Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has launched a new campaign in the form of a petition to try to improve food education in schools throughout the world. Oliver, who famously saw his campaign to introduce healthy gourmet-style meals to the UK’s school dinner regime backfire 10 years ago, has started his new campaign on change.org. Thus far he has amassed over 60,000 signatures in just over a week, a figure which pales into insignificance against the one million people disturbed enough to insist that Jeremy Clarkson be re-instated as a Top Gear presenter, despite beating up a producer because a hotel chef had finished for the night.
Oliver states that the world is “facing an obesity epidemic,’ and that there are now over 42 million children under the age of five years old who are either overweight or clinically obese. The “Naked Chef” is urging the Governments of all the G20 countries to give children practical food lessons to raise awareness of the dangers of becoming yet another victim hoovered up by the fast food industry.
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His previous school dinner campaign, highlighted the infamous turkey twizzler as being the poison it is, however rather than bringing healthy school dinners to the UK’s future generations, it actually encouraged parents to take their children out of the school dinner programme and pack them up with some sandwiches, a packet of crisps and a Kit-Kat each day instead.
In reality it was always going to be difficult to get a canteen cook on minimum wage to be affected enough to abandon the trough of baked beans to instead prepare a salad nicoise accompanied by homemade dressing, and it would certainly have been even more of a challenge to get the under-developed pallets of the under 10’s to enjoy such creations, but the idea did at least improve the equipment and preparation areas in schools, and introduced cookery classes across the UK in a large amount of primary education facilities.
Whether enough people will be moved to support Oliver’s latest campaign, remains to be seen……