By Peter Smith

Jamie Oliver is talking a mile a minute. He’s on a friend’s borrowed mobile phone, en route to a theater performance starring one of his four kids. “I’ve got a lot of things going on,” he says. It’s something of an understatement.

Over the past month, Oliver has written a cookbook on British food; developed new locations for Jamie’s Italian, a rustic Italian chain he co-owns; and worked out the details for another restaurant concept called Union Jacks, all while promoting the campaign that launched his stateside presence into prime time on ABC, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.

In the glossy, glistening world of celebrity chefs, the 36-year-old cook stands out for doing well by doing good. His televised mission for changing the world revolves around teaching us where our food comes from, how to cook it from scratch and how healthy eating can pay off in the long run.

“The nature of the food revolution affects how long or short you live on this planet, how enjoyable it is while you’re here, how creative you are, how well you do in school, what you look like and what your sex life is like,” Oliver says. “Ultimately, it’s about cooking and inspiring people to have a go at learning to cook.”

Earlier this year, the hyperkinetic chef wrapped up his second—and final—season of his show at Los Angeles Unified School District, or rather, at one prep school in LA, since the school district revoked his filming permit. A quick highlight reel of the kitchen stunts performed on the show: One, fill a washing machine with ground beef and ammonia to teach us how “pink slime” makes its way into hamburgers; two, pump a school bus full of sugar to demonstrate the eye-opening amount of sugar in flavored milk; and, three, teach a math class, wherein kids who take a candy bar will have to walk 11 laps around a track wearing 20- and 30-pound backpacks to understand the implications of snacking and weight gain.

“This kind of TV is not commercial,” Oliver says. “It’s lucky to even be on network. There’s a lot of pressure for us to be informative, shocking and also clear—because quite a lot of health policy is really [bleeping] boring.”

In April, one of his efforts paid off. The LAUSD’s new superintendent announced the district would stop serving strawberry- and chocolate-flavored milk. Michael Pollan, the nation’s unofficial food-guru-in-chief, responded by sending out this message to his 78,758 followers on Twitter: “Kudos to Jamie Oliver on this one.”

The concern about what we feed our children isn’t confined to Los Angeles, and his small nagging pursuits shouldn’t be seen, as Oliver put it in one episode, merely as “a little rash on their crotch.” Given his small victories, he’s intent of delivering on the show’s premise: If he could change LA, maybe he could change the world.

“Right now, children are expected to have a shorter life span than their parents,” Oliver says. “That doesn’t sound normal. Any logical person would say, ‘Give it up. America’s never going to change.’ But I do look at things very differently.”

Across the United States, a broader food revolution has been brewing since 1966, when a group of radicals, the San Francisco Diggers, doled out soup in Golden Gate Park under the vague, druggy pretense of expanding everyone’s frame of reference. Food has always served as a vehicle for moral and spiritual guidance, but the so-called “countercuisine” distilled environmental, social and political issues into the personal choice of eating. It’s arguably the most enduring legacy of the counterculture. Take a look around: Co-ops evolved into Whole Foods Markets. Organic produce, once confined to the fringe, is now found at Wal-Mart. Alice Water’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley is just one of thousands of restaurants touting its farm-to-table authority. Even the White House has a garden.

Jamie Oliver was born in the midst of this revolution, so to speak, in 1975, in Essex, England. He left high school at 16 and was discovered by a BBC film crew working the line at London’s River Café. Oliver went on to juggle inside the three-ring circus of dump-and-stir television shows and once sang a reggae tune about concocting lamb curry, but he moved well beyond entertainment in 2005 with Channel 4’s Jamie’s School Dinners.

“We had nutritional standards for dog food in Save-A-Lots, but we had no nutritional standards for kids in schools, and that’s our future of our country,” Oliver says. “That was an ‘aha!’ moment. I realized that celebrity chefs and all the [bleep] that goes with it, it’s not just about dancing around and selling books and going to all these incredible places. If there’s a problem, an issue, and you feel passionate about it, you should be fighting tooth and nail to broadcast it. So when I did School Dinners, I didn’t ask anyone. I said, ‘I’m doing this. I’ve been shooting for two weeks, do you want to do this because this is what I’m doing?’”

The four-part documentary lead to a substantial overhaul of school lunches and a ban on junk in vending machines. Even the British Medical Journal hailed the show, saying, “Jamie Oliver has done more for the public health of our children than a corduroy army of health promotion workers or a £100m Saatchi & Saatchi campaign.”

