I think his point about class and "dirtiness" of food is just wrong. Oliver knows full well about using a whole bird and has long advocated for doing such. Chicken stock is delicious and food...
I think his point about class and "dirtiness" of food is just wrong. Oliver knows full well about using a whole bird and has long advocated for doing such. Chicken stock is delicious and food waste is bad and I doubt you'd find a single chef who would disagree with that. This video misses a lot by focussing on Jamie's "war on nuggets" which was really only a small part of his campaign for better school meals. The nuggets are something of a stand-in for a whole range of highly processed, nutrition-light foodstuffs which were common on school plates. And still are, although less so because of Oliver's efforts. That's what his problem is with, he wants fresh/minimally processed food because it is healthier and he is well aware that for a lot of kids, the school lunch is their main source of nutrition for the day. He's not saying "your kids are eating badly because you're poor, just be less poor" he's saying "your kids are eating badly because you're poor, let's make policies which help feed kids better so they can learn better and have more of a chance of getting out of poverty"
Jamie does know that people don't have time or money to cook from fresh every day, it's something he mentions all the time and has several books trying to make that very thing easier - but he also knows that schools could have those resources if the political will was there - and that was a major part of why he made this a political campaign rather than one directed at parents or the kids themselves.
Olsen's point at around 11m as to why school lunches suck is precisely the point that Jamie's School Dinners makes again and again, and precisely the point Oliver himself made when he took his case to the Prime Minister. Schools need more money for food. To make this all about nuggets and all about how people should just stop being poor is to miss what the original show was all about. Oliver's mission was to improve nutrition for less well off kids. The rich kids at fancy schools don't need a chef campaigning to get them more funding and more training for their staff.
I can't stand Jamie Oliver. He's annoying, his recipes are sloppy and lazy, he never knows when to stop with the bloody olive oil. But the School Dinners campaign is one of the best things any chef (hell, any celebrity full stop) has done in this country. Oliver's Fifteen restaurants which largely employ (and train, so they are employable for life) young, disadvantaged adults - often straight out of the prison system - is another. I do not buy the argument that Jamie Oliver, of all people, is classist.
Like everything, there's a lot of nuance to it. I think the aggressively anti-processing can be a bit "classist". There's nothing inherently wrong with processing food - cooking is processing...
Like everything, there's a lot of nuance to it. I think the aggressively anti-processing can be a bit "classist". There's nothing inherently wrong with processing food - cooking is processing food.
Processing becomes a heuristic for unhealthy, because one easy way to make things last long and taste good is to replace water with oil and add in sugar and sodium, which is one way to process something.
The infamous Oliver pink slime video is ironically an example of good processing. Oliver blends the leftovers of a chicken into ground chicken, so not only lots of lean poultry, but there's also much of the nutrients from the bone there, forms into balls, lightly coats them in flour, and cooks them into nuggets. Those nuggets are perfectly fine nutritionally. This is ironically a great counter-argument: this is processing that results in cheap, but nutritious food that is appetizing to people. The issue with storebought nuggets is that perhaps 50% of the mass may be flour instead, and there's probably additive sugar.
I think in net, being fully anti-processing can be helpful overall, because it is a heuristic against foods overly saturated with oil and carbs to make them taste good with the least effort. But that doesn't mean that Oliver's stance can't be a bit ridiculous. It's similar to if someone pushed for UK schools to only buy organic produce. It's possible that it'd be beneficial, because buying produce implies better quality food already, but the organic part is really not necessary.
I'm not in a place to watch the video right now, but I don't think you're entirely right about Jamie's nuggets being an example of "good processing". Is he not still frying the meat? That's a lot...
I'm not in a place to watch the video right now, but I don't think you're entirely right about Jamie's nuggets being an example of "good processing". Is he not still frying the meat? That's a lot of added fat. I don't know how much he added to his recipe but many nuggets tend to have a high amount of salt in them as well. I don't know how well people can absorb the minerals in bones, but too much calcium can be bad for you.
