Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
—————————————- Transcript ———————————————
Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead from the food that they eat.

My name’s Jamie Oliver. I’m 34 years old. I’m from Essex in England and for the last seven years I’ve worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way. I’m not a doctor. I’m a chef; I don’t have expensive equipment or medicine. I use information, education.

I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life. We have an awful, awful reality right now. America, you’re at the top of your game. This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world.

Can I please just see a raise of hands for how many of you have children in this room today? Please put your hands up. Aunties, uncles, you can continue … Put your hands up. Aunties and uncles as well. Most of you. OK. We, the adults of the last four generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents. Your child will live a life ten years younger than you because of the landscape of food that we’ve built around them. Two thirds of this room, today, in America, are statistically overweight or obese. You lot, you’re all right, but we’ll get you eventually, don’t worry.

(Laughter)

Right? The statistics of bad health are clear, very clear. We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide, you name it. It’s on the front page of every paper, CNN. Look at homicide at the bottom, for God’s sake. Right?

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Every single one of those in the red is a diet-related disease. Any doctor, any specialist will tell you that. Fact. Diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States, right now, here today. This is a global problem. It’s a catastrophe. It’s sweeping the world. England is right behind you, as usual.

(Laughter)

I know they were close, but not that close. We need a revolution. Mexico, Australia, Germany, India, China, all have massive problems of obesity and bad health. Think about smoking. It costs way less than obesity now. Obesity costs you Americans 10 percent of your health care bills. 150 billion dollars a year. In 10 years, it’s set to double. 300 billion dollars a year. And let’s be honest, guys, you ain’t got that cash.

(Laughter)

I came here to start a food revolution that I so profoundly believe in. We need it. The time is now. We’re in a tipping-point moment. I’ve been doing this for seven years. I’ve been trying in America for seven years. Now is the time when it’s ripe — ripe for the picking. I went to the eye of the storm. I went to West Virginia, the most unhealthy state in America. Or it was last year. We’ve got a new one this year, but we’ll work on that next season.

(Laughter)

Huntington, West Virginia. Beautiful town. I wanted to put heart and soul and people, your public, around the statistics that we’ve become so used to. I want to introduce you to some of the people that I care about. Your public. Your children. I want to show a picture of my friend Brittany. She’s 16 years old. She’s got six years to live because of the food that she’s eaten. She’s the third generation of Americans that hasn’t grown up within a food environment where they’ve been taught to cook at home or in school, or her mom, or her mom’s mom. She has six years to live. She’s eating her liver to death.

Stacy, the Edwards family. This is a normal family, guys. Stacy does her best, but she’s third-generation as well; she was never taught to cook at home or in school. The family’s obese. Justin, here, 12 years old. He’s 350 pounds. He gets bullied, for God’s sake. The daughter there, Katie, she’s four years old. She’s obese before she even gets to primary school. Marissa. She’s all right. She’s one of your lot. But you know what? Her father, who was obese, died in her arms. And then the second-most-important man in her life, her uncle, died of obesity. And now her step-dad is obese. You see, the thing is obesity and diet-related disease doesn’t just hurt the people that have it; it’s all of their friends, families, brothers, sisters.

Pastor Steve. An inspirational man. One of my early allies in Huntington, West Virginia. He’s at the sharp knife-edge of this problem. He has to bury the people, OK? And he’s fed up with it. He’s fed up with burying his friends, and his family, his community. Come winter, three times as many people die. He’s sick of it. This is preventable disease. Waste of life. By the way, this is what they get buried in. We’re not geared up to do this. Can’t even get them out the door, and I’m being serious. Can’t even get them there. Forklift.

OK, I see it as a triangle, OK? This is our landscape of food. I need you to understand it. You’ve probably heard all this before, but let’s just go back over it. Over the last 30 years, what’s happened that’s ripped the heart out of this country? Let’s be frank and honest. Well. Modern-day life.

Let’s start with the Main Street. Fast food has taken over the whole country. We know that. The big brands are some of the most important powers, powerful powers in this country. Supermarkets as well. Big companies. Big companies. 30 years ago, most of the food was largely local and largely fresh. Now it’s largely processed and full of all sorts of additives, extra ingredients, and you know the rest of the story. Portion size is obviously a massive, massive problem. Labeling is a massive problem. The labeling in this country is a disgrace. They want to be self … They want to self-police themselves. The industry wants to self-police themselves. What, in this kind of climate? They don’t deserve it. How can you say something is low-fat when it’s full of so much sugar?

