From the beginning, Oliver should have understood the “Get Lost!” message clearly held by the Dawg aka local radio show host DJ Rod’s country morning show. "We don't want to sit around and eat lettuce all day. Who made you king?" Rod said to bright-eyed Oliver.
The welcome greeting only continues when Oliver heads over to Huntington Elementary in his main attempt to reform school cafeteria lunches. He meets the lovely lunch ladies (note to self: they don’t like to be called lunch ladies…) Oliver interrupts Paulie, Millie, Linda, Louella and feisty head cook, Alice, serving breakfast pizzas to 450 screaming kids.
While the idea of breakfast pizza may be atrociously foreign to Oliver, the ladies find things perfectly normal and go on with their day preparing frozen, processed delights and an unpleasantly familiar fluffy Potato Pearls concoction (mashed potatoes from a water-based goo substance).
Like a car wreck you can’t turn away from, Oliver watches in horror as most kids throw their lunches in the garbage, the only things missing are their adored chicken nuggets and BBQ sauces.
It all seems so simple but the politics of the school lunch program work out to be extremely confusing. Oliver meets with the head of the district’s school lunch program regulated by the USDA where french fries count as a vegetable and pizza contains two starches (crust and the rest of the pizza if that makes any sense). The strict rules and budge outlines make Jamie’s proposed food face-off impossible. His efforts to present fresh food on a budget versus the frozen food force behind Alice and her girls, makes the entire situation hopeless and just plain sad. During the testing day, the lunch ladies all laugh while Oliver scrambles to make more carbs out of thin air. Although cruel, these ladies will always make excellent villains we love to hate.
The heartwarming story comes when Oliver meets with the Edwards family, a group of three obese boys, one young girl on her way to her mother’s giant state and a small-ish deep fryer that causes all the problems. When Oliver enters the small home, he finds that the people and the food they consume is cramping up the space. In order to free up the clutter, Oliver and Mrs. Edwards cooks up and lays out the weekly diet for the family, which includes a fridge dedicated to frozen pizzas, giant hot dogs, and Mom’s best breakfast: deep-fried donuts dipped in chocolate, a daily requirement of course.
The family shares a tender moment at the ceremonial burial of the dearly loved deep fryer and they seem to put their refined taste buds on the backburner. Jamie helps 12-year-old, Justin, stir up his passion for culinary arts and break a healthy piece of bread with the family at the end of the day.
The earth shattering morning of the hour comes even before the lunch ladies awake. The local paper prints a front-page article inciting Oliver of bad mouthing the Americans, specifically the Huntington’s. "They are all anemic with information. Like, when you meet these people, they are not stupid. They are not ignorant. It's just they have never had food from scratch in their life." The slanted angle brings Oliver to tears and the lunch ladies fuming in their hairnets. He feels genuinely obligated to publicly apologize to the entire Huntington Elementary school staff and when most refuse to accept (the chip on Alice’s shoulder prohibiting), Oliver pushes on the best he can.
With the processed v. fresh food face-off on the brink, Oliver and Alice go head to head with a cafeteria full of fat first graders spitting out lettuce and yogurt at every possible chance. If you can imagine, the worst is yet to come as previews of giant waste buckets (what can only be the ingredients of their beloved chicken nuggets) and sad, stout people bawling fog up our TV screens.
Out of all the ABC sob reality shows, this one feels the most relevant, necessary, and even striking to our nation’s situation. While everyone needs a home (“Extreme Home Makeover”) and most families need discipline advice for their children (“Super Nanny”), it’s Oliver who triumphs as the critical hero this country could actually use.
With the hype of the show, Oliver hopes to get viewers to sign a nationwide petition against unhealthy eating habits mainly targeting schools. As CDC statistics state, if the obesity rate continues to rise over the next five years, 40% of Americans will be not only overweight, but life-threateningly obese. A scary thought but even scarier how frustrating the hour episode was to watch. When you see the cultural divide in certain areas across the country (especially from a New Yorker’s perspective), it’s hard to separate the sushi bars from the organic fruit markets. When in reality, the majority of Americans cling to their deep fryer and rely on processed food with the same faded brown color of pizza or wings washing out their plates night after night.
Will Oliver be able to get through to a dying community? With only so much time before an apocalypse, Huntington’s end may come a bit sooner and their preparation and prevention is now or never. A revolution is at hand.