I used to agree with you about processing being unfairly vilified, but the more I learn about nutrition the less I am inclined to agree. There are a few examples of processing that can be done to improve something - adding iodine to salt is a pretty good example. But for every good example there are practically hundreds of negative examples. Every form of cooking, for instance, is going to cause nutrients in vegetables to start breaking down. Even things you wouldn't think to look are affected: the flour in your pantry has been milled to remove all of it's fiber.
You even mentioned this yourself:
The issue with store bought nuggets is that perhaps 50% of the mass may be flour instead, and there's probably additive sugar.
The problem with this is that this isn't just a nuggets problem, it's an everything problem.
As an exercise, go to your local supermarket and look at the cereal aisle. Try to find all the options that offer zero added sugars or artificial sweeteners. There's a Keto craze going on so you should be able to find a decent number of options - though if you're anything like me you'll probably be surprised to see how many supposedly "healthy" options have them. Now here's the second part: of those cereals you found, now try to find one that has no added oils.
If you've done this correctly and you're not in a specialty health food store, you would have eliminated everything except for perhaps some muesli and if you're lucky you'll have Uncle Sam. And even then, they will have added salt. The only other option is if you included oatmeal in your comparison, in which case the unflavored ones are the only ones with no added sugars or fats.
Sure, with these options the person eating them is likely going to add sweet or fatty things to flavor them, but then they at least have the choice of how much they are adding and have the option of using alternatives that are better options for their own health.
I do think Oliver is doing a great deal of good in regards to school lunches, and while I think he's fighting the good fight his real enemy isn't school lunches, it's the way society and culture deals with food as a whole. Grocery stores are full of convenience foods that are are bad for our health, addictive, and - thanks to things like palm oil dependency and plastic packaging - are also destructive to the environment. And the other form of convenience foods - restaurants and other forms of foodservice - are even less healthy and more addictive. And thanks to our hypercapitalist society there is extreme opposition for even the most hands-off regulations to help the situation (relevant Tildes discussion). Though I would be a fool if I were to blame it all on capitalism; there were many people hating on Michelle Obama for "trying to control what we eat" on both sides of the political aisle.
It's true that he did deep fry them, but I wouldn't consider the last step to be what most people consider "processing", otherwise we'd all have to eat the paleolithic diet to avoid processed...
It's true that he did deep fry them, but I wouldn't consider the last step to be what most people consider "processing", otherwise we'd all have to eat the paleolithic diet to avoid processed foods (not very healthy for you). You could just as easily baked them.
The transformation from chicken carcass to "slime" to ball is the processing, and Oliver did very little additives in that process. There's not nearly enough calcium in the "slime" to cause health issues. You'd need a lot of calcium density for that. He only lightly seasoned it. It's likely that his chef background is betraying his point, here.
There are a few examples of processing that can be done to improve something - adding iodine to salt is a pretty good example. But for every good example there are practically hundreds of negative examples. Every form of cooking, for instance, is going to cause nutrients in vegetables to start breaking down.
I don't agree. For the latter, while true, that's actually a benefit in many cases. Breaking down nutrients makes them more bioavailable, and there's no point in having nutrients in your food if they just pass through your gullet and out the other end. That humans learned to cook food is one of the major adaptions that led to the current human-dominated world - cooked food is significantly easier to extract nutrients from, which can be hard, especially for vegetables. Herbivores have two stomachs for a reason.
Humans get away with their tiny stomachs and calorie burning lifestyle because we invented our own second stomach: the pot with water and food inside, atop a fire, doing the first passthrough to break down nutrients.
I also think there's a lot of processing that can be perfectly fine. An example: lentil spaghetti. It's highly processed, as can be indicated from the fact that lentils do not grow in noodle form. Still plenty healthy. In the school setting, you may have issues trying to get UK schoolchildren to down lentils, but spaghetti is something even the Br*tish can eat.
I also think preservatives get unfairly maligned in the process. The vast majority of preservatives have no scientifically significant evidence that they are in any way unhealthy, and the fact that food can be preserved is good for lowering the price of said food and reducing food waste.