Home. The biggest problem with the home is that used to be the heart of passing on food and food culture, what made our society. That isn’t happening anymore. And you know, as we go to work and as life changes, and as life always evolves, we kind of have to look at it holistically — step back for a moment, and re-address the balance. It ain’t happening. Hasn’t happened for 30 years. I want to show you a situation that is very normal right now. The Edwards family.

(Video) Jamie Oliver: Let’s have a talk. This stuff goes through you and your family’s body every week. And I need you to know that this is going to kill your children early. How are you feeling?

Stacy: Just feeling really sad and depressed right now. But, you know, I want my kids to succeed in life and this isn’t going to get them there. But I’m killing them.

JO: Yes you are. You are. But we can stop that. Normal. Let’s get onto schools, something that I’m fairly much a specialist in. OK. School. What is school? Who invented it? What’s the purpose of school? School was always invented to arm us with the tools to make us creative, do wonderful things, make us earn a living, etc., etc., etc. You know, it’s been kind of in this sort of tight box for a long, long time. OK? But we haven’t really evolved it to deal with the health catastrophes of America, OK? School food is something that most kids — 31 million a day, actually — have twice a day, more than often, breakfast and lunch, 180 days of the year. So you could say that school food is quite important, really, judging the circumstances.

(Laughter)

Before I crack into my rant, which I’m sure you’re waiting for …

(Laughter)

I need to say one thing, and it’s so important in hopefully the magic that happens and unfolds in the next three months. The lunch ladies, the lunch cooks of America … I offer myself as their ambassador. I’m not slacking them off. They’re doing the best they can do. They’re doing their best. But they’re doing what they’re told, and what they’re being told to do is wrong. The system is highly run by accountants. There’s not enough, or any, food-knowledgeable people in the business. There’s a problem. If you’re not a food expert, and you’ve got tight budgets, and it’s getting tighter, then you can’t be creative, you can’t duck and dive and write different things around things. If you’re an accountant, and a box-ticker, the only thing you can do in these circumstances is buy cheaper shit.

Now, the reality is, the food that your kids get every day is fast food, it’s highly processed, there’s not enough fresh food in there at all. You know, the amount of additives, E numbers, ingredients you wouldn’t believe … There’s not enough veggies at all. French fries are considered a vegetable. Pizza for breakfast. They don’t even get given crockery. Knives and forks? No, they’re too dangerous. They have scissors in the class room but knives and forks, no. And the way I look at it is, if you don’t have knives and forks in your school, you’re purely endorsing, from a state level, fast food. Because it’s handheld. And yes, by the way, it is fast food. It’s sloppy joes, it’s burgers, it’s wieners, it’s pizzas, it’s all of that stuff. 10 percent of what we spend on healthcare, as I said earlier, is on obesity. And it’s going to double. We’re not teaching our kids. There is no statutory right to teach kids about food, elementary or secondary school. OK? We don’t teach kids about food. Right? And this is a little clip from an elementary school, which is very common in England.

Video: Who knows what this is?

Child: Potatoes. Jamie Oliver: Potato? So, you think these are potatoes? Do you know what that is? Do you know what that is? Child: Broccoli?

JO: What about this? Our good old friend. Do you know what this is honey? Child: Celery.

JO: No. What do you think this is? Child: Onion. JO: Onion? No.

Jamie Oliver: Immediately you get a really clear sense of do the kids know anything about where food comes from.

Video: JO: Who knows what that is? Child: Uh, pear. JO: What do you think this is? Child: I don’t know. JO: If the kids don’t know what stuff is, then they’d never eat it.

(Laughter)

JO: Normal. England and America, England and America. Guess what fixed that. Guess what fixed that. Two one-hour sessions. We’ve got to start teaching our kids about food in schools, period.

