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Gibson, K. & Dempsey, S. E. (2014) “Make Good Choices, Kid: Scalar discourses and ideologies of choice on Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.” Children’s Geographies. DOI:10.1080/14733285.2013.827875 This is a pre-print version of the final published article, which can be found at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14733285.2013.827875#.VZqOABNVhHw Abstract

In recent debates surrounding childhood nutrition and U.S. school lunch reforms, the

child's body serves as a contested battleground in a destructive politics of blame over

obesity and diabetes. Scalar discourses of the body play a significant role in constructing

food-related problems and their solutions. We illustrate our claims through critical

analysis of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution; a celebrated national television program

centered on chef Oliver’s attempts to address childhood nutrition through school lunch

reform. Informed by Foucault’s biopolitics, our analysis highlights how moralizing scalar

discourses of the body frame nutrition as an individual problem of personal choice. Food

politics, when played out at the scale of young bodies, masks class divisions,

marginalities, and governmental policies that structure access to nutritious food in the

U.S. school lunch system. Increased attention to biopower, scalar politics, and the

political economy of childhood nutrition in the space of U.S. public schooling challenges

naturalized ideologies of food choice that regulate and delimit change to the scale of the

body.

Keywords: school lunch reform, childhood nutrition, media discourse, scalar politics,

biopower

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The authors wish to thank Ruth Glasser and Frances Moulder for their helpful feedback

on earlier drafts. We would also like to thank our students Mike Solla and Frances

Batista for their incisive comments.

Tensions between industrial food systems, political economies, and social justice have

become increasingly clear in recent years (Guthman 2011; Lien and Nerlich 2004; Nestle

2007; Schanbacher 2010; Wakefield 2007). Research highlights the links between

embodied socio-spatial practices of individuals, such as how we each select, prepare and

consume food, to the wider socio-economic systems of food policy, production,

distribution, regulation and marketing (Guthman 2004; Jackson 2009, 2011). In

particular, geographers have identified scalar politics associated with food access, food

rights, and children’s health (McIntosh et al 2010; Guthman, 2008; Pike 2008, 2010;

Wakefield 2007). In this work, the role of space, the child’s body and popular discourse

have opened up questions about power and societal interventions. Public health

interventions are key exemplars of biopower. Here, a set of ‘truth’ discourses concerning

health are shaped by a reliance on expert knowledge, and guide interventions into

individual behavior in the name of social good (Foucault 1978; Rabinow and Rose 2006).

Biopower is a way of regulating social life ‘from within’ as individuals are trained to

self-discipline and mitigate risk (Rasmussen 2011; Welch et al 2012). Because children

are subjects that are socially constructed as both ‘future citizens’ and ‘at risk’ they are

thereby seen as valid sites of biopolitical intervention in the name of the public good

(Nadesan 2010). In this way, the implementation of the National School Lunch program

functions as a biopolitical intervention into childhood health.

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Increased attention to how popular culture assists in creating regulatory schemes of food

choice provides much needed insight into current debates about children’s health and

nutrition. Informed by our analysis of Jamie Oliver’s reality television show Food

Revolution, we argue that popular discourses assist in politicizing the topic of child

nutrition in ways that both obscure and reaffirm a scalar politics of food. With its

moralizing focus on individual choice over the wider political economy of the food

system, Food Revolution provides a particularly illuminating example of the embedded

assumptions within contemporary interventions into child nutrition. We argue that scalar

discourses of the child’s body as an unproblematic site of agency play a significant role

in constructing food-related problems and their solutions. Our work highlights how

popular discourses construct children as inherently poor decision-makers in need of limits

to their agency. Here, children’s agency is increasingly framed as a matter of ‘making

good choices’ irrespective of the economic, social and political environments in which

they make these choices. Such discourses locate agency and blame at the scale of the

body, thereby obscuring biopolitical power operating across other scales. Building on

previous analyses of children’s nutrition and food agency in the space of the British and

U.S. school systems (Daniel & Gustafsson 2010; DuPuis 2002; McIntosh et al 2010; Pike

2008, 2010), our study expands and contrasts how the child's body functions as a

contested battleground in a destructive politics of blame over obesity and diabetes.

Popular television shows such as Food Revolution frame critical social issues like

childhood nutrition as an ideology of personal choice, while simultaneously minimizing

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the class-based nature of the school lunch system and the political economy of the food

movement overall.

We begin by highlighting how children’s food choices have been profoundly shaped by a

subsidized U.S. school lunch system that treats food as a commodity (Poppendieck

2010). U.S. school food programs reflect decades of political and economic decisions

operating across local, regional and national scales. These decisions profoundly shape

children’s available choices and influence their food agency in the space of the school.

We then introduce our critical discourse analysis of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, a

reality television program marketed as a radical intervention into problems of childhood

nutrition in Huntington, West Virginia. We center our analysis on two particularly

revealing narratives of children’s bodies as sites of intervention by adults. Each

highlights how popular discourses assert problematic understandings of both problems

and solutions to a widening childhood health crisis.