In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the U.S. army of health promotion—released data indicating that about one in every three Americans was obese, and suggesting that just north of the Southern Stroke Belt lay a town where more than half of the residents belonged to this growing demographic. Two years later, after an unsuccessful bid to find an American chef to expand his crusade in the states, Oliver and his film crew parachuted in to Huntington, West Virginia, intent on changing attitudes and waistlines.

Whether it was a typical British tradition of offering unsolicited critiques of America, or merely an unwelcome incursion in a place wary of outsiders with big ideas, the reception proved chilly, which, of course, made for good reality television. Being a Brit also proved helpful behind the scenes at the network. “When important people questioned me,” Oliver says, “I was able to say, ‘Well, that’s what I had as a kid. That’s what every country in Europe does. Why can’t we do it here?’ It’s important to be able to say, ‘Just because it’s normal, doesn’t mean it’s right, or it can’t change, or can’t be a lot better.’”

Today, Jamie’s Kitchen is called Huntington’s Kitchen, and it’s run by a local free health clinic. The anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength offers classes there for low-income residents. “What he’s done is tremendous,” says Jane Black, who’s writing a book with her husband Brent Cunningham about how the town is developing a healthier food culture. “He’s taken the power he’s accumulated and used it for good, but these kinds of changes need to happen at the dinner table, in school and at the grocery store every day. They need to come from specific communities. What people eat and what’s available is different everywhere, so now that everybody’s aware of it, the hard work still has to be done.”

Clearly, one show alone can’t reverse decades of confounding factors—the cup-holders engineered into our cars; drive-thru restaurants; our daily commutes and prolonged sitting at work; having overweight friends; the lights we leave on at night; eating too much inexpensive, always-available, high-calorie food that’s incredibly easy to digest; and all the other complex, interlocking factors linked to the rising rates of obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Just as there is no single cause, there will be no single cure.

If there’s a litmus test for just how important food politics has become, it lies on the South Lawn of the White House, where First Lady Michelle Obama planted a garden at 1600 Pennsylvania for the first time since Eleanor Roosevelt. The garden is part of the Let’s Move campaign, which is on a mission to encourage physical activity, better food labeling and healthier eating in schools. To make the message even more palatable, Ms. Obama’s enlisted Beyoncé, singer and a one-time Pepsi spokeswoman, to become a sort of Jane Fonda for youth today. Her viral videos really make you want to dance.

“Let’s Move has been very helpful,” says Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. “Michelle Obama is very popular and has a high visibility. She has the bully pulpit. She’s working with administration staff on policy. She’s not just getting up and making speeches. Efforts like Jamie Oliver’s are useful, too, because they add to the buzz. Even if it doesn’t change policy, it makes it easier for groups like ours. The awareness lays the groundwork for change.”

On Capital Hill this year, health advocates successfully passed school lunch reform for the first time in 30 years (albeit one that may only add about six cents to most school lunches). The 2010 health care reform bill mandates that all chain restaurants post calorie counts on their menus. The CDC has dozens of projects nationwide measuring the effects its anti-obesity campaigns. Still, the amount spent by the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity and other nonprofits is dwarfed by advertising budgets of companies trying to sell us more food, whether it’s healthy or not.

For a food revolution to take hold in everyone’s kitchen, it’s going to take more than two school districts featured on two seasons of reality television. It’s going to take more than the $2.89 spent on making every single free school lunch taste good and provide good nutrition for all the nation’s students, too. For some kids, school lunches still offer better nutrition than what’s served at home, as Oliver suggested when he packed one family’s home with stacks and stacks of chili dogs, French fries, pizzas and breakfast donuts. Because what holds true for politics apparently holds true to television: It’s more feasible to critique school lunch than to tell parents that we’re not feeding kids well.

In the end, whether you’re Jamie Oliver running around in a peapod costume, shouting “Eat your vegetables!” or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, dressing up the country’s dietary recommendations in a colorful plate-shaped icon called MyPlate, all the efforts tend to run up against basic human biology. It’s not that we’re fat and lazy, it’s that we appear to have evolved to seek out, with the least amount of effort, the very foods wreaking havoc on our bodies.

