Hurley's World

The 2010 TED Prize winner is Jamie Oliver, a British chef and an advocate for better food education, particularly in schools. While his entire talk is quite interesting, two points are of particular interest: why school breakfasts and lunches are not as healthy as the could be and how little much of the population knows about cooking.

First, he notes that the people on the front lines in the school districts across the country should not be the target of the public's ire. For the most part, the cooks, servers and even food service managers are working within constraints which make it impossible for them to serve high-quality, nutritious food to our children. Instead of them being in charge of what is served and how it is prepared, the power often lies with bean counters and, although unmentioned in the speech, farm policy. The decisions are based more often on cost rather than nutrition and taste.

What does this mean? First, to keep costs down, much of what schools serve is determined by the free food available from the federal government. Which foods are available generally is governed by food politics and distribution system realities rather than food quality and nutrition. Additionally, the labor needed to prepare and serve the meals to our children can be quite expensive. Thus, schools outsource a fair amount of this labor in the form of processed foods from food manufacturers. Since the food is then designed to be easily manufactured and to last on shelves, rather than for its nutritional value, the children don't get the best quality food. Without financial support from the community, these two factors lead to fewer fresh fruits and vegetables being available to our children..

Another interesting tidbit is the number of generations we have gone where people do not learn how to cook as they grow up. One of the people he spotlighted is a mother of young children and she is part of the third generation of her family who did not learn these essential life skills at home. I've been thinking about this very topic for the last few months. While I didn't know exactly how far in the past it went, I knew that there were a number of young women in my grandparents generation who got married and started their own households without knowing how to cook. I'm guessing this trend is part of what fueled the popularity of cookbooks like "The Joy of Cooking" and the back to basics movement. Although I'm not sure why we went away from home cooked meals, my guess is that it was a confluence of events involving better canning techniques, development of refrigeration and freezing, the increasing women's educational and professional opportunities during the early 1900s, and the entrance of large numbers of women into the workforce during World War II.

Somehow, we need to find a way to get nutritious meals into our bodies and fully understanding these issues will help us get there. As a country, we need to find a way to emphasize food quality over cost for our school children and we need to teach our population how to cook. Taking these two steps would go a long way towards alleviating the obesity problem.