Not very well. If you haven't yet seen the following video featuring Jamie Oliver (part of his extremely well-executed six-part "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" television series), you are in for a treat. Oliver has a genius for making the life-or-death issue of nutrition engaging.
Jamie Oliver is a chef who wants to talk about people who are killing themselves by eating dangerous food. Obesity is killing us in huge numbers, though the media still would rather scare us about homicides, which are relatively rare. We have become so big that there is a significant market for double-sized coffins.
The system is rife with misinformation. We are a country where food manufacturers make prominent "no fat" labels when the food (including milk) is full of sugar. One of his messages is that we've got to stop trusting food manufacturers to properly label their food products. What we do to our children by feeding them crappy food is "child abuse." Our schools are complicit, along with food manufacturers.
Oliver's talk is an up front and personal look at the perpetrators and victims of the problem, and they are often the same people. But consider, also, that we now live is a system where accountants choose our food, not nutritionists.
The low-light of the video is at the 11-minute mark. How well do our kids recognize fruits and vegetables? Not well at all. We are failing miserably at educating our children about food.
We can do a lot better, and Jamie offers some promising solutions that all focus on educating our families and children. Oliver offers a positive energy and an urgency that we desperately need.
Here's Oliver's wish:
It was bound to happen. Several people I know already called it "Linens-N-Shit," a well-known hot spot for people who were helpless to recognize that they needlessly wanted to buy things they didn't actually need. And now, The Onion has dedicated an entire article to the retailer. Speaking of The…
This is a no-brainer, or so I thought. Before asking my extended family this question at a family gathering this weekend, I assumed that everyone would agree to my hypothetical proposal. As distasteful as it might seem at first, I assumed that everyone in the room would (if given the opportunity) agree that they would eat nothing but dog food for one year in return for $1 million.
I write this post having tasted dog food on two occasions in past years. On those two occasions, I’d chomped on a nugget of dry dog food, the kind that comes in a 40 pound bag. I thought it tasted like cardboard, but it was not disgusting. On the other hand, it was not food I would be inclined to eat again unless given an incentive. Note: I have smelled canned dog food before, and I would not be inclined to eat that stuff. The canned dog food I smelled had a strong disgusting odor to it. It looked and smelled like it was no longer safe to eat.
So there I stood with various members of my family in my mother’s kitchen when I raised the question: who would be willing to eat nothing but dog food for the next year in return for $1 million? To my surprise, the rejections and objections started pouring in, even though I went first and even though I proudly stated that my answer was absolutely “yes.”
Two of my sisters and my mother each …
How should you take care of them? According to one book I’m reading, you need to give them lots of exercise and they need to eat good food. You need to buy a good leash and collar. No, I’m not referring to a childcare book–I’m talking about a book on dog care: The Complete Dog Care Manual, by Bruce Fogel, president of ASPCA.
To use a dog book to raise a child, you’ve got to pick and choose the advice, of course. You don’t put your children on leashes or toss them bones (except when they misbehave!). It is interesting, though, that dog-raising books are full of good ideas that also apply to raising children. And it’s especially interesting to compare the way we are supposed to raise dogs with the way many people actually raise children.
My family has a dog (“Holly”) and two human children, aged 6 and 8. I am thus an expert on this topic.
My dog-training book stresses that taking care of a dog requires a lot of work. We need to invest a lot of time in order to have a healthy animal. The dog book places a premium on early training? “Your dog relies on you to train it from an early age to be trusting, even-tempered and sociable…” (page 48). Compare this advice with the way many people actually raise children, ignoring them for long stretches and often abandoning them to the commercial wasteland of television.
Feeding is critically important, according …