(Applause)

I want to tell you about something, I want to tell you about something that kind of epitomizes the trouble that we’re in guys. OK? I want to talk about something so basic as milk. Every kid has the right to milk at school. Your kids will be having milk at school, breakfast and lunch. Right? They’ll be having two bottles. Okay? And most kids do. But milk ain’t good enough anymore. Because someone at the milk board, right — and don’t get me wrong, I support milk, but someone on the milk board, probably paid a lot of money for some geezer to work out that if you put loads of flavorings and colorings and sugar in milk, right, more kids will drink it. Yeah.

(Claps)

And obviously now that’s going to catch on. The apple board is going to work out that if they make toffee apples they’ll eat more apples as well. Do you know what I mean? For me, there ain’t no need to flavor the milk. Okay? There is sugar in everything. I know the ins and outs of those ingredients. It’s in everything. Even the milk hasn’t escaped the kind of modern day problems. There’s our milk. There’s our carton. In that is nearly as much sugar as one of your favorite cans of fizzy pop. And they are having two a day. So, let me just show you. We’ve got one kid, here, having, you know, eight tablespoons of sugar a day. You know, there’s your week. There’s your month. And I’ve taken the liberty of putting in just the five years of elementary school sugar, just from milk. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but judging the circumstances, right, any judge in the whole world, would look at the statistics and the evidence, and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse. That’s my belief.

(Applause)

Now, if I came up here, and I wish I could come up here today, and hang a cure for AIDS or cancer, you’d be fighting and scrambling to get to me. This, all this bad news, is preventable. That’s the good news. It’s very very preventable. So, let’s just think about, we got a problem here, we need to reboot. Okay so, in my world what do we need to do? Here is the thing, right. It can not just come from one source. To reboot and make real tangible change, real change, so that I could look you in the white of the eyes and say, “In 10 years time, the history of your children’s lives, happiness — and let’s not forget, you’re clever if you eat well, you know you’re going to live longer, all of that stuff, it will look different. OK?”

So, supermarkets. Where else do you shop so religiously? Week in, week out. How much money do you spend, in your life, in a supermarket? Love them. They just sell us what we want. All right. They owe us, to put a food ambassador in every major supermarket. They need to help us shop. They need to show us how to cook, quick, tasty, seasonal meals for people that are busy. This is not expensive. It is done in some. And it needs to be done across the board in America soon, and quick. The big brands, you know, the food brands, need to put food education at the heart of their businesses. I know, easier said than done. It’s the future. It’s the only way.

Fast food. With the fast food industry you know, it’s very competitive. I’ve had loads of secret papers and dealings with fast food restaurants. I know how they do it. I mean basically they’ve weaned us on to these hits of sugar, salt and fat, and x, y, and z. And everyone loves them. Right? So, these guys are going to be part of the solution. But we need to get the government to work with all of the fast food purveyors and the restaurant industry. And over a five, six, seven year period wean of us off the extreme amounts of fat, sugar, fat and all the other non-food ingredients.

Now, also, back to the sort of big brands, labeling, I said earlier, is an absolute farce, and has got to be sorted. OK, school. Obviously in schools we owe it to them to make sure those 180 days of the year, from that little precious age of four, til 18, 20, 24, whatever, they need to be cooked proper fresh food from local growers on site. OK? There needs to be a new standard of fresh proper food for your children. Yeah?

(Applause)

Under the circumstances, it’s profoundly important that every single American child leaves school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life. Life skills.

(Applause)

That means that they can be students, young parents, and be able to sort of duck and dive around the basics of cooking, no matter what recession hits them next time. If you can cook recession money doesn’t matter. If you can cook, time doesn’t matter. The workplace. We hadn’t really talked about it. You know, it’s now time for corporate responsibility to really look at what they feed or make available to their staff. The staff are the moms and dads of America’s children. Marissa, her father died in her hand, I think she’d be quite happy if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly. Definitely they shouldn’t be left out. Let’s go back to the home.

Now, look, if we do all this stuff, and we can, it’s so achievable. You can care and be commercial. Absolutely. But the home needs to start passing on cooking again, for sure. For sure, pass it on as a philosophy. And for me it’s quite romantic. But it’s about if one person teaches three people how to cook something, and now they teach three of their mates, that only has to repeat itself 25 times, and that’s the whole population of America. Romantic, yes, but, most importantly, it’s about trying to get people to realize that every one of your individual efforts makes a difference. We’ve got to put back what’s been lost. Huntington Kitchen. Huntington, where I made this program, you know, we’ve got this prime time program that hopefully will inspire people to really get on this change. I truly believe that change will happen. Huntington’s Kitchen. I work with a community. I worked in the schools. I found local sustainable funding to get every single school in the area, from the junk, onto the fresh food. Six-and-a-half grand per school.

