CHARLES GRAHAM: Jamie's food crusade too much to swallow
While he has scored many uplifting little victories in his latest series, I fear chef Jamie Oliver bit off rather more than he could chew with his latest social TV project – The Ministry of Food.
Not that I didn't want him to succeed with his project to get the whole of Rotherham – and ultimately the country – cooking proper food instead of dining permanently on kebabs and cheesy chips.
And he certainly did enough to confound the hectoring doom-monger Julie Critchlow: she who notoriously served junk through the school railings to youngsters who were being fed healthier options in the canteen.
You can't fault him for trying, especially as he will have helped to improve the health prospects of an indeterminate number of people, even if his "pass-it-on" policy wasn't entirely successful.
Yes I know the series finished with a big festival involving several thousand people, but I still have a nagging doubt in my mind that when Jamie returns to the South Yorkshire town in a year's time (or the three other towns where councils have agreed to set up a Ministry of Food), he will have found that most people will have lapsed back into their old habits.
He has made a tremendous contribution to improving school meals, but that came about because he was able to win over a couple of ministers who were then able to exert influence over the whole structured edifice of school catering (Critchlows notwithstanding).
Trying, as Oliver has done in the Ministry of Food project, to persuade thousands of individuals to change habits of a lifetime of their own free will has, unsurprisingly, proved harder.
The cynic in me tells me that his progress will at best be limited. I hope I am completely wrong.
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Weather for Wigan
Thursday 02 September 2010
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