The Food Revolution

This morning I was listening to the radio when I heard Jamie Oliver. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he is an English chef who has been the host of many cooking shows, including “The Naked Chef.” His biggest project is Jamie Oliver’s food revolution, where he is trying to get Americans to eat healthy and have more nutrition in their food, which has become “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.”

The second season is taking place in my backyard – that is, if you consider Los Angeles to be the huge backyard of Long Beach. However, considering that this is the area where I have grown up in and find myself loyal to, my interest in what he is doing is piqued.

I don’t know if Jamie will truly grasp the essence of what food is like here in the greater Los Angeles area, let alone our culture. We are technically in a car culture, where we drive to work, drive home, drive pretty much anywhere and spend a ton of time in the car waiting. Remember that famous song, “Nobody Walks in L.A.?” It’s the honest truth. Nobody, unless they’re considered “poor,” is running to catch a bus.

Our food reflects that style. If you go into the poorer parts of LA, there are a ton of fast food joints for mothers who have been working two jobs to feed their families and don’t have time to cook. Although vegetarianism and being vegan is more accepted, there are still plenty of people who don’t understand that you can have a meal without meat. There is balancing what is good with what is fast, because when I had my frustrating hour-long commute to LA every day, the first thing I had to do when I got home was rush into the kitchen to cook. That is not the way to live.

I think Jamie has got some great ideas, but sometimes there is our reality to deal with. The cost of food is getting high. There are several markets that have been great with keeping prices low for healthy goods – thank you Sprouts and Fresh and Easy – but there are plenty like Whole Foods where you feel like you can’t even purchase a single grape without giving away two week’s worth of pay. We want good flavors, but there’s the time factor.

It reminds me of a graph that my father showed me, a vector of cheap, fast and correct. “You can only have two,” he said. It may have been a business graph, but it applies to many things, particularly when it comes to food. According to that graph, we can’t have it all.

I prefer to think positive and think that anything is possible, but with the current structure of the world, I think my dad’s graph plays a significant role. We want to have it all, but sometimes we just can’t. There are too many factors at play, so when it boils down to it, we may only get to pick and choose what we can have.

I know that Jamie doesn’t see the world this way. I know he is putting forth initiatives all across the city to try to help, to when he tried to work with LAUSD (who I think need this the most, but the bureaucrats shot him down almost immediately – G-d forbid they see the mess in the district). Jamie has good goals and we should all try to eat healthier. But with the new culture of the working poor rising in the greater Los Angeles area, it may not come to pass. We would have to make a significant lifestyle change to the way we live here in Los Angeles in order for it to work. We would have to toss the car culture and somehow get fast food joints to reform completely. However, there’s a reason why they call it the “greater Los Angeles area” – everything is so spread out. There is no way around this one, unless somehow we had to rebuild everything in this area from the ground up.

This is not to say that I frown upon eating well. We should all try to incorporate more vegetables and fruits in our diets. We need to eat whole grains and lean meats and avoid processed food. We just need to be realistic, and this is my message to Jamie Oliver: I understand this revolution, but there are other things we have to think about, like using the time that we have wisely and the money factor. Please understand where we are coming from when we try our best to eat healthy but empty our pockets and we seem to have nothing left, not to mention we get into the kitchen after a long day of working and commuting and find that all we really want to do is relax. Have pity on the working poor.