(Applause)

That’s all it takes. Six-and-a-half grand per school. The Kitchen in 25 grand a month. Okay? This can do 5,000 people a year, which is 10 percent of their population. And it’s people on people. You know, it’s local cooks teaching local people. It’s free cooking lessons guys, free cooking lessons in the main street. This is real, tangible change, real, tangible change. Around America, if we just look back now, there is plenty of wonderful things going on. There is plenty of beautiful things going on. There are angels around America doing great things in schools, farm to school set-ups, garden set-ups, education. There are amazing people doing this already. The problem is they all want to roll out what their doing to the next school, and the next. But there is no cash. We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly, identify them, and allow them to easily find the resource to keep rolling out what they’re already doing, and doing well. Businesses of America need to support Mrs. Obama to do the things that she wants to do.

(Applause)

And look, I know it’s weird having an English person standing here before you talking about all this. All I can say is I care. I’m a father. And I love this country. And I believe truly, actually, that if change can be made in this country, beautiful things will happen around the world. If America does it I believe other people will follow. It’s incredibly important.

(Applause)

When I was in Huntington, trying to get a few things to work when they weren’t, I though if I had a magic wand what would I do? And I thought, you know what? I’d just love to be put in front of some of the most amazing movers and shakers in America. And a month later TED phoned me up and gave me this award. I’m here. So, my wish. Dyslexic, so I’m a bit slow. My wish is for you to help a strong sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

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American Heart Association highlights hazards of consuming sugar, including fructose

I recently mentioned in a blog that I’d tidied up my diet a bit (in conjunction with some mindful eating). Part of the ‘tidying up a bit’ meant taking out ALL foods with added sugar from my diet. I don’t consume much added sugar habitually, but I am generally no angel either. So, I won’t forego dessert in a restaurant or at a dinner party if I fancy it, and some chocolate or cake is known to pass my lips on occasion too. Anyway, for the last two months, all of extraneous sugar consumption has gone.

If a recent paper published in the journal Circulation is to be believed, my cutting out of added sugar from my diet may be positively contributing to my cardiovascular health [1]. You can access a pdf of the article here.

In this statement, representatives of the American Heart Association detail the evidence linking consumption of added sugar, say from sugar-sweetened beverages, and effects on health that are likely to increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke. For example, the quote a review of 88 studies which found that higher intakes of soft drinks was associated with greater caloric consumption, higher body weight, lower intake of other nutrients and worse indicators of health [2].

The review also highlights evidence which links sugar consumption to certain risk factors of cardiovascular disease such as raised levels of blood fats known as triglycerides and heightened levels of inflammation and ‘oxidative stress’ (free radical damage).

I was particularly interested in this paper because it highlighted the potential problems associated with consuming fructose. As the authors point out, fructose was “Originally proposed as the ideal sweetener for people with diabetes mellitus because of its inability to stimulate insulin secretion…” However, they go on to point out that epidemiological studies link its consumption to various ills including insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure. The authors also cite a study in which feeding individuals fructose-rich drinks was found to bring about detrimental effects in terms of insulin sensitivity, blood fat levels, fasting sugar levels and fatty accumulation. These changes were not, however, seen in individuals fed glucose-rich drinks.

Some of you may know that ‘high fructose corn syrup’ (HFCS) is commonly used as a sweetening agent in our food supply, including soft drinks. The authors of this paper point out that many people mistakenly believe that HFCS is pure fructose. In fact, it is made up of about half fructose and about half glucose – just like sucrose (table sugar).

It seems the food industry has done it’s best to brand HFCS as a healthier alternative to sugar by highlighting its fructose content. Remember, fructose has been traditionally believed to be a healthier because of it does not raise blood sugar levels acutely. However, a more evidence comes in the fructose is a major villain of the peace, it seems like the food industry’s apparent attempt to brand HFCS as something desirable is backfiring spectacularly.