Political Economies of Food in the U.S. School System

Contemporary debates about children’s nutrition in the space of the school must be

grounded in an understanding of the intertwined histories of school health reforms and

national agricultural subsidies amidst a market-based capitalist system. The reductions in

childhood malnutrition following the founding of the National School Lunch Program in

1946 is often heralded as one of the greatest achievements of the U.S. public health

movement (Nestle 2007). Yet, its implementation often pits economic interests against

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nutritional concerns. Under this program, public schools provide a free or reduced price

hot lunch to students who qualify as financially needy. Currently, children whose family

fall below 130% of the poverty line can qualify for free lunches and those who fall below

185% of the poverty line can get a reduced price school lunch (Poppendieck 2010).

Importantly, both federal funds and fees collected from paying students subsidize the free

or reduced price lunches. This arrangement provides an economic incentive for schools to

make purchasing decisions based on their potential to create profit – and thereby balance

their food budget gap – rather than address nutritional needs.

Because the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) administers school lunch programs,

purchasing decisions are inextricably tied to federal agricultural subsidies and surpluses.

The USDA requires schools to match or exceed federal funds to produce free meals for

impoverished children. As a result, school lunch programs are typically under-funded and

heavily reliant on wholesale, processed foods provided through the USDA. Because

federal and state funds only cover a portion of the costs of subsidized lunches, schools

must entice paying customers. Raising the price for paying children restricts access,

thereby worsening schools’ budget gaps. In this way, federal and state funding structures

place schools in the role of sellers soliciting students to buy their wares. In order to

prevent boycotts, school lunch programs must appeal to children’s taste preferences over

their nutritional needs (Levine 2010; Nestle 2007; Poppendieck 2010). The political

economy of school lunch programs fuels the importance of personal choice in lunch lines,

whereby paying children subsidize the cost of free lunch for their classmates. Yet, the

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choices on offer are limited to foodstuffs appealing to children’s tastes, and to those items

that can be cheaply and quickly mass-produced, with minimal labor.

Unsurprisingly, commercial vendors of fast food, soft drinks, and processed snacks have

emerged as key suppliers and funding sources for under-resourced public schools. In turn,

school food looks more and more like fast food, with many schools offering pizza,

hamburgers and chicken nuggets as regular staples (Poppendieck 2010). By 2000, 43%

of elementary schools and 98% of highs schools had competitive food contracts (Levine

2010). A 2012 national study of school food service programs found that 50% of

elementary school students could purchase competitive foods from vending machines and

other sources on school grounds (Turner and Chaloupka 2012). Pouring rights contracts

provide a company exclusive rights to stock vending machine items (Levine 2008; Nestle

2000, 2007). Such contracts are attractive for school districts because they provide an

initial payment that can pay for things like sports facilities and computer rooms. In some

cases, corporate sponsorship of sports equipment and other school supplies comes in

exchange for allowing advertising into the space of the school. Commercial food

messages pervade U.S. public schools, shaping student’s ‘tastes’ for fast food (Levine

2010; Nestle 2007).

As early as the mid-1970s, school lunches had been singled out as promoting poor food

habits and furthering child obesity. Food standards declined throughout the 1980s and

1990s, with cookies and corn chips counting as bread servings and ketchup and pickles

considered vegetables (Levine 2010). In a recent study of 1,000 Michigan schoolchildren,

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those who ate school lunch were 29% more likely to be overweight compared to children

who brought lunch from home (Rabin 2011). There have been small gains made in recent

years. In 2010, the reauthorized Child Nutrition Act bans 2% and whole milk in favor of

skim and 1% milk. In addition, for the first time, schools will be required to provide

water with every meal (Severson 2010). However, the price of lunch for paying children

will likely increase to offset costs of incorporating greater amounts of fresh fruits and

vegetables. The 2010 federal budget increased allocations by just 6 cents per meal

(Severson 2010), with less than $1 of the allocated $2.74 per lunch going toward food

(Lawn 2010). In some low-income school districts, increased production expenses result

in less than $.60 to cover the cost of a child’s meal (Poppendeick 2010). Yet, despite the

political economy of the U.S. school food system, popular discourses continue to

construct the problem of childhood nutrition around a moralizing body politics of

personal choice. Not just ‘at risk’ of poor nutrition, children are constructed as ‘risky’

decision makers. Thus, in a space of biopolitical intervention, technologies of power and

expert knowledge are mobilized to mitigate children’s agency.

Moralizing Body Politics of Food Choice

Children’s bodies are contested sites, subject to biopolitical modes of governance,

parental negotiations, and power relations tied to their various social locations. These

multiple scales of control evince a central contradiction of contemporary childhood:

although children are increasingly charged with taking responsibility for their food

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choices, overlapping modes of control profoundly delimit, restrict and reduce children’s

agency.

First, the school food system operates as a form of biopolitics, whereby technologies of

power are used to manage the risk and health of populations (Foucault 1978). Public

health interventions are examples of biopower in action. In the name of a larger public

good, populations are encouraged to self-govern their bodily actions (Rasmussen 2011).

