Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

If you have kids, or are planning to have kids, or care about kids in any way, then you need to be watching Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. Move over Alton Brown, I have a new culinary hero. Jamie stands for everything I believe in when it comes to food and healthy eating, especially in terms of what we're feeding our children.

Jamie is a BBC TV chef who I've watched regularly over the years. He transformed the school lunch program in the UK and now he's come over here to help with ours. The US series takes place in Huntington, West Virginia - the most overweight city in our country. It starts off with a visit to the elementary school where he finds a veritable horror show of processed crap and junk food, including flavored milk, pizzas of all imaginable variety, chicken nuggets, french fries, and the boxes and boxes of pre-cooked, chemical-filled "food" stacked in the freezer.

I still can't get over the fact that the people involved in the school lunch planning and preparation saw nothing wrong with what they were feeding their children - thought it was just fine to serve high-fat, high-sugar strawberry and chocolate flavored milk, sugary cereals for breakfast, breakfast PIZZA followed by more pizza for lunch, and an ingredient list 20+ items long on what was being called "chicken breast."

It saddens me to think that we're completely ok with feeding our kids this kind of garbage. It made me even sadder when he went into the first grade classroom and none of the kids knew what an eggplant was. Sadder still when they couldn't identify a tomato. How did we get to this point?

Then he did the "nugget demonstration" and I thought I was going to puke (if you don't have a weak stomach, you can watch the video here). What made it even worse is that the kids still wanted to eat the nugget after they saw what was in it!

I've now got a renewed commitment to making sure I'm feeding my child the best that I can. I wish I could just stick him in a food bubble.