The industry’s first position will be, of course, to deny that fructose is a problem. Last year I was lecturing to a group of dietitians in South Africa and was warning of the hazards of consuming fructose and HFCS. A dietitian in the audience took exception to this. She did confess, though, to being ‘a representative of the sugar industry’.

But my sense is this is a battle the industry will not be able to win. Before long, I hope it’s going to be pretty common knowledge that fructose is a nutritional disaster area. And then I suspect what will happen is that the sugar industry will set about rebranding high fructose corn syrup in a way that is less vocal about the fact that this sweetening agent is high in fructose.

References:

1. Johnson RK, et all. Dietary sugars intake and cardiovascular health. A scientific statement from the American Heart Association. Circulation 24th August 2009 [on-line publication]

2. Vartanian LR, et al. Effects of soft drink consumption on nutrition and health: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Am J Public Health 2007;97:667-675

Via: drbriffa

Speaking at the 2007 EG conference, “renegade lunch lady” Ann Cooper talks about the coming revolution in the way kids eat at school — local, sustainable, seasonal and even educational food.

My thing with school lunch is, it’s a social justice issue. I’m the Director of Nutrition Services for the Berkeley Unified School District. I have 90 employees and 17 locations, 9,600 kids. I’m doing 7,100 meals a day and I’ve been doing it for two years, trying to change how we feed kids in America. And that’s what I want to talk to you a little bit about today. These are some of my kids with a salad bar. I put salad bars in all of our schools when I got there. Everyone says it couldn’t be done — little kids couldn’t eat off the salad bar, big kids would spit in it — neither happened.

When I took over this I tried to really figure out, like, what my vision would be: how do we really change children’s relationship to food? And I’ll tell you why we need to change it, but we absolutely have to change it. And what I came to understand is, we needed to teach children the symbiotic relationship between a healthy planet, healthy food and healthy kids. And that if we don’t do that, the antithesis, although we’ve heard otherwise, is we’re really going to become extinct, because we’re feeding our children to death. That’s my premise.

We’re seeing sick kids get sicker and sicker. And the reason this is happening, by and large, is because of our food system and the way the government commodifies food, the way the government oversees our food, the way the USDA puts food on kids’ plates that’s unhealthy, and allows unhealthy food into schools. And by tacitly, all of us send our kids, or grandchildren, or nieces, or nephews, to school and tell them to learn, you know, learn what’s in those schools. And when you feed these kids bad food, that’s what they’re learning. So that’s really what this is all about.

The way we got here is because of big agribusiness. We now live in a country where most of us don’t decide, by and large, what we eat. We see big businesses, Monsanto and DuPont — who brought out Agent Orange and stain-resistant carpet — they control 90 percent of the commercially produced seeds in our country. These are 10 companies — control much of what’s in our grocery stores, much of what people eat — and that’s really, really a problem.

So when I started thinking about these issues and how I was going to change what kids ate, I really started focusing on what we would teach them. And the very first thing was about regional food — trying to eat food from within our region. And clearly, with what’s going on with fossil fuel usage, or when — as the fossil fuel is going away, as oil hits its peak, oil — you know, we really have to start thinking about whether or not we should, or could, be moving food 1,500 miles before we eat it. So we talked to kids about that, and we really start to feed kids regional food.

And then we talk about organic food. Now, most school districts can’t really afford organic food, but we, as a nation, have to start thinking about consuming, growing and feeding our children food that’s not chocked full of chemicals. We can’t keep feeding our kids pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics and hormones. We can’t keep doing that. You know, it doesn’t work. And the results of that are kids getting sick.

One of my big soapboxes right now is antibiotics. 70 percent of all antibiotics consumed in America is consumed in animal husbandry. We are feeding our kids antibiotics in beef and other animal protein every day. 70 percent — it’s unbelievable. And the result of it is we have diseases. We have things like E. coli that we can’t fix, that we can’t make kids better when they get sick. And, you know, certainly antibiotics have been over-prescribed, but it’s an issue in the food supply. One of my favorite facts is that US agriculture uses 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides every year. That means every one of us and our children consumes what would equal a five-pound bag — those bags you have at home — if I had one here and ripped it open, and that pile I would have on the floor is what we consume and feed our children every year because of what goes into our food supply, because of the way we consume produce in America.