Overlapping moralizing discourses provide biopedagogies, or techniques that invite the

individual to practice self-discipline of one’s own health as a form of good citizenship

(Rabinow and Rose 2006; Welch et al 2012). Children are constructed as autonomous

individuals, collectively ‘making good choices’ for the greater good of society. It is

through these modes of both subjectification and objectification of childhood and health

that children’s agency is problematically constructed and therefore controlled. Popular

media discourses of personal choice and responsibility resonate with nutritional reforms

aimed at children in U.S. schools. As well illustrated within programs such as Jamie

Oliver’s Food Revolution, the concept of children’s agency functions as a form of self-

governance, and is paradoxically deployed as a rationale for limiting children’s food

choices and obscuring wider political economies of food access.

Second, children’s agency often involves complex negotiations with parents and adults

over choices about what, when and how to eat (Pike 2008, 2010). Typically, adults

interpret, discipline, judge, adjudicate and provide for children’s food wants and needs.

Engaging in ‘semantic provisioning,’ or meaning-making labor, adults enter into multi-

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layered negotiations with children to assign certain foods as good or bad, healthy or

unhealthy, and proper or improper (Cook 2009, 331). Negotiations over food choice draw

upon commercialized messages, overlapping with biopolitical discourses assigning

citizens the task of cultivating and self-disciplining a healthy body (Guthman 2011;

Wright & Harwood 2009). Discourses of the healthy body mobilize expert knowledge

for the good of child subjects, counseling children and adults to make good choices so as

to avoid grievous risk.

Third, children’s social location is fundamental to understanding children’s agency,

including how they understand their own ability to act and make choices. The social

location of children is particularly critical in discussions of food agency because children

experience highly regulated and surveilled lives in the Western world (Pike 2008;

Valentine 2003). Therefore children’s choices and their interpretations cannot be

separated from the complex and dynamic power-geometries of childhood (Massey 1999)

and in this case, the school. These power-geometries are deeply structured by income,

race and gender among others. Despite correlations between youth obesity and limited

socio-economic access to fresh fruits and vegetables, popular discourses forward a

doctrine of personal responsibility for making healthy choices (Poppendieck 2010).

Previous research demonstrates the need for more attention to additional constraints on

children’s food choice (McIntosh et al, 2010; Poppendieck 2010), including such factors

as the lunchroom’s aesthetic features, time allotted for eating, and class-based tastes and

stigmas about eating (Daniel & Gustafsson 2010; McIntosh et al, 2010; Metcalfe et al

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2008; Pike 2008, 2010). Yet, popular debates over school lunch in the U.S. reproduce a

moralizing body politics concerned with regulating and limiting children’s food agency.

The unrelenting focus on personal responsibility and choice works against collective

identification and action (Guthman 2011; Hollows and Jones 2010; Miller 2007), which

is the foundation of any transformative food revolution. It is within this ideologically

charged context that Oliver’s Food Revolution has found tremendous support and popular

acclaim within the U.S.

The Rise of the Televised Celebrity Chef

In focusing on Oliver’s Food Revolution, our study responds to recent calls for greater

attention to the intersections of food politics and the political economy of popular culture

industries (Miller, 2007). A growing approach within the interdisciplinary food studies

literature includes the use of critical discourse analysis to engage with popular ideologies

of food and eating (Cramer, Greene and Walters 2011; Frye and Bruner 2012). Here,

media discourses are seen as important cultural texts, reflecting, reproducing and shaping

normative assumptions and expectations about food, health, and eating. While much of

the research on youth, food and media to date focuses on the influential role of children’s

advertising (e.g. Johnson & Young 2002; Stitt & Kunkel 2008), prime time television

also yields important insights into contemporary discourses of children’s nutrition.

Critical analysis of television programming provides a way to gauge cultural assumptions

about children’s health and obesity, including the discursive construction of food choice

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and health interventions. Food, cooking, and eating have always occupied a central place

on television screens. Researchers have usefully analyzed the cultural implications of

television cooking shows, including the rise of the TV Food Network (TVFN) (Collins

2009; Ketchum 2005; Miller 2007). Analyses of TVFN have focused on its role in the

increasing stratification of food markets, including its linking of food with cultural

markers of status and lifestyle. For example, Meister (2001) argues that TVFN

programming reflects a “good life science” promoting excessive consumption of food

and, by extension natural resources. Here, TVFN functions as a 24-hr promotional

machine centered on equating food-related consumption practices with life fulfillment.

The broad success of TVFN has spurred the development of food reality TV across all of

the major U.S. networks. From Top Chef, to Kitchen Nightmares, Cake Boss and

Cupcake Wars, reality food TV has become a television staple. Of course, reality TV is

not so much a reflection of reality as it is a carefully constructed set of narratives and

ideologies (Andrejevic 2003). Part of the ethos of reality TV is to construct and resolve

tensions between different actors or groups by constructing conflicting narratives of

power imbalances and negotiations. Subsequent negotiations of tensions allow for both

drama and comedy.