Taking aim at processing at a whole is throwing the baby away with the bath water. The end goal should be to make things have superior nutritional, and any tools that can be used for that goal should be used.
In the context of Jamie Oliver's campaign and more generally in the discourse around food here in the UK, "processed" implies foods high in added salt and sugar (or msg and HFCS or whatever). It's...
In the context of Jamie Oliver's campaign and more generally in the discourse around food here in the UK, "processed" implies foods high in added salt and sugar (or msg and HFCS or whatever). It's not so much about the physical process the foodstuff goes though as about the filler ingredients which provide empty calories, and excessive amounts of flavour boosters being added. The last time I had a cheap chicken nugget it was horribly sweet and salty. My local chip shop does ones made from actual chicken pieces, battered and deep fried and they're much nicer - and I'm happy for my kid to eat them (occasionally).
From what I understand the current thinking on nutrition is that frying stuff isn't bad. Fats are mostly OK, although some are better than others. Sugar is probably pretty bad. Salt is definitely bad in excess. As with most things to do with diet, moderation is probably the important thing - and it's hard to achieve moderation of salt and sugar when eating a "processed" heavy diet because it's often loaded with those things to make it tastier for cheap. Sure, manufacturers could add mushroom powder or miso paste or something to add umami and richness to their nuggets but why bother when a hefty dose of salt and some sugar to balance the saltiness does just as well for a fraction of the price?
Just as an aside there's no way I'd serve spaghetti in a school setting, especially with younger kids. They'd all come back from lunch covered in sauce. I'd go lasagne.
It can be hard to tell, though. It's one of those things where the precise definition is fairly hazy and context dependent, and it kinda depends on the person. It's also why the pink slime nuggets...
In the context of Jamie Oliver's campaign and more generally in the discourse around food here in the UK, "processed" implies foods high in added salt and sugar (or msg and HFCS or whatever).
It can be hard to tell, though. It's one of those things where the precise definition is fairly hazy and context dependent, and it kinda depends on the person.
It's also why the pink slime nuggets demonstration from Oliver was so lambasted. It seemed to pull back the curtains and nail his definition: it's about the actual act of changing food. After all, he absolutely did not add salt, nor sugar. His entire argument to the kids was, "wow, ain't this icky, you're eating blended chicken carcass". And I think that kind of puritanical, "oh, you can only eat things mother nature made" is where the "classist" (which I'm personally not sure is exactly the right label) claim.
As an aside, there is a real market of health-oriented ready made processed foods now. It's just that the good ol' price tradeoff triangle is still there: cheap, tasty, and low effort - you can only pick two. So either it tastes... bad, or it's a good bit more expensive, considering we're pinning on "low effort" given the premise. So it's also a thing that high income classes partake in, mostly.
It's been a long time since the show was on (2005) but I did watch it at broadcast and I don't recall the pink slime bit being particularly lambasted back then. Just watching clips nearly 20 years...
It's been a long time since the show was on (2005) but I did watch it at broadcast and I don't recall the pink slime bit being particularly lambasted back then. Just watching clips nearly 20 years later removes the context of what was almost four hours of TV specifically aimed at 2005-era British people. A TV show in which he talks a lot about additives - and sure, I don't disagree that "chemicals" are often misunderstood and that preservatives and other food additives aren't necessarily bad - but again, lots of focus on sugar and salt. Also he talks about "junk food", which is rather less ambiguous. I am fairly sure nobody I knew was talking about the mechanical process of blending some bits of chicken. You might not have seen the clip where Oliver talks about the washing of carcasses with bleach and other chemicals to chemically and later mechanically recover every last scrap of possibly edible material. I might be misremembering which show that was from, but I'm fairly sure it was School Dinners.
Oliver's campaign was pretty popular at the time. He got a quarter of a million people to sign a petition which he took to the Prime Minister and eventually ended up securing almost £300m in additional funding for school meals. Also he got fizzy sugar water (coke, etc) banned from UK schools, a ban which stands to this day.