The USDA allows these antibiotics, these hormones and these pesticides in our food supply, and the USDA paid for this ad in Time magazine. Okay, we could talk about Rachel Carson and DDT, but we know it wasn’t good for you and me. And that is what the USDA allows in our food supply. And that has to change, you know. The USDA cannot be seen as the be all and end all of what we feed our kids our kids and what’s allowed. We cannot believe that they have our best interests at heart. The antithesis of this whole thing is sustainable food. That’s what I really try and get people to understand. I really try and teach it to kids — I think it’s the most important. It’s consuming food in a way in which we’ll still have a planet in which kids will grow up to be healthy, and which really tries to mitigate all the negative impacts we’re seeing. It really is just a new idea. I mean, people toss around sustainability, but we have to figure out what sustainability is.

In less than 200 years, you know, just in a few generations, we’ve gone from being 200 — being 100 percent, 95 percent farmers to less than 2 percent of farmers. We now live in a country that has more prisoners than farmers — 2.1 million prisoners, 1.9 million farmers. And we spend 35,000 dollars on average a year keeping a prisoner in prison and school districts spend 500 dollars a year feeding a child. It’s no wonder, you know, we have criminals.

(Laughter)

And what’s happening is, we’re getting sick — we’re getting sick and our kids are getting sick. It is about what we feed them. What goes in is what we are. We really are what we eat. And if we continue down this path, if we continue to feed kids bad food, if we continue not to teach them what good food is, what’s going to happen? You know, what is going to happen? What’s going to happen to our whole medical system? What’s going to happen is, we’re going to have kids that have a life less long than our own. The CDC — the Center for Disease Control — has said, of the children born in the year 2000 — those seven- and eight-year-olds today — one out of every three Caucasians, one out of every two African-Americans and Hispanics, are going to have diabetes in their lifetime. And if that’s not enough, they’ve gone on to say, most before they graduate high school. This means that 40 or 45 percent of all school-aged children could be insulin-dependent within a decade — within a decade.

What’s going to happen? Well, the CDC has gone further to say that those children born in the year 2000 could be the first generation in our country’s history to die at a younger age than their parents. And it’s because of what we feed them. Because eight-year-olds don’t get to decide, and if they do, you should be in therapy. You know, we are responsible for what kids eat. But oops, maybe they’re responsible for what kids eat. Big companies spend 20 billion dollars a year marketing non-nutrient foods to kids. 20 billion dollars a year. 10,000 ads most kids see. They spend 500 dollars for every one dollar — 500 dollars marketing foods that kids shouldn’t eat — for every one dollar marketing healthy, nutritious food. The result of which is kids think they’re going to die if they don’t have chicken nuggets.

You know, that everybody thinks they should be eating more and more and more. This is the USDA portion size, that little tiny thing. And the one over there that’s bigger than my head is what McDonalds and Burger King and those big companies think we should eat. And why can they serve that much? Why can we have 29-cent big gulps and 99-cent double burgers? It’s because of the way the government commodifies food, and the cheap corn and cheap soy that are pushed into our food supply that makes these non-nutrient foods really, really cheap. Which is why I say it’s a social justice issue.

Now I said I’m doing this in Berkeley, and you might think, “Oh, Berkeley. Of course you can do it in Berkeley.” Well, this is the food I found 24 months ago. This is not even food. This is the stuff we were feeding our kids — Extremo Burritos, corn dogs, pizza pockets, grilled cheese sandwiches. Everything came in plastic, in cardboard. The only kitchen tools my staff had was a box cutter. The only working piece of equipment in my kitchen was a can crusher, because if it didn’t come in a can, it came frozen in a box. The USDA allows this. The USDA allows all of this stuff. In case you can’t tell, that’s, like, pink Danish and some kind of cupcakes. Chicken nuggets, Tater Tots, chocolate milk with high fructose, canned fruit cocktail — a reimbursable meal.