In addition to shaping desires for consumer lifestyles, reality television cooking programs

mark the growth of the celebrity chef as a cultural arbiter of food, class, and taste (Collins

2009). The marketing and promotion of celebrity chefs – from Julia Child to Emeril

Lagasse, Gordan Ramsey, Paula Deen, and Jamie Oliver – frames cooking and food as a

means of self-expression and lifestyle choice. Celebrity chefs are part of a larger culture

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industry dedicated to promoting and marketing food products, which include celebrity-

endorsed lifestyle cookbooks, as well as lines of cooking utensils and prepared foods. As

public interest in food politics, nutrition, and obesity has grown, celebrity chefs have

become popular figures in shaping discourses of food-related problems and their

solutions.

Chef as Social Change Agent: Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

Jamie Oliver has been at the forefront of the chef-as-social change agent in his work with

British youth over the past decade. An English chef, author of numerous popular

cookbooks, restaurateur, and increasingly ubiquitous international media personality,

Oliver’s TV credits include a role in “Oprah’s Big Give,” a program focused on charity,

as well as his “Jamie at Home” on the Cooking Channel. Oliver focused on simple

cooking in his first television series, The Naked Chef (1998-1999). In many of his later

shows, Oliver integrates cooking, documentary film styling, and a youth-oriented social

mission. His programs primarily involve teaching children the importance of nutrition

and good food choices through cooking instruction and other food education projects.

Jamie’s Kitchen (2002) showcased Oliver’s attempts to rehabilitate disadvantaged youth

by putting them to work in his restaurant. Beginning with his 2005 BBC show, Jamie’s

School Dinners, Oliver began centering his efforts on youth health within the British

public school system. This program has gained widespread acclaim and popular

recognition. As Curtis, James and Ellis (2010) illustrate in their study of U.K. children’s

snacking, both children and parents draw upon Oliver’s programs as a resource for

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judging between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods. In addition, his program, which included a

public petition calling for improved school food, coincided with changes to Britain’s

school meal program, including a governmental pledge to increase spending.

In the wake of his success, Oliver shifted his attention to the highly competitive and

regulated space of the U.S. school food system. The first season of Jamie Oliver’s Food

Revolution (2009) featured Oliver’s controversial efforts to improve the school lunch

program in Huntington, West Virginia. In the past few decades, Huntington (pop. 49,000)

has suffered from economic restructuring and job loss. An older industrial community, it

has a nearly 50% obese adult population and a 19% poverty rate (Click 2010; Poniewozik

2010). According to Oliver, he chose Huntington because of its recent rating as the “most

unhealthy town in America” in a report issued by the U.S. Center for Disease Control.

The stated mission of Food Revolution is to start a social movement by focusing on one

local community that represents an extreme case study of poor nutrition. The program

portrays Oliver as an outsider who has come to save the town. His efforts center around

reforming the local elementary and high school lunch programs, giving cooking classes

to a group of at-risk teenagers, working with an individual family suffering obesity-

related health problems, and starting a ‘pop-up’ community kitchen and instruction

center.

Oliver’s work has spurred a range of critical debate across the social sciences. Critics

have pointed to his use of moral entrepreneurialism and consumer moralism (Hollows

and Jones 2010; Slocum et al 2011) as well as the stigmatization of obesity and the use of

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shaming as ways of prioritizing individualism over systemic processes. In addition,

themes of individualism and the neoliberalization of food systems appear alongside calls

for social change in that very same food system (Broad 2012). Building on such insights,

our study develops an understanding of how children’s bodies function as sites of

contestation around choice, agency, and the controlling and restriction of such choices.

We focus on the first season of Food Revolution because of its immense popularity and

influence in shaping contemporary discourses about young people and food. Over 7

million viewers saw the first episode of Food Revolution and it was frequently the top

rated show for young adults 18-35 (Severson 2010). In addition to earning an Emmy in

the reality TV category and a Television Academy Honor for exemplifying “television

with a conscience,” Oliver’s efforts also garnered a 2010 TED (Technology,

Entertainment, Design) Award (Hibberd 2010). Such acclaim was met with a second

season 2011 renewal and move to a more competitive 8 PM Tuesday night timeslot.

Our analysis reflects a multi-stage narrative coding of each episode of Food Revolution

(Creswell 2007). During the first stage, the authors individually analyzed the full season,

noting major themes about children, young bodies, food access, food choices,

community, activism, parenting, and school food. Each author constructed research

‘memos,’ or second order syntheses of these themes (Lindloff and Taylor 2004). Next, as

part of a larger effort to engage undergraduate students in research as well as a tactic to

allow for multiple comparisons with diverse readings of the material, the first author

trained seventeen college students in the authors’ qualitative coding techniques. The

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researchers asked students to draw on their own recent public school experiences in their

identification of salient themes and creation of analytic memos. Based on comparison of

these varied themes, the authors selected reoccurring, key exemplars in episode segments

that represented the most salient themes related to children, children’s bodies, and food

access and choice. During the third stage, we narrowed our analysis to focus on the

overwhelmingly dominant theme of portrayals of children’s agency. The authors

transcribed coded narrative segments in full and then compared across themes for

structural narratives (see Cresswell 2007; Lindloff and Taylor, 2004). In this final stage,

two undergraduates from the initial coding exercise provided further comment. From this

multi-tiered coding scheme, we then selected two exemplary scenes. Each scene is

particularly revealing of a persistent narrative structuring of children’s agency in relation

to wider political and moral economies of food choice.

