"I am bereft, outraged, and appalled that TV as desperately needed as this is being pulled. Oprah is a legacy because her goal was to use the TV medium for good, to educate, and to help people. It seemed like ABC was doing great work in this vein by airing this show. Now, instead of being an agent for critical and important change, you have simply deepened the disconnect between Americans and reality. I am ashamed of ABC. You need to apologize publicly and get that man back on the air." (they only give you 500 characters).
food. comes. from. the ground.
Tell them what you think:http://abc.go.com/site/contact-us
For those who don't know, Jamie Oliver is a cheeky Brit with a penchant for great food (ok, he's a spectacular chef) and a decent amount of outrage over how far "food" today is from its original, nourishing and healing forms. He has traveled around advocating for real food and real transparency in the agencies that feed America's children (schools and fast food are huge areas of focus) without ever once attacking; rather he helps people see what's wrong - that a second grader can't tell a tomato from a potato and highschool kids- smart ones!- earnestly identify the "corndog plant" (which are really cattails) in a photo as the source of the hotdogs on their lunch menu.
Add to all of this that as obesity and diabetes rise in America, so does the mainstream consumer's dependence on prepackaged, processed, and mircowave-oriented food that does so little for the body and so much for the industrialized food industry. American children are literally being trained to subsist on empty starches, sugared-up milk drinks, high fructose corn syrup, and "pink slime" (left-over bits from the industrial butchering process routinely mixed with bleach, pulverized, and added to Americans' "beef patties" as a filler). Only the minutest portion of what we eat actually goes to support the brain's functions of cognition and memory, yet today's kids have more to cope with mentally than any previous generation- and virtually nothing to support them nutritionally.
Jamie contrasts this in his kitchen, to the amazement of parents and children alike, with locally raised, pasture fed and humanely treated meats, real vegetables (from the real ground), and teaches them what ought to be part of all children's learning- what food is, where it comes from, and how vitally important it is that we make this connection.
We are so mortifying-ly disconnected from our food sources as it is, and here comes this unassuming, funny, endearing man who knows his stuff and is all about helping fix the monumental problem in our society that is giving "the disease formerly known as adult-onset (aka diet related) diabetes" to children who haven't even hit puberty yet... and the network responsible for all of this abruptly closes the door on the whole thing.
Just when he had low-income kids in LA building their own garden and learning to cook for the student body after overcoming a shocking amount of resistance in the person of one member of the school board! Mind you, parents were all for it. In one episode they swarmed him with samples from their childrens' school breakfasts and lunches because he was not allowed in the cafeteria. To a piece it was in the beige-ochre color scheme, mostly wrapped in microwave plastic sheaths, and at least 8 steps removed from any identifiable animal, fruit, or vegetable. Not a speck of fresh produce in the mix.
The man who was fighting to change all this, and finally making headway, has been replaced in favor of RE-RUNs of (as another angry blogger put it) "Dancing with the f#*&@ng Stars".
Please do whatever you can to see what Food Revolution is still available to watch (try abc, hulu, and netflix if you must). See what this man has done and if you share my outrage, please let them know.
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