Last week Michelle Obama released an action plan for solving the childhood obesity epidemic “within a generation.” The plan is ambitious, and begins with improved prenatal care, nutrition counseling, healthier food and more physical activity in schools. Big problem: All the recommendations are unfunded.
The Childhood Obesity Task Force’s reforms are laudable and incorporate suggestions from 12 federal agencies as well as 2,500 parents and doctors. But it remains merely a piece of paper unless communities back those recommendations with their pocketbooks.
In the area of school lunches, the task force calls on chefs to volunteer their services. Interested schools can put their names on a list to be contacted by chefs who will volunteer time to educate students, parents and food service workers in nutrition and food preparation. How many chefs have the leisure to volunteer? I wouldn’t want to wait by the phone for that call!
Compare this plan to Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” in Huntington, W.Va. Oliver began with only his own money and whatever funds network television provided for five episodes on school lunch reform. During his months in Huntington, he was able to add corporate sponsorship to continue the initiative beyond last fall.
Simultaneously, Oliver opened Huntington’s Kitchen to teach local residents how to cook healthy meals, and recently a fresh farmers market — funded by a Medical Outreach group — has opened downtown, near the Kitchen. Oliver has an advantage over Obama and her task force: He has done it all before, and knows that nothing will change without funding.
It’s been five years since Oliver introduced his school lunch initiative in Greenwich, London. Part of his campaign in the United States is an online petition for the improvement of school food, now nearing 600,000 signatures. When a similar U.K. petition was signed by 300,000, Oliver traveled to Downing Street and presented it to Prime Minister Tony Blair, who pledged $500 million over three years to improve school lunches.
While our schools are waiting by the phone for chefs to volunteer their services, Oliver is aiming for a million signatures before he shows up on President Obama’s doorstep with his petition. With Oliver’s knack for publicity, showing up on the White House portico might mean change is imminent.
Yet it’s an uphill fight, even when the cause is so patently virtuous and critical to improving the healthy future of our children. It’s taken five years for changes to occur in Britain, and even now Oliver is donating his own millions to carry his initiatives beyond a few select districts. In the U.S., we are in the early months of both Oliver’s and Obama’s campaigns to improve school nutrition, so we can look at the faces of our first-graders and hope that by the time they’re in middle school, french fries might no longer count as a vegetable equivalent to spinach or asparagus. But do we want to wait?
Americans are impatient and idealistic. Can’t we use these character traits to expedite the school food campaign so it doesn’t take years to trickle into our local lunchrooms? Wouldn’t 600,000 signatures do as well as a million in requesting something we all know is imperative to our country’s healthy future?
Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected].