At the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research institute in West Philadelphia’s University City neighborhood, inside a building graced by a giant statue of a bronze nose, scientists are exploring the frontiers of smell and taste. Here, Julie Mennella has been looking into how children develop food preferences.

Because kids tend to eat what they like, and children prefer more intense sweet and salty flavors—probably an evolutionary mechanism to account for periods of rapid growth— there’s at least some explanation for why schools serve flavored milks and sweetened cereals. If that’s the bad news, the good news is that we can change these preferences by introducing a wide variety of healthy foods—even before children are born. “Before our first taste, we learn about the food choices of our mothers when we’re in utero,” Mennella says. “We learn from breast milk and from repeated exposure to food.”

Mennella has found, for example, that babies exposed to carrot juice before birth found the taste of carrots more acceptable at seven months, compared to those babies fed a more monotonous diet. Her research underscores the emotional potency of childhood, which instills vital lessons about when to eat, how to eat and who we are as a culture. “Jamie Oliver talks about teaching kids about food and how to feed yourself is as important as math and science,” she says. “It’s a learning process that builds on the familiar. With taste and liking particular foods, our sensory systems are incredibly open to learning during development.”

In other words, the revolution can be taught. Of all these necessary steps toward remaking a culture around readily available, healthy and competitively priced meals, Oliver’s biggest contribution to the zeitgeist may be in making food politics slightly entertaining. Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, though, is really only the start for his vision for transforming the way we eat.

The show has hit the road in Southern California with a mobile Food Revolution truck—full of plasma screens, kitchen stations and room for about 40 students. Along with the American Heart Association, he hopes to build teaching kitchens in Dallas, Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York. At the end of the final show, which wrapped up in late June, Oliver gave audiences a pep talk: “The battle is not won. The power lies with you…. It’s not just about me. We’ve all got to start stirring the pot, and we’ve all got to start expecting more.”

After all, we shouldn’t expect this revolution to be televised. At the very least, Oliver hopes his message will stir up some much needed skepticism. “If the public keeps questioning things, asking things, expecting more—whether it’s asking about school food or asking where meat comes from at the drive-through—when people start asking things, stuff starts to change.”

Originally published in Delta Sky magazine, August 2011.

Far Flung and Well Fed: The Food Writing of R.W. Apple Jr. R. W. Apple Jr., foreword by Corby Kummer. St. Martin’s, $26.99 (432p) ISBN 978-0-312-32577-0

Written in the decade before his untimely death in 2006, this compilation showcases more than 50 engaging, food-centric travel essays by longtime New York Times writer R.W. (“Johnny”) Apple. The grandiose dispatches cover the U.S.’s best soft-shell crabs, the most authentic kosher corned beef and the finest cherry pie. Internationally, he dubs Singapore a “dim sum nirvana,” compares Naples without its tomatoes to “salt without pepper” and finds Dover sole like a “porterhouse steak.” Apple’s legendary expense account fuels an enormous and discriminating appetite, and his journalistic instincts guide an impressive selection of experts in support of Apple’s decisive interpretations, including one Philadelphia editor who authoritatively explains the die-off of Philadelphia’s pepper pot soup, but not its cheese steaks. These instructive, well-chosen tidbits convey vivid, sociological portraits of cities, regions and countries, places infused with regional vernacular that is both spoken and eaten. With such stature and scholarship, he can make Dickensian references in describing both English porridge and Italian buffalo mozzarella sound natural. Similarly, only Apple can get away with using words like “toothsome,” “unctuous,” and “delectable” without sounding like a public relations sham masquerading as a food critic. While Apple’s air of superiority can be hard to take, his incisive, insistent writing often remains far superior to the rest of its kind. (Oct.)

The desire for a simpler life in the country, filled with the excitement of living like pioneers, spurred Novella Carpenter’s parents to move away from the Bay Area in the 1970s. While their countercultural back-to-the-land experiment ultimately fell apart, the underlying idea persevered, and, in the midst of working on her master’s degree at UC Berkeley, Carpenter decides to dig a garden and start raising turkeys, rabbits and pigs. Only the difference is she’s not farming out in the middle of nowhere; she’s raising food on a vacant lot behind her apartment on 28th Street in Oakland.

“Looking back on my parents’ history and comparing it to my present,” she writes, “I recognized that if my parents were Utopia version 8.5 with their hippie farm in Idaho, I was merely Utopia 9.0 with my urban farm in the ghetto, debugged of the isolation problem.”