I think you are getting a bit too confused in the details because it honestly sounds like you're taking what I'm saying to extreme conclusions. I said that it is possible to have too much calcium,...
I think you are getting a bit too confused in the details because it honestly sounds like you're taking what I'm saying to extreme conclusions. I said that it is possible to have too much calcium, not that Oliver's nuggets had enough to become toxic. You'd have to probably toss a whole stick of blackboard chalk into the food processor to get that much calcium in them. Nowhere in my comment did I advocate for eating an all-raw foods diet; I think that's both extreme and unwise. Cooking is a necessity of life. In any case, the reason why I brought up cooking was to demonstrate that almost every kind of processing including cooking will reduce the nutritional value of food.
The problem I see in your line of thought have to do more with the way you use terms like "healthy" and "superior nutrition". Both of those are so ambiguous in this context that they are essentially useless. There is no such thing as food that is "healthy" or "unhealthy"; what is healthy or unhealthy is your consumption of that food when taken in the context of your overall diet and lifestyle. "Superior nutrition" can simply mean a food has more calories, or it could mean that the food has a superior balance of nutrients given some defined standard or model - which, I should mention, we have yet to establish. In any case, there is not going to be any one food that is a perfect nutrition source; once again, you have to consider things as part of a diet.
There's actually quite a lot of problems with your lentil spaghetti example. One of which is that the reason why children are less likely to eat lentils rather than spaghetti is because we give them things like highly processed spaghetti to begin with. The main ingredient in many baby foods are mashed legumes, including lentils; parents end up accidentally teaching their kids to dislike them! Lentil spaghetti is also a pretty good example of why too much processing can be a bad thing. Compare Barilla's lentil spaghetti with their whole wheat spaghetti. Both have roughly the same amount of calories. The lentil spaghetti does have one advantage with higher protein, but the whole-wheat spaghetti has more than double the insoluble fiber, which makes the food more filling and helps prevent the eater from overeating. And then it has a whole host of extra nutrients that are completely missing from the lentil version and their regular enriched pasta (the kind most people would regularly buy).
If you compare all three of these pastas, there is one main difference between the lentil and enriched wheat pastas vs. the whole-wheat pasta; the enriched wheat and lentil pastas have an extra step where they are completely de-hulled before they are ground into flour. It's especially stark when comparing the enriched to the whole-wheat version; the enriched pasta has extra vitamins and minerals added back in because they got rid of all of them when they de-hulled the wheat! Even after the enrichment, they still don't have all the minerals that the whole-wheat version has but it has a bit more calories, a bit less protein, and less than half the insoluble fiber.
By almost every measure, the whole-wheat version is the superior option to serve. Even if you think that the lentil version is better because of the protein, keep in mind that we're only talking about the spaghetti and not the complete meal; that can easily be remedied with the sauce it is served with (meat sauces are pretty common, no?) or by adding a side.
Preservatives are a bit off topic, but I do agree with you generally. I will say, though, that the way that USDA just gives a pass to anything we don't explicitly know has bad effects on human health is incredibly foolish; we're essentially risking people's health for food megacorporations to be able to take in more profit.
This is one of my favourite videos on YouTube, I've watched it a number of times since it came out. I was totally ready for some hot nonsense from Jamie Oliver in the usual vein of his antics....
This is one of my favourite videos on YouTube, I've watched it a number of times since it came out. I was totally ready for some hot nonsense from Jamie Oliver in the usual vein of his antics. That it turned into something rooted in classism caught me off guard and really turned what could have been another Two-Minute Hate into something informative and revelatory about the purpose behind the initiatives and messaging.
Dan Olsen really is a cut above almost everyone. All of his videos are incredibly insightful and remarkably well considered, he's a treasure. But I suppose that's to be expected from any of Lindsay Ellis' longtime cowriters.
His videos on Suicide Squad and Annihilation are some of my favourites.
I'm really impressed by this video. The author addresses something apparently mundane with insight, humanity, and erudition without sounding pedantic or needlessly aggressive. That is not easy.
