Lights, camera, Antonio
Posted on | January 23, 2011 | No Comments
The Los Angeles Times reports that after the Los Angeles Unified School District refused to admit ABC’s Jamie Oliver to its cafeterias, the celebrity chef has been granted an audience at West Adams Prep, one of Mayor Villaraigosa’s cluster schools.
If this is not part of the mayor’s long-running political tug-of-war with the school board, then it looks like it.
For how Oliver has used Facebook to urge parents to write school board members to demand that the district accommodate him, click here.
For how the ABC reality TV program opened Oliver’s nutrition ministry in Westwood, many freeway off ramps never mind bus stops from West Adams Prep (or any low income community), click here.
For how Oliver’s been larking around town conducting stunts, including filling a school bus with sand as if it were sugar, click here.
Meanwhile, for a source other than school lunches of the weight of the children at West Adams Prep, here is a shot taken last spring from outside the school. Directly across the street where children line up for buses is a Burger King. West Adams has one of the highest concentrations of fast food restaurants in the country.
This post has been updated.
The Dry Garden: Dead in the pot
Posted on | January 21, 2011 | No Comments
Planting season in Southern California is rarely busier than midwinter, when nursery lots crammed with Christmas trees give way to displays of fruit trees and roses. If you’re haunting stores to select an apricot tree, a flowering bramble, a hedge or even a specimen tree, plant pathologist Jim Downer has a message for you: “Good gardening starts with good plant selection.”
By which he means: If the stock you find is root-bound, walk away.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.
Santa Anas
Posted on | January 20, 2011 | 1 Comment
LA Observed has good fun with weather speak in today’s forecast of Santa Ana winds for Southern California. For those interested in how greater Los Angeles, a place that is often mistaken as desert, but is not (yet), gets intermittent breaths out of the actual deserts of the Great Basin and Mojave, click here for a good explanatory page from a California and federal climate project. A favorite meteorologist (among other things) who blogs as Bad Mom, Good Mom, sent this UCLA link explaining Santa Anas, which opens with this Raymond Chandler excerpt from Red Wind: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”
This post has been updated.
LAUSD is right to say ‘no’ to Jamie Oliver
Posted on | January 17, 2011 | 5 Comments
Schools are for kids, not celebrities.
When a parent drops a child off at school, he or she is entitled to a small set of reasonable expectations. These include: 1) That their child will be educated. 2) That school meals will be available if the child does not bring a packed lunch. 3) That the child will not be exploited.
Item one is not going well. Item two happens, if not to the standards that some would wish. Item three includes keeping out child molesters and celebrities who view the world as background.
That British TV chef Jamie Oliver has arrived in Southern California preaching the gospel of healthful eating is fine. The city has plenty of pulpits, but the cafeterias of public schools are not among them. If he wants to help the school district improve its meals, then it would have been politic and orders of magnitude more sincere of him to offer to donate his expertise to the meal formulators, while leaving the cameras in the studio. Camera crews do not feed kids twice a day, every weekday, nine months out of 12. They do distract classes. ABC does not pay for school meals, taxes do. Most importantly, children at schools are not TV extras, they are kids. As kids, they deserve protection.
LA Weekly reports that Oliver describes his series as a “documentary.” Maybe by Golden Globe standards, but it’s a documentary about him. ABC’s Food Revolution is not News Hour. An ABC casting call includes it with The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Wife Swap and Take the Money and Run. If the school district wants Oliver in, it would have to arrange it in a way that didn’t disrupt classes, respected the privacy needs of students and acknowledged real-world cost constraints.
As it happens, it has elected not to turn its cafeterias into a TV studio and it’s entirely within its rights. Oliver says, “In my country [England], it would be illegal.” Really? Show me the canon of English law that assures reality TV programs access to school lunchrooms.
Given his backing from fashionable and wealthy quarters, along with his new Westwood headquarters, maybe Oliver should try Crossroads, or Oakwood, or Harvard Westlake, or some other high-toned private school. Surely the elite parents of students there wouldn’t mind ABC filming their kids eat.
Book review: “We have met the Enemy”
Posted on | January 17, 2011 | No Comments
Daniel Akst borrowed his new book’s title from “Pogo” creator Walt Kelly, whose “We have met the enemy and he is us” became a slogan marking the first Earth Day in 1970. However, in “We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess,” Akst isn’t interested in saving the planet, at least as a first line of business. He’s intrigued by impulse control in America, what is eroding it and what that means.
The book opens much like a tract on obesity from the Morbidity and Mortality Report if it had been written by a social commentator and not clinicians from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An anecdote about a corpse too fat to fit in a morgue freezer is followed in short order by the unsparing observation that an obese bariatric nurse at a Texas conference helped herself to a second plate of waffles smeared with cream cheese.
Akst, a former Times editor and writer who proclaims himself to be slender and pretty much addiction-free, is not sold on the nurse’s argument that obesity is genetic or the fault of the food offerings around us. Obesity, in the nurse’s eyes, is certainly not about self-control. And therein lies the problem. Akst here aims “to reinflate the narrowed arena of the elective, reclaiming most excessive behaviors from the realm of disease.”
Click here to keep reading my review in the Los Angeles Times of Daniel Akst’s book on self-control.
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