That’s what the government says is okay to feed our kids. It ain’t okay. You know what? It is not okay. And we, all of us, have to understand that this is about us — that we can make a difference here. Now I don’t know if any of you out there invented chicken nuggets, but I’m sure you’re rich if you did. But whoever decided that a chicken should look like a heart, a giraffe, a star? Well, Tyson did, because there’s no chicken in the chicken. And that they could figure it out that we could sell this stuff to kids. You know, what’s wrong with teaching kids that chicken looks like chicken? But this is what most schools serve. In fact, this may be what a lot of parents serve — as opposed to this — is what we try and serve.

We really need to change this whole paradigm with kids and food. We really have to teach children that chicken is not a giraffe. You know, that vegetables are actually colorful — that they have flavor, that carrots grow in the ground, that strawberries grow in the ground. There’s not a strawberry tree or a carrot bush. You know, we have to change the way we teach kids about these things. There’s a lot of stuff we can do. There’s a lot of schools doing farm-to-school programs. There’s a lot of schools actually getting fresh food into schools.

Now in Berkeley, we’ve gone totally fresh. We have no high-fructose corn syrup, no trans fats, no processed foods. We’re cooking from scratch every day. We have 25 percent of our — (Applause) thank you — 25 percent of our stuff is organic and local. We cook. Those are my hands. I get up at 4 a.m. every day and go cook the food for the kids, because this is what we need to do. We can’t keep serving kids processed crap, full of chemicals, and expect these are going to be healthy citizens. You’re not going to get the next generation or the generation after to be able to think like this if they’re not nourished. If they’re eating chemicals all the time, they’re not going to be able to think. They’re not going to be smart. You know what? They’re just going to be sick.

Now one of the things that — what happened when I went into Berkeley is I realized that, you know, this was all pretty amazing to people — very, very different — and I needed to market it. I came up with these calendars that I sent home to every parent. And these calendars really started to lay out my program. Now I’m in charge of all the cooking classes and all the gardening classes in our school district. So this is a typical menu — this is what we’re serving this week at the schools. And you see these recipes on the side? Those are the recipes that the kids learn in my cooking classes. They do tastings of these ingredients in the gardening classes. They also may be growing them. And we serve them in the cafeterias. If we’re going to change children’s relationship to food, it’s delicious, nutritious food in the cafeterias. Hands-on experience — you’re looking in cooking and gardening classes — and academic curriculum to tie it all together.

Now you’ve probably garnered that I don’t love the USDA, and I don’t have any idea what to do with their pyramid — this upside down pyramid with a rainbow over the top, I don’t know. You know, run up in to the end of the rainbow, I don’t know what you do with it. So, I came up with my own. This is available on my website in English and Spanish, and it’s a visual way to talk to kids about food. The really tiny hamburger, the really big vegetables. We have to start changing this. We have to make kids understand that their food choices make a big difference. We have cooking classes — we have cooking classrooms in our schools, and why this is so important is that we now have grown a generation, maybe two, of kids where one out of every four meals is eaten in fast food, one of every four meals is eaten in a car and one out of every last four meals is eaten in front of a TV or computer. What are kids learning? Where is the family time? Where is socialization? Where is discussion? Where is learning to talk? You know, we have to change it.

I work with kids a lot. These are kids I work with in Harlem. EATWISE — Enlightened and Aware Teens Who Inspire Smart Eating. We have to teach kids that Coke and Pop Tarts aren’t breakfast. We have to teach kids that if they’re on a diet of refined sugar, they go up and down, just like if they’re on a diet of crack. And we have to pull it all together. We have composting in all of our schools. We have recycling in all of our schools. You know, the things that we maybe do at home and think are so important, we have to teach kids about in school. It has to be so much a part of them that they really get it. Because you know what, many of us are sort of at the end of our careers, and we need to be giving these kids — these young kids, the next generation — the tools to save themselves and save the planet.

One of the things I do a lot is public-private partnerships. I work with private companies who are willing to do R&D with me, who are willing to do distribution for me, who are really willing to work to go into schools. Schools are underfunded. Most schools in America spend less than 7,500 dollars a year teaching a child. That comes down to under five dollars an hour. Most of you spend 10, 15 dollars an hour for babysitters when you have them. So we’re spending less than 5 dollars an hour on the educational system. And if we’re going to change it, and change how we feed kids, we really have to rethink that. So, public and private partnerships, advocacy groups, working with foundations. In our school district, the way we afford this is our school district allocates .03 percent of the general fund towards nutrition services. And I think if every school district allocated a half to one percent, we could start to really fix this program.