I'm really impressed by this video. The author addresses something apparently mundane with insight, humanity, and erudition without sounding pedantic or needlessly aggressive. That is not easy.
I think his point about class and "dirtiness" of food is just wrong. Oliver knows full well about using a whole bird and has long advocated for doing such. Chicken stock is delicious and food waste is bad and I doubt you'd find a single chef who would disagree with that. This video misses a lot by focussing on Jamie's "war on nuggets" which was really only a small part of his campaign for better school meals. The nuggets are something of a stand-in for a whole range of highly processed, nutrition-light foodstuffs which were common on school plates. And still are, although less so because of Oliver's efforts. That's what his problem is with, he wants fresh/minimally processed food because it is healthier and he is well aware that for a lot of kids, the school lunch is their main source of nutrition for the day. He's not saying "your kids are eating badly because you're poor, just be less poor" he's saying "your kids are eating badly because you're poor, let's make policies which help feed kids better so they can learn better and have more of a chance of getting out of poverty"
Jamie does know that people don't have time or money to cook from fresh every day, it's something he mentions all the time and has several books trying to make that very thing easier - but he also knows that schools could have those resources if the political will was there - and that was a major part of why he made this a political campaign rather than one directed at parents or the kids themselves.
Olsen's point at around 11m as to why school lunches suck is precisely the point that Jamie's School Dinners makes again and again, and precisely the point Oliver himself made when he took his case to the Prime Minister. Schools need more money for food. To make this all about nuggets and all about how people should just stop being poor is to miss what the original show was all about. Oliver's mission was to improve nutrition for less well off kids. The rich kids at fancy schools don't need a chef campaigning to get them more funding and more training for their staff.
I can't stand Jamie Oliver. He's annoying, his recipes are sloppy and lazy, he never knows when to stop with the bloody olive oil. But the School Dinners campaign is one of the best things any chef (hell, any celebrity full stop) has done in this country. Oliver's Fifteen restaurants which largely employ (and train, so they are employable for life) young, disadvantaged adults - often straight out of the prison system - is another. I do not buy the argument that Jamie Oliver, of all people, is classist.
Like everything, there's a lot of nuance to it. I think the aggressively anti-processing can be a bit "classist". There's nothing inherently wrong with processing food - cooking is processing food.
Processing becomes a heuristic for unhealthy, because one easy way to make things last long and taste good is to replace water with oil and add in sugar and sodium, which is one way to process something.
The infamous Oliver pink slime video is ironically an example of good processing. Oliver blends the leftovers of a chicken into ground chicken, so not only lots of lean poultry, but there's also much of the nutrients from the bone there, forms into balls, lightly coats them in flour, and cooks them into nuggets. Those nuggets are perfectly fine nutritionally. This is ironically a great counter-argument: this is processing that results in cheap, but nutritious food that is appetizing to people. The issue with storebought nuggets is that perhaps 50% of the mass may be flour instead, and there's probably additive sugar.
I think in net, being fully anti-processing can be helpful overall, because it is a heuristic against foods overly saturated with oil and carbs to make them taste good with the least effort. But that doesn't mean that Oliver's stance can't be a bit ridiculous. It's similar to if someone pushed for UK schools to only buy organic produce. It's possible that it'd be beneficial, because buying produce implies better quality food already, but the organic part is really not necessary.
I'm not in a place to watch the video right now, but I don't think you're entirely right about Jamie's nuggets being an example of "good processing". Is he not still frying the meat? That's a lot of added fat. I don't know how much he added to his recipe but many nuggets tend to have a high amount of salt in them as well. I don't know how well people can absorb the minerals in bones, but too much calcium can be bad for you.
I used to agree with you about processing being unfairly vilified, but the more I learn about nutrition the less I am inclined to agree. There are a few examples of processing that can be done to improve something - adding iodine to salt is a pretty good example. But for every good example there are practically hundreds of negative examples. Every form of cooking, for instance, is going to cause nutrients in vegetables to start breaking down. Even things you wouldn't think to look are affected: the flour in your pantry has been milled to remove all of it's fiber.
