Listen to This Man (Jamie Oliver)

This is really the first year that I've come to know Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, and I don't really even know him very well at all. Additionally, I haven't really followed the TED awards and talks much before this year either. But I think the combination of both of them has come to be one of the most important events in the growth of our food supply. I find myself strangely torn between optimism and pessimism on this subject. I want so badly for people to be healthy, it thrills me beyond belief to see the subject come up as the First Lady's "problem to deal with" or as the central theme of the latest reality show. Yet when I peek over at the next checkout lane in the grocery store to see it piled high with the very processed junk that is poisoning our children everywhere, I can't help but feel that some people are going to be beyond help, forever.


See, I've been there. I've been a to the point where I shunned sunlight and exercise as a child to play video games on the family computer. As it could be expected, I ballooned up pretty quickly and stayed there for years, most specifically the worst possible years to be overweight in a publicly-schooled child's life. That is, the years of middle school and high school - those very years when teasing and bullying reach a high point. But I got out of that. But in a sense I'm still there because only twenty years after "got healthy", I also finally realize that not only is it difficult to choose healthy foods, there are companies and organizations that are working hard to make it difficult! Corporations exist to make money, and corporations whose methods of doing so are to make processed food and drugs only make money when you keep buying more and more processed food and drugs.

Jamie Oliver's wish fulfillment is what we need right now. We don't need health insurance reform - that's a band-aid applied to a gaping wound. We don't need convenient junk food - that's a twist of the knife already in our back. We most certainly do not need massive corporations working together with government agencies to push new and untested processed "food" on the public at large - that is the equivalent of first-degree murder to our health. Listen to Jamie, and teach our children (and the adults!) to know what real food is. You can only be healthy if you eat real food.

Related articles

• MUST WATCH THIS - Passionate Plea [Jamie Oliver, TED 2010] (fooducate.com)
• Food Revolution (JamieOliver.com)
• Bad diet shortens life spans, raises health costs, says Jamie Oliver (cnn.com)
• Michelle & Jamie, Let's Talk About Oil (drsusanrubin.com)