We really need to change it. It’s going to take more money. Of course it’s not all about food — it’s also about kids getting exercise. And one of the simple things we can do is put recess before lunch. It’s sort of this “duh” thing. You know, if you have kids coming into lunch and all they’re going to do when they get out of lunch is go to have recess, you see them just throw away their lunch so they can run outside. And then at one in the afternoon, they’re totally crashing. These are your children and grandchildren that are totally melting down when you pick them up because they haven’t had lunch. So if the only thing they’d have to do after lunch is go to class, believe me, they’re going to sit there and eat their lunch.

We need to — we need to educate. We need to educate the kids. We need to educate the staff. I had 90 employees. Two were supposed to be cooks — none could. And, you know, I’m not that better off now. But we really have to educate. We have to get academic institutions to start thinking about ways to teach people how to cook again, because, of course, they don’t — because we’ve had this processed food in schools and institutions for so long. We need 40-minute lunches — most schools have 20-minute lunches — and lunches that are time-appropriate. There was just a big study done, and so many schools are starting lunch at nine and 10 in the morning — that is not lunchtime.

You know, it’s crazy, it’s crazy what we’re doing. And just remember, at very least tacitly, this is what we’re teaching children as what they should be doing. I think if we’re going to fix this, one of the things we have to do is really change how we have oversight over the National School Lunch Program. Instead of the National School Lunch Program being under the USDA, I think it should be under CDC. If we started to think about food and how we feed our kids as a health initiative, and we started thinking about food as health, then I think we wouldn’t have corn dogs as lunch.

Okay, Finance 101 on this, and this — I’m sort of wrapping it up with this finance piece, because I think this is something we all have to understand. The National School Lunch Program spends 8 billion dollars feeding 30 million children a year. That number probably needs to double. People say, “Oh my God, where are we going to get 8 billion?” In this country, we’re spending 110 billion dollars a year on fast food. We spend 100 billion dollars a year on diet aids. We spend 50 billion dollars on vegetables, which is why we need all the diet aids. We spend 200 billion dollars a year on diet-related illness today, with nine percent of our kids having type 2 diabetes — 200 billion.

So you know what, when we talk about needing 8 billion more, it’s not a lot. That 8 billion comes down to two dollars and 49 cents — that’s what the government allocates for lunch. Most school districts spend two-thirds of that on payroll and overhead. That means we spend less than a dollar a day on food for kids in schools — most schools 80 to 90 cents. In LA, it’s 56 cents. So we’re spending less than a dollar, OK, on lunch. Now I don’t know about you, but I go to Starbucks and Pete’s and places like that, and Venti latte in San Francisco is five dollars. One gourmet coffee, one, is more — we spend more on than we are spending to feed kids for an entire week in our schools.

You know what? We should be ashamed. We, as a country, should be ashamed at that — the richest country. In our country, it’s the kids that need it the most, who get this really, really lousy food. It’s the kids who have parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts that can’t even afford to pay for school lunch that gets this food. And those are the same kids who are going to be getting sick. Those are the same kids who we should be taking care of.

We can all make a difference — that every single one of us, whether we have children, whether we care about children, whether we have nieces or nephews, or anything — that we can make a difference. Whether you sit down and eat a meal with your kids, whether you take your kids, or grandchildren, or nieces and nephews shopping to a farmers’ market — just do tastings with them. Sit down and care. And on the macro level, we’re in what seems to be a 19-month presidential campaign, and of all the things we’re asking all of these potential leaders, what about asking for the health of our children? Thank you. Thank you.

There is a revolution happening in the farm fields and on the dinner tables of America — a revolution that is transforming the very nature of the food we eat.

THE FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.

From the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada to the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, this film gives a voice to farmers whose lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by this new technology. The health implications, government policies and push towards globalization are all part of the reason why many people are alarmed by the introduction of genetically altered crops into our food supply.

Shot on location in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, THE FUTURE OF FOOD examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world’s food system. The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture, placing organic and sustainable agriculture as real solutions to the farm crisis today.

http://www.thefutureoffood.com