This is a man with a plan, rest assured.
We all know Jamie Oliver as the celebrity chef with the cute lisp. But Jamie has a vision: some years ago he went against the system of unhealthy school dinners in Britain and has tried to turn it around. In a country that fed its children with bangers and mash and fried fish, Jamie decided to try to change that and make salad appealing to kids.
These days his crusade is to teach poor Northern English townies that survive on doner kebabs to cook. His experiment has been immortalized in this four episode documentary called ministry of food whose premise is simple: if Jamie teaches 8 people to cook, and each of them teaches two friends and each of them another two, then some time in the very foreseeable future the entire town will know how to cook. After a series of unfortunate events the documentary ends on a high note: Jamie organizes a food festival where the entire town joins in and councilors from other neighboring towns promise that they will support the ministry of food in their own towns.
The nicest part of this is that it reminds me that one person can make a difference. I've always believed that it shouldn't be the society that changes the individual, it is the individual that will change the society. Jamie O is an inspiring man: he believes in the power of the individual but he also has a very strong sense of community. He thinks that communities should be together, having common goals, people inside them helping each other out. And this is what his ministry of food is all about. Lonely people with no clear purpose in life, single mothers that had never cooked a meal before in their lives, coming together and finding a purpose, sharing a common goal and succeeding in it. Seeing these people on TV who say that they never thought they could do this, now teaching their friends to cook, is just amazing. People saying how this common cause has given a new meaning and changed their lives, is so touching. People should indeed never stop believing that something inspiring can come along and change things.
So, for Jamie people, pass it on!
1 comment:
I really like Jamie Oliver. Unlike his fellow star chef, unbearable holier than thou Gordon Ramsay, J.O. seems to be genuinely interested in having people eat healthy.
This project seems wonderful and I agree in principle with the individual changing society instead of the other way around, despite the fact that if people don't follow your actions then the change won't be that much, so at some point you need collective action.
If this project helps British people to have a better, healthier relationship with food, then that's great. I hope it works - some of Oliver's plans in the past resulted in nothing more than publicity to the chef whilst people's lives remained the same, so maybe now it's different. But ultimately, it is always going to be hard to eat healthy, specially in the UK, if you don't have some money to spend. In Portugal, for example, people can afford fruit and veg, which is good, and everybody still eats lots of salad and soup, but some have already given up on fish because they find it just too pricey. And we're talking about people who love their fish. So maybe J.O. can change eating habits, but the actual cost of meals will always be an issue, as was bitterly shown with the School Dinners programme.
I would just like to add that the only thing I disagree with is the cute lisp - lisp all right, but cute it is not.
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