Carpenter’s adventurous memoir, developed from a series of online essays at Salon.com and a blog, offers a contemporary restaging of the agrarian American dream. Over two seasons’ time, Carpenter explores her relationship with eating in and around an inner-city garden in the run-down Ghost Town neighborhood.

Despite its name, the place brims with life, and a diverse group of curious neighbors show up with questions for the white woman raising plants and farm animals in the inner city. Although her encounters with them sometimes seem cursory (and even imaginary), Carpenter says she’s chosen a bustling, “second-rate” city to escape the loneliness of rural life and to find bars, shops and a vibrant community, where she meets fellow farmers, urban scroungers and a chef at Eccolo in Berkeley. But the bulk of “Farm City” is not about her peers or predecessors; it’s about Carpenter, a self-proclaimed renegade and urban squatter pursuing both a degree in journalism and “playing at self-sufficiency.” She’s the type of person who drives a dirty Mercedes around with her boyfriend to pick pig food out of Chinatown garbage bins while simultaneously ruminating on the soft, agrarian sentimentality found in “Little House in the Big Woods.”

Carpenter enthusiastically captures bees, drives live pigs to a butcher and pulls weeds from a nearby lot for chicken feed. Each of the book’s three sections follows the joy, humor and violence involved with plopping a bunch of farm animals down on an urban lot. Her birds turn their heads upward at the sound of police helicopters. A boy named Cornrows catches her runaway pig. And before Thanksgiving turkey, she stands under Interstate 980 with a hatchet and a vat of hot water.
Raising food, eating food

“Farm City” is sort of “The Simple Life” in reverse: Rather than wealthy socialites mucking manure on a farm, the memoir depicts an educated country girl giddily exploring the heart of the city. When she visits Eccolo, Carpenter realizes the shirt she’s wearing is dirty and stained.

Her expanded series of diarylike entries creates a strong sense of place and explores the narrowing gap between raising food and eating it. Carpenter prods the intellectual trappings of the Bay Area’s mantra of “eat, fresh, local, free-range critters” and the fad of defining ourselves by what we eat with a critical examination of both the foodie’s elitism and the locavore’s solemn devotion to food.

In doing so, “Farm City” offers a refreshing take on the sustainable food movement - introducing the ethical and logistical ambiguities involved in food choices without too much of ethical high ground cultivated in many back-to-the-land primers, diet guides or muckraking exposes. Her backyard project lacks a specific, well-defined mission for social change, which, given the kind of individualism manifest in the back-to-the-land movements, may be an unlikely prospect anyway. Early on, Carpenter expresses skepticism about changing the way other urban residents view food and agriculture, especially for those neighbors unlike her, who haven’t willingly chosen poverty.
Economic realities

And here’s where Carpenter’s experiment in downward mobility begins to unravel. Her attempt to explore fresh, local food as a “poor scrounger with three low-paying jobs” unfortunately includes little about how three low-paying jobs financed grad school and a farm. Overlooking the economic realities and omitting other practical steps to implementing an urban homestead might disappoint those seeking to replicate her experiment, but it leaves room for the inevitable development of a Utopia version 9.5. (In fact, Carpenter is working on “The Complete Urban Farmer,” a hands-on guide co-written with Willow Rosenthal, scheduled for publication in the spring of 2010).

The fast-paced account of the day-to-day drama unfolding in one backyard in Oakland makes “Farm City” more than just a whimsical, next-generation hippie farm in the ghetto and transforms Carpenter’s personal experience into a broader, more engaging inquiry into our culture’s complex relationship with food.

This article appeared on page J - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Novelist (Birds in Fall; Lick Creek) Kessler’s account of tending a small herd of milking goats in Vermont captures both the lush, poetic paradise of rural life and the raw, unrelenting drama of dairying. Kessler, a Saab-driving ex-Manhattanite, purchases two Nubian goats, breeds them and helps his wife, Dona, a trained doula, attend to the birth of four goat kids the following spring. The amusing zoomorphic and anthropomorphic descriptions, where goats forage as if they were at a sample sale and milk-fed kids stagger “like street junkies,” dissipate as Kessler endures a season of goat wrangling, haying and hunting coyotes. Kessler gives the legal aspects of unpasteurized cheese a cursory inspection; his devotion centers on a budding relationship with animals, the earth and goat cheese. He’s a back-to-the-land naturalist, who supports his detailed personal observations with extensive research as he explores the cultural, historical and biological aspects of pastoralism. While the tome’s lengthy poetic journal entries on animal husbandry and cheese making hardly qualify as a comprehensive manual, the observant, unsanctimonious read is bound to inspire hobby farmers and consummate cheese lovers. (June)

