Being a do-gooder is not easy, especially if one happens to be a multimillionaire celebrity attempting to do good in a?realm far removed from one's own land of expertise. Jamie Oliver knows all about this. He is an English chef who, for one reason or another, became incredibly famous and is now worth some $105 million. He traffics in kitchen-based, instructional television programs; food-chain sponsorships; cookware lines; artisanal edible products with his name on them; and suchlike. Lately, however, he has nursed a new afflatus: to improve the schools for the schoolchildren in them. It began in Britain with his very public campaign to redesign the typical school lunch, which needed it. His message was that kids are too fat and unhealthy and that the rations schools offer them will only make them more of both. Oliver took this message to the United States last year with Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, a television show in which the chef attempted and largely failed to restructure the school lunches being proffered in one of the country's most unhealthy cities, Huntington, West Virginia.
One could make the argument that Oliver, in these pursuits, wasn't do-gooding too far from home base. He is a chef, and this activism involved food?more specifically, not shoveling heaps of the trashy sort of it into the mouths of babes. But now, perhaps, Oliver has stretched too far. His new show is Dream School; it is currently airing in the UK. Charlie Brooker, writing in the Guardian, provides some background:
The audacity of Dream School is truly inspiring, assuming you're impressed by mountains of bullshit. The first episode opened with Jamie recounting how he left school with no qualifications. The British educational system failed him, just as it fails millions of others like him every year. Now he wants to make a difference. Not by campaigning against education cuts?which might be boring?but by setting up his own school. Not one staffed by actual teachers?which might be boring?but by celebrities. And it won't be open all-year round?which might be expensive?but for a few weeks. Thus our education system will be saved.
What on earth is the point? The students, we learn, aren't even real students but teenagers who have already left school and volunteered to act as students for the cameras. Brooker writes that after just two episodes he ?wound up hating almost everyone in it, aside from a couple of the kids and, curiously, Jamie himself?because he just looks so crushingly, dizzyingly confused by the whole thing. Why is he there? Why is this happening? What's the ultimate aim??
But Oliver is undaunted. Tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of Americans will slide comfortably into well-worn couches, La-Z-Boys, and beanbag furniture, with bowls of chips and guacamole and cans of sodas within reach, to watch Oliver return with a second season of his Food Revolution, this time taking his tumbrels to Los Angeles. Problem: Los Angeles Unified School District doesn't want him in their kitchens. Episode one shows the revolutionary petitioning the city's school board to be allowed to film and cook inside its schools. No, they said, and their answer has not changed. At a news conference Oliver mentioned that he hopes that John Deasy, who will become the new LAUSD superintendent this Friday, ?is going to have a different strategy, a strategy that's more inclusive.? He later said on a conference call that ?If John Deasy wants to talk to me and wants to do what I know the public wants . . . if he's really clever, you know, he'll let us in for a filming and we can have a dialogue.? Oliver, however, hasn't waited for the incoming superintendent's invitation; the Los Angeles Times reported that the chef ?managed to spend some time in West Adams Prep, a school west of downtown that runs under a contract with the district, before he was told to leave.?
Do-gooding ain't easy.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow