Get Yourself Educated on Food

I was very impressed with this speech delivered by Jamie Oliver at TED advocating the cause for a food revolution.

Jamie Oliver's TED Award speech

Here are some of the best quotes which impacted me in his speech:

The statistics of bad health are clear, very clear. We spend our life being paranoid about death, murder, homicide, you name it...it's on the front page of every paper, CNN...look at it, homicide at the bottom, for god's sake. (see chart at 2:20) Every single one of those in the red is a diet-related disease...Fat, diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States right now, here today.

The labeling in this country is a disgrace...How can you say something is low-fat when it's full of sugar?

(The lunch cooks in schools)...They're doing their best. But, they're doing what they're told. What they're being told to do is wrong. The system is highly run by accountants, there's not enough or any food-knowledgeable people in the business, that's a problem. If you're not a food expert, and you have got tight budgets, and it's getting tighter, then you can't be creative, you can't duck and dive and right different things around things. If you're an accountant and a box-ticker, the only thing you can do in this circumstance is to buy cheaper shit.

If you don't have forks and spoons in school...all you're endorsing is fast food, because it's hand held.

Guess what fix that? Two one-hour sessions. We got to start teaching our kids about food in school. Period.

The whole speech was delivered with full conviction and full of illustration of how modern foods are seriously affecting our health causing problems, especially diabetes (see how much sugar is consumed through milk alone for a 5-year period at 13:10).

I'll leave you to watch the rest of the speech yourself. And last but not least, this final part of the video really touched me:

"I wish for everyone to help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity." ~ Jamie Oliver

A very powerful mission statement aside, I must agree with him that the biggest challenge mankind is facing today is obesity.

Get yourself educated about food starting today!