Making ‘Poor’ Choices

Food Revolution mobilizes its main theme of Oliver as a "man on a social mission" by

carefully setting him up as a somewhat bumbling do-gooder. The narrative arc centers on

engendering the enjoyment of watching an emotional outsider attempting to reform the

ways of a local community. In the course of doing so, the show presents Huntington

residents as well meaning, but also stubborn and uneducated. Critics have pointed out

that blame for poor nutrition seems to disproportionately fall on the shoulders of mothers,

female food service workers and administrators rather than on wider structural forces like

the economy, the larger commercial food industry, and agriculture policy (Click 2010).

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As one critic stated, “noticeably absent from the first two episodes is a discussion of any

role the American food industry and its lobbyists might play in the makeup of school

lunches and in the formulation of the guidelines set for them by the Agriculture

Department” (Hale 2010, 17). In this way, Food Revolution reflects a long tradition of

lifestyle makeover programs promoting themes of choice and responsibility. The show

draws on the conventions of social reform documentaries as well as make-over programs,

counseling economically underprivileged groups to “make better choices” and to pursue

better jobs, homes, looks, and families (Miller 2010, 160). Here, Food Revolution frames

poor choices as proof of a lack of educated self-governance on the part of low-income

groups.

In the following sections, we unpack two extended scenes of food choice from Jamie

Oliver’s Food Revolution to gain a better understanding of how the social location of

children’s agency is constructed and presented to a wider audience. Each scene is

representative of key discourses present throughout the show as a whole and speaks to

larger concerns of how popular discourses frame children’s food agency.

Flavored Milk and Moral Economies

In his first day at Huntington’s Central City Elementary School, Jamie Oliver states that

he would like to get a good idea of how things normally run in the school kitchen and

cafeteria. He arrives just as children are being served a breakfast of pizza, cold cereal and

milk. Huntington, WV has a relatively high poverty rate and a large number of students

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receive subsidized breakfast as well as lunch at the school. As Oliver inspects the

components of the breakfast on offer, he walks up to a little girl with a bright pink shirt

and pigtails. She is eating cereal with pink milk.

Jamie: Oh lovely! What’s in there? You’ve got luminous pink! Is that milk?

Lovely. [Little girl smiles and nods.]

Jamie [speaking off camera]: The milk’s got crap in it.

A short time later, scenes feature Oliver helping out at the cafeteria lunch line. The same

group of younger elementary school children are lining up and picking milk out of crates

at the beginning of the line.

Jamie [speaking off camera]: Come 10:30 we’ve reheated thousands of chicken

nuggets. We’ve made gallons of artificial potatoes… but that was just the tip of

the iceberg, because there was yet another processed thing.

Here the camera cuts to a shot of little girls and boys choosing plastic bottles of brown

and pink milk. Each bottle is at least a pint and looks enormous in their small hands.

Jamie [to cafeteria staff person]: So, all the milk that comes out. Is it always

flavored?

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Staff person: There’s chocolate, strawberry, 1% and then skim.

Jamie [to camera/audience]: The kids have got to have milk everyday.

Jamie [to the line of children]: Show me your milks guys? So you’ve got

chocolate, you’ve got strawberry…chocolate…you’ve got strawberry…

[Students hold up their milks to show him].

Jamie [to camera/audience]: Really, they’re just going for the flavored milks. No

one has any natural.

These excerpts are particularly revealing of the way that milk consumption broadly

functions as a cultural marker of child health and nutrition. Long before the contemporary

popularity of celebrity-oriented “Got Milk” campaigns taking aim at U.S. schoolchildren

debuted, marketers positioned milk as indispensable to children’s health and growth.

Even when flavored with sugar to appeal to children’s taste, the necessity of milk to

school meal plans has rarely been questioned. Current U.S. school food policy mandates

the supply of fresh milk to all school students. However, the naturalization of milk as

both an ideal food for growing children and as a mark of good parenting has a long and

expensive history (DuPuis 2002). After World War I, the National Dairy Council created,

funded, and monitored the first milk-for-health campaigns, creating a larger consumer

market for existing milk surpluses. Dairy councils remain powerful political lobbies with

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close relationships to the USDA, the governing body for school food. As one cultural

historian has pointed out, children as the main beneficiaries of drinking milk remains

largely unquestioned. Yet, campaigns to promote milk in public schools have functioned

in large part as income revenue programs for farmers. As milk became coupled to notions

of the “perfect” food, these programs were seen as a “win-win” for childhood nutrition

and the agriculture industry (DuPuis 2002, 114).

On the Food Revolution, the complex political economy of milk production and

marketing boils down to children’s ability to choose ‘healthy’ milk over flavored milk.

Throughout this episode, Oliver refers to skim milk as more ‘natural,’ belying the fact

that it too is a product of extensive food processing and marketing. There is no dialogue

about other sources of calcium and vitamins that might replace milk. Here, food politics

are better understood through a lens of moral and political economies where “morality

and markets are co-constructive rather than mutually exclusive” (Jackson 2011, 70). In

this example, we see how the overlapping moral and political economies associated with

milk are mobilized around the battle for children’s nutrition.