In this rambling memoir from “America’s heartland of organic produce,” literary scholar Raskin (For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman) recalls a pleasant year visiting farm friends in Sonoma, Calif. Following the chronology of one season, he goes to farms, markets and restaurants, profiling Mexican workers, talking with small-farm advocates and even harvests vegetables himself. The breezy, romantic prose is peppered with literary references, and, at times, awkward academic language. His descriptions of meals seem limited to “sumptuous,” “delicious” and “excellent”; similarly, the analysis tends to be cursory. After listening to one industrious produce seller’s story, Raskin evokes a simple “Wow!” The closest his research comes to a serious investigation is a description of employees at the Sonoma Whole Foods Market, a company he openly dislikes. The story’s overarching countercultural bent intensifies the aging academic’s apparent longing for the revolutionary roots of organic foods. The redemptive aspect of this memoir lies in its intensely local specificity—Northern California’s marijuana-growing culture and a feeling of youthfulness—although the sprawling narrative imparts more of a gauzy, poetic impression than any cohesive ideas about food or farming. 22 b&w photos. (May)

Freelancer Miller is a self-described “cake chronicler,” and in this memoir, she describes her indiscriminate and conflicted obsession with cakes, which yields varying and sometimes, embarrassing results. Her stories are structured like a tiered cake and begin with a series of historical tidbits based on Internet research. She mixes in her experiences as a “sloppy baker” and an owner of a low-carb bakeshop, sprinkles in detailed but uninsightful discussions with other bakers and tops it off with lists of cultural ephemera. Much of the earnest, conversational prose reads like a series of inflated blog entries and reveal a person whose love of sweet, sugary food makes her feel “addicted, neurotic, weak-willed.” Like her frantic, inconsistent attempts at baking, the writing suffers from the “perils of impatience” and a lack of focus. Miller manages to redeem herself with a few short, poignant memories—eating frosting from a can, her grandmother’s kitchen and a dream about sweets. (Apr.)

Veteran Chicago Tribune entertainment reporter Caro expands on his front-page story about a 2005 flap over foie gras with a wide-ranging investigation into the ethical debate surrounding the human consumption of fattened duck liver. Drawing on conflicts in Chicago, Philadelphia and California over whether force-feeding birds should be legislated as torture or standard agricultural practice, Caro presents various positions from duck farmers, chefs and animal rights activists. His chatty arguments between industry players deliver without becoming unnecessarily complicated or resorting to the oversimplification of surveys and superficial media reports. Caro offers descriptions of a vegan activist headquarters, a video depicting a rat burrowing into an injured duck, and traditional farm operations in France. While he pursues his source’s agendas with due diligence, he appears reluctant to side completely with gourmands despite describing “presumably happy ducks,” mouthwatering foie gras meals and even eating a raw duck liver. While he tends to focus on the colorful, entertaining aspects of the food’s history and science, Caro’s selection of pointed quotes from duck liver lovers and foie gras foes presents an in-depth take on this ongoing food fight. (Mar.)

In his meandering memoir, New York restaurateur Luongo traces his “American success story” from a hasty, draft-dodging flight from Italy to his current position as a chef at the Upper East Side’s Centolire. His rise from busboy to chef at Il Cantinori and the star-studded Sapore di Mare remains far more interesting than his descent and “death sentence” with a failed corporate Tuscan restaurant chain. Friedman (Breaking Back, and co-writer of several cookbooks) makes brief appearances as the writer assisting Luongo with his bad boy cooking memoir—and Luongo is shaped into both an uncompromising, confrontational chef and a person with an affection for his mother and good food. If it weren’t for his uncompromising love of Italian food throughout, Luongo’s reminiscences might seem bitter. He has a tendency to drop too many names and fight other celebrities’ sense of entitlement. The trendsetting chef helped popularize Tuscan cooking and tells an engaging story even when he orbits outside the intense clatter of the kitchen. The book might disappoint hardcore foodies if it were not for a few incisive remarks on restaurant design, pasta portioning, how to skewer a critic—and recipes. (Jan.)