, "Lactose Intolerance in Infants, Children, and Adolescents, " Pediatrics 118 (September 1, 2006): 1279-86.
52. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).
53. Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics and the Emergence of Supermarkets, 1919-1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
54. For example, in a Tweet on the occasion of the show's winning an Emmy award, Oliver noted that he was now "ex enemies" with his two former "arch enemies. " Twitter, 8:08 p.m., August 21, 2010, www.twitter.com/jamie_oliver/status/21798333883.
55. Notable examples of projects that make efforts explicitly to keep food reform tied to material and social contexts and to evaluate change include FoodShare Toronto (www.foodshare.net), The Food Project (and the related Real Food Challenge; www.thefoodproject.org), and School Food FOCUS (as a sustained model of attempts to improve problematic aspects of the sourcing of milk, meat, and vegetables in large school districts; www.schoolfoodfocus.org). All Web sites accessed 29 November 2010.
56. Quote from show's promotional trailer. Critics have documented a number of additional such limits posed by dominant food movement themes, such as its neoliberal, white, middle-class politics and diet promotion and inattention to white privilege and institutionalized racism. See Rachel Slocum, "Whiteness, Space and Alternative Food Practice, " Geoforum 38 (2007): 520-33.
57. On reactionary gender politics, see Tracey Deutsch's article in this issue of Radical History Review, "Memories of Mothers in the Kitchen: Local Foods, History, and Women's Work. "
58. On fetishization of the local and of farmers as embodying social justice, see Patricia Allen et al., "Shifting Plates in the Agrifood Landscape: The Tectonics of Alternative Agrifood Initiatives in California, " Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003): 61-75.
59. In addition to those cited above, we point to examples of collective efforts such as the Healthy Corner Store Network (www.healthycornerstores.org), the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program at UC Davis (www.sarep.ucdavis.edu), and The Food Trust in Philadelphia (www.thefoodtrust.org) as better models. All Web sites accessed 29 November 2010.