The show’s argument about impure “milk with crap in it” resonates ideologically with

popular conceptions of health and childhood. Public service announcements shaming

children and their parents for their own obesity deploy powerful frames of morality,

purity and childhood to regulate the responses of adults who see these media. A

particularly compelling example includes Georgia Children’s Health Alliance’s recent

anti-childhood obesity campaign (http://www.stopchildhoodobesity.com/) where a public

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service video shows parent’s poor eating habits being passed on to their children. The

video concludes with dual images of a mother feeding her crying child French fries as a

soother and an adult man having a heart attack with the implication that poor food

choices learned in childhood will ultimately result in untimely death. Such campaigns

attempt to regulate adult behavior such as what parents feed their children through

cultural markers of parental neglect. Yet, the unintended outcome is often to stigmatize

children who are obese. Adults are affectively invested in the interpretation of children’s

food choices. In this way, food education in the Food Revolution can be read as a

coercive text, aimed not just for the young people it targets, but also at parents who may

interpret scenes of children choosing flavored milk as ‘bad parenting.’

In a number of scenes, Oliver constructs parental lack of knowledge as particularly

damaging to children’s health through different demonstrations. In the second episode, he

attempts to visually quantify this lack of knowledge by showing a group of parents the

amount of sugar contained in flavored milk:

Jamie [speaking to a public gathering of parents]: We’re going to start with milk.

This is one week’s worth for lunch.

[Jaime pours out a large bag of sugar.]

Jamie: There is more sugar in this [the flavored milk] than there is in your soda.

How many of you didn’t know that?

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By focusing in on parents’ shocked expressions and shamed comments, the camera

invokes a visceral response that obscures the construction of knowledge and the claims

made by the educator in the form of an outside expert. Comparing flavored milk to soda

is one way to recode flavored milk as a poor nutritional choice, but it does not address the

overlapping economic and social policies that structure children’s access to milk. The

creation of shame is particularly effective here, because milk is so closely coded with

parenting in the Western world (DuPuis 2002). Over 100 years of milk marketing has

normalized the ‘fact’ that children need cow’s milk for healthy development. Food

Revolution provides a particularly compelling example of how the responsibility for

children’s consumption of foods deemed healthy for development are often placed on

parents, with little attention to the relations of food production, including histories of

marketing, access, and cost.

Debates over milk in the space of public schooling present school administrators as

trapped in a system that demands children consume milk at any cost (DuPuis 2002;

Poppendieck 2010). In the final two episodes of the season, Jamie undergoes a series of

negotiations with school administrators about removing flavored milk altogether from the

school. While the administrators acknowledge that flavored milk is perhaps not the

healthiest option, their fear that children will not drink skim milk eventually pushes the

flavored options back onto the lunch line. Indeed, a report by a local university found that

milk consumption overall decreased by 25% during the two months covered by the Food

Revolution in Huntington schools (WVU Health Research Center 2010). However, the

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broader political economy of milk promotion remains unspoken, with the issue of

children’s consumption of milk presented as children making poor individual choices

when picking flavored milks. Alternately, adults’ powerlessness to alter a system that

prioritizes milk over other sources of nutrition exemplifies how economies of food

manufacture meaning into not just political but moral frameworks (Jackson 2009, 2011).

Framed in this manner, the only solution is to take away the choice of flavored milk,

rendering children powerless to make this ‘poor choice.’ In the next exemplary scene,

Jamie attempts a different tactic to intervene and persuade children to make better

choices.

Chicken Nuggets: Children’s Problematic Knowledge and False Agency

Food Revolution markets itself as transparently revealing to the American public what we

are “really feeding our children.” Throughout, the program constructs Oliver as the expert

outsider who will lead the way toward better nutrition. While the Food Revolution’s

espoused goal is to spark a broad, community-based social movement in Huntington,

editing decisions consistently position Oliver as the main agent of change. Tellingly, in

voiceovers and promos, Oliver frequently asks people to ‘join him.’ Further, Food

Revolution frames Huntington, WV public schools as a site of intervention by informed

outsiders into local ignorance about food. In this way, the program draws upon national

stereotypes of ignorance and poverty associated with rural areas and the Appalachia

mountain regions in particular.

  23  

Food Revolution regularly lingers on individuals’ lack of knowledge. During the initial

episodes, Oliver visits a kindergarten classroom and gives students a verbal quiz on fresh

fruits and vegetables. When one child fails to correctly identify a tomato, the camera

lingers on Jamie and the teacher’s shocked expressions. Later, school administrators and

a local radio station host chastise Oliver for an interview in which he called the

townspeople’s knowledge of food and nutrition “anemic.” A scene centers on Oliver

denying that he believes that adults in Huntington are ignorant; however, previous scenes

decrying children blissfully eating pizza for breakfast and unable to identify basic fruits

and vegetables discursively counterpoint these scenes. Across episodes, Food Revolution

fixates on children making poor food choices due to a chronic lack of education acquired

from adults.

