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5
A Matter of Taste
Reading Passage 042
At the age of just 22, Jamie Oliver became well known across the UK as "The Naked
Chef." He called himself this not because he cooked wearing no clothes, but because he
wanted to simplify food preparation so that everybody could follow his recipes. He wanted to
"strip down" the idea of cooking. Since then he has had numerous TV shows, published
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many books, and has become a household name in the UK.
Today, one of the activities Jamie Oliver is best known for is his great effort to improve the
school dinners that children eat every day. One day, he visited the kitchen of a typical London
secondary school, and he was shocked to see how much processed junk food the kids were
given to eat each day. Fat and sugar levels were extremely high, and nutritional values very
10 low. The "turkey twizzler" became the symbol of these unhealthy meals: processed meat
containing 21.2% fat and only 34% actual turkey. Oliver ran the school kitchen for one year
and tried to show that it was possible to serve healthy meals on a limited budget—and that
kids actually enjoyed eating them. His mission was to radically change the eating habits of
children in that school, and across the country.
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CULTIES
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His project (the "Feed Me Better" campaign) has had some influence on school dinners in
the UK. After watching the documentary Jamie's School Dinners, 271,677 people signed a
petition calling for healthier school meals. This led the Prime Minister to agree to spend 280
million pounds (about 37 billion yen) on school dinners, to ban some junk food from school
menus, and to create a School Food Trust to provide support and advice for people preparing
school meals. Research, by the way, shows that children who stop eating sugary, fatty food
and instead eat Oliver's school dinners are better behaved in class, and they get higher test
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scores, too.
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Of course, the project has had some problems. At first, many students (and even parents)
resisted the removal of the junk food they were so used to. In one famous instance, some
parents were passing local takeaway food to their children through the school fence. Also,
schools that followed the plan for a while were often found to gradually drift back into bad
habits. After all, it is easier and cheaper to just give the kids junk food. However, Oliver's
efforts represent a positive start, and with obesity becoming such a huge problem (see Unit 4),
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it's a very necessary start.
