Celebrity chef and serial killjoy Jamie Oliver has been policing what school children are allowed to eat for years now. It all started with turkey twizzlers and now he’s coming for cake sales.
Apparently thinking that cake sales are a daily occurrence in schools, the Jamie Oliver Foundation has stated that it believes cake sales give children the wrong message about obesity and nutrition. It released this statement in a recent report: “The culture of high fat and sugary foods used as rewards, in fundraising and in celebrations, is creating social and physical environments that contradict children’s food education.”
Every child knows that cakes are an unhealthy, now-and-then treat- there is absolutely no confusion about that.
Cake sales are a great way to get kids involved in baking at home and also for disadvantaged schools to raise money. For some schools, holding frequent fundraisers is the only way to create opportunities such as school trips or improved facilities for students. Cake sales are effective because they are accessible to all. Most items cost between 10p and £1 meaning that nearly every schoolchild in Britain could purchase something without putting pressure on their parents’ finances. They allow schools to raise large amounts of money from contributions of less than £1 from most students in the school. It won’t be long before cake sales are forced to become ‘fruit sales’ or ‘pencil sales’- as good as both of these items are, no child is going to go out their way to purchase them.
Perhaps the most ignorant part of the report comes at Jamie Oliver’s foreword:
“We’ve found that there’s a massive difference between the schools that are doing a great job at delivering food education and those that are struggling.”
Because of government cuts to education, schools are struggling to teach students basic English and Maths. It’s more likely that the schools are struggling because of a general lack of funding rather than a lack of food education specifically. In the report, it is stated that secondary school children only receive on average 25 minutes of food education per week. This figure isn’t so low because schools don’t want to educate students about food- it’s because they can’t.
The worst part of this situation is that Jamie Oliver has no problem profiting off “the culture of high fat and sugary foods”. Here are just some of the many cake/sweets recipes on his website and in his cookbooks.
Unless he starts to practise what he preaches, Oliver can not protest against an effective and low cost way of raising money in schools while continuing to profit from the sale of recipe books that teach people how to make sugary and fattening food. It’s ironic that many of his recipes may have been used to make cakes that would have been sold in school cake sales.
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