Given this, a primary focus of the show is educating both adults and children as passive

recipients of knowledge about nutrition and food choices. Several scenes depict Oliver

teaching children about healthy cooking. An exemplary scene involves Jamie counseling

a group of young children about the commercial production of the typical chicken nugget.

Chicken nuggets are ubiquitous features of public school lunches, but not just because

children will eat them. Popularized by the fast food chain McDonalds in early 1980s,

chicken nuggets are currently the most common school lunch item in the U.S.

(http://www.pcrm.org/health/reports/the-five-most-unhealthful-school-lunches; Roberts

2008). The centralization of school kitchens and the eventual de-skilling of school

kitchen employees coupled with falling chicken prices all ensure that chicken nuggets

remain on the school lunch menu. Chicken are three-times more efficient than cows in

  24  

converting grain to protein, and new technologies such as meat separators allow the

mechanized mass production of foodstuffs from nearly every part of the chicken. The

cost savings and flexibility of product drove high demand from the fast food sector,

which in turn pushed the poultry industry to faster growth. Since the 1970s, the

maturation time of chickens has been reduced by 30 days, while the slaughter weight has

more than doubled (Roberts 2008). Large slaughterhouses handle anywhere from 1.25-2

million birds a week. The poultry industry consumes 15% of corn and 20% of U.S.

soybean crops – all heavily subsidized by the USDA. Because of market demands,

government subsidies of feed, and new technologies, the 37 billion pounds of chicken

produced annually are a staple of the American diet and one of the more familiar foods

for children. However, because the meat is breaded and often fried, one serving of

nuggets can have the same salt, fat and calorie content as a hamburger (Roberts 2008).

A compelling scene centered on Oliver’s cooking demonstration of a fast food chicken

nugget frames children’s poor food choices as an inherent problem of childhood agency.

Here, even when children are given access to more knowledge in the form of a cooking

demonstration, they make what are constructed as poor choices. The program never

indicates why chicken nuggets are served so frequently in school lunches. Showing

children how something is produced ostensibly follows an experiential learning model

that assumes a certain degree of children’s agency; however, in this case the intervention

goes horribly wrong.

  25  

Jamie [to camera/audience]: I started my food revolution in one of Huntington’s

elementary schools. Last time I cooked for the kids, they chose the processed food

over the home cooked meals. Today I’m going to show them a little experiment

that I have done time and time again to show them one of the most disgusting

ingredients, in some of the worst processed foods. My goal is to do something

really extreme and get them to care about what goes into their bodies. This

experiment works every single time.

[Cut to test kitchen; children lined up around worktable]

Jamie [holding up a raw chicken]: Right. Who knows what this is?

Children: Chicken!!!

Jamie [chopping up the chicken]: When you get a chicken like this there are lots

of bits on it that are worth lots of money. The breast, the white meat. That is a

chicken breast.

Jamie [to camera/audience]: I showed them all the parts of the chicken and then

the carcass, giblets, blood, skin, stuff like that.

Jamie [holding up stripped carcass to the children]: What do you think happens

to this?

  26  

Children: It gets thrown away.

Jamie [holding out the carcass to the children]: You want to eat some of this?

Children: Ewwwww, yuck!

Jamie: Ok, I’m going to tell you a little story about how you can take all the

leftover bits and make food. Now watch me.

[Thundering music, violent chopping by Jamie]

Jamie: Some of the processed foods are made from the bits you don’t like. Bones,

connective tissue, they even add chicken skin.

[Children are screaming and squealing at the sight of butchered chicken parts.

Jamie blends up the chicken bits in a food processor, creating a pinkish mush.]

Jamie [pushing pulverized chicken through a fine sieve]: Once they’ve done that,

put in the horrible bits, and they squeeze all the soft stuff away from hard stuff.

Children: Ewwwww.

  27  

Child [in background]: It’s totally awesome.

Jamie: What’s the good meat, what is the bad meat?

[Children point to each pile of chicken.]

Jamie: Okay so now they have all this stuff that’s really not meant to be eaten,

and that isn’t really meat, to be frank. They have to put all these stabilizers in it,

you know, flavoring to make it taste nice not like something horrible. They mix it

up and make a load of gunk. And then guess what? We can make some patties on

it, put some breadcrumbs on it. There you go ladies and gents, all we do is whack

them in a pan…and lovely.

[Shot of pinkish chicken nuggets sizzling in pan]

Jamie: Now who here would eat this?

[One by one children look at each other and then raise hands]

Jamie [to camera/audience]: Great. So there you go. The whole experiment fails.

That experiment always works. And it didn’t work. That was literally the opposite

response I’ve had back home.

  28  

[Cut back to kitchen with children]

Jamie: Do you think that’s good food for you or bad food?

Children: Bad

Jamie: Why would you still eat it if you know it’s bad?

Children: Cuz we’re hungry.

Jamie [to camera/audience]: You know what’s scary is that we’ve brainwashed

these kids so brilliantly so even though they know something is disgusting and

gross they’ll eat it if it’s in that little friendly shape.

In this scene, the failure of the students to make better choices after an infusion of direct

knowledge about food production leads into a second rationale for children’s poor food

choices: they are victims of social normalization within a market society that heavily

promotes processed foods. This scene presents children as possessing false agency in

selecting food: they unwittingly pick the foods that are most familiar and that they have

been socialized into accepting as “that little friendly shape.” Because younger children

generally lack control over the cooking, shape, or look of food, it is perhaps not

surprising that that they do not question the process of production. Moreover, the

presentation of only the white meat, breast of the chicken as ‘good’ and all other chicken

  29  

parts as ‘bad’ reflects western, middle-class tastes for chicken as a moral economy. In

addition, the scene belittles parts of the animal that may be valued in other cultural

groups. By framing anything but the white meat as ‘bad’ or ‘waste’, such portrayals also

omit how the food industry artificially creates the illusion of white meat. Like milk, the

presence of chicken as a product of the industrial food system is not challenged. Rather,

the chicken is dissected into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parts which children are then presented.

Further, this scene illustrates the importance of context, location, and immediacy in

shaping children’s choices. Being filmed watching a famous chef prepare nuggets from

scratch violates typical cultural markers of fast food, or processed food. Instead of

coming from a can, the freezer or the microwave, the students were also subject to the

visceral, embodied aspects of food choice such as sight and smell.1

This scene is a particularly salient example of how Food Revolution presents a

problematic interpretation of children's agency by dwelling frequently on scenes of

children making poor individual choices. Such scenes discursively locate the problem of

obesity and poor childhood nutrition at the scale of the child’s body in an intersectional

axis of poor parenting, individual education, and ‘bad’ agency. As the show studiously

avoids addressing the structural conditions and social location of children's agency, it

suggests that children choose to eat the chicken nugget because of their false

consciousness; a kind of food choice ‘brainwashing.’ Despite the shows’ persistent

emphasis on individual choice, adult agencies, as reflected by local and national policies

                                                                                                               1  The  authors  would  like  to  thank  an  anonymous  reviewer  for  this  insight.  

  30  

and commercial interests, largely determine children’s food choices in the space of the

school.

Discussion and Conclusion

Our analysis of Food Revolution’s portrayals of children’s choice in the space of the U.S.

school food system informs current understandings of how scalar discourses of childhood

agency provide selective framing of biopolitical interventions to childhood nutrition

problems. Our findings contribute insight into the problematic intersection of scalar

politics, children’s agency and the political economy of childhood nutrition. As discussed

earlier, food choices are fundamentally shaped by wider political economies of

marketing, governmental policies, and access, as well as cultural preferences and

personal choice. Food Revolution counsels a large audience about the nature and context

of children’s agency, advocating particular kinds of adult interventions into children’s

social location. At first glance, Food Revolution can be interpreted as drawing attention

to the collective, institutional-level shaping of children’s choices operating at the scale of

the public school system. Within such an interpretation, Oliver’s critiques could be

productively linked to broader social movements aimed at politicizing the inequalities

that make certain choices more likely than others. However, in privileging the scale of the

body, Food Revolution functions as a biopolitical intervention aimed at counseling

children to make better food choices. As it attempts to change students’ eating choices

through education, it does so by adopting a moralizing, discourse of children’s bodies as

sites of poor education, bad parenting, and irresponsible food choices. By doing so,

  31  

Oliver’s interventions place the onus of change – a revolution – at the scale of the self-

regulating, individualized body.

While Oliver assumes an activist role, the program does not fully engage the social

location of young people, nor acknowledge the wider political economy of the school

food system. Instead, Food Revolution forwards a moralizing discourse of poor health as

a symptom of individual failure. Dwelling on individual choices, it does not address the

structural limitations of those very choices that economic and regional geographies

present. As a result, such interventions overlook the power-geometry of young peoples’

food choices. For example, throughout Food Revolution, Oliver navigates the

pervasiveness of fast food in the US school food system. Yet, the show does not dwell on

the complex reasons for this ubiquity, such as how partnerships with commercial food

vendors help subsidize under-funded schools’ free and reduced-price lunches for low-

income students. Instead, portrayals place poor food choice in the realm of the personal

rather than the political or the economic, creating a moral economy of food grounded in

children’s ‘bad choices.’

Food politics, when played out at the primary scale of youth bodies, masks the

importance of social marginalities amidst a market-driven food system, including the role

of governmental policies in structuring children’s access to nutritious food in the space of

the school. Our findings demonstrate the need for increased critical attention to the role

of popular discourse in creating regulatory schemes of health and obesity. In particular,

there is a need to challenge the ways in which food politics are increasingly pinned to the

  32  

scale of the child’s body. Food Revolution is less likely to stress the structural and

institutional barriers that delimit children’s choices in a reality TV meme set up in

relation to artificial constructions of tension and competition. Perhaps most tellingly, the

show persistently asks young people to join ‘Jamie’s revolution,’ rather than challenging

children to collectively lead their own food revolution aimed at changing the multiple,

overlapping systems of control that characterize contemporary food systems. Thus, as

food is rendered outside of politics, activism itself becomes untenable as a mode of

agency.

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