You even mentioned this yourself:
The problem with this is that this isn't just a nuggets problem, it's an everything problem.
As an exercise, go to your local supermarket and look at the cereal aisle. Try to find all the options that offer zero added sugars or artificial sweeteners. There's a Keto craze going on so you should be able to find a decent number of options - though if you're anything like me you'll probably be surprised to see how many supposedly "healthy" options have them. Now here's the second part: of those cereals you found, now try to find one that has no added oils.
If you've done this correctly and you're not in a specialty health food store, you would have eliminated everything except for perhaps some muesli and if you're lucky you'll have Uncle Sam. And even then, they will have added salt. The only other option is if you included oatmeal in your comparison, in which case the unflavored ones are the only ones with no added sugars or fats.
Sure, with these options the person eating them is likely going to add sweet or fatty things to flavor them, but then they at least have the choice of how much they are adding and have the option of using alternatives that are better options for their own health.
I do think Oliver is doing a great deal of good in regards to school lunches, and while I think he's fighting the good fight his real enemy isn't school lunches, it's the way society and culture deals with food as a whole. Grocery stores are full of convenience foods that are are bad for our health, addictive, and - thanks to things like palm oil dependency and plastic packaging - are also destructive to the environment. And the other form of convenience foods - restaurants and other forms of foodservice - are even less healthy and more addictive. And thanks to our hypercapitalist society there is extreme opposition for even the most hands-off regulations to help the situation (relevant Tildes discussion). Though I would be a fool if I were to blame it all on capitalism; there were many people hating on Michelle Obama for "trying to control what we eat" on both sides of the political aisle.
It's true that he did deep fry them, but I wouldn't consider the last step to be what most people consider "processing", otherwise we'd all have to eat the paleolithic diet to avoid processed foods (not very healthy for you). You could just as easily baked them.
The transformation from chicken carcass to "slime" to ball is the processing, and Oliver did very little additives in that process. There's not nearly enough calcium in the "slime" to cause health issues. You'd need a lot of calcium density for that. He only lightly seasoned it. It's likely that his chef background is betraying his point, here.
I don't agree. For the latter, while true, that's actually a benefit in many cases. Breaking down nutrients makes them more bioavailable, and there's no point in having nutrients in your food if they just pass through your gullet and out the other end. That humans learned to cook food is one of the major adaptions that led to the current human-dominated world - cooked food is significantly easier to extract nutrients from, which can be hard, especially for vegetables. Herbivores have two stomachs for a reason.
Humans get away with their tiny stomachs and calorie burning lifestyle because we invented our own second stomach: the pot with water and food inside, atop a fire, doing the first passthrough to break down nutrients.
I also think there's a lot of processing that can be perfectly fine. An example: lentil spaghetti. It's highly processed, as can be indicated from the fact that lentils do not grow in noodle form. Still plenty healthy. In the school setting, you may have issues trying to get UK schoolchildren to down lentils, but spaghetti is something even the Br*tish can eat.
I also think preservatives get unfairly maligned in the process. The vast majority of preservatives have no scientifically significant evidence that they are in any way unhealthy, and the fact that food can be preserved is good for lowering the price of said food and reducing food waste.
Taking aim at processing at a whole is throwing the baby away with the bath water. The end goal should be to make things have superior nutritional, and any tools that can be used for that goal should be used.
In the context of Jamie Oliver's campaign and more generally in the discourse around food here in the UK, "processed" implies foods high in added salt and sugar (or msg and HFCS or whatever). It's not so much about the physical process the foodstuff goes though as about the filler ingredients which provide empty calories, and excessive amounts of flavour boosters being added. The last time I had a cheap chicken nugget it was horribly sweet and salty. My local chip shop does ones made from actual chicken pieces, battered and deep fried and they're much nicer - and I'm happy for my kid to eat them (occasionally).
From what I understand the current thinking on nutrition is that frying stuff isn't bad. Fats are mostly OK, although some are better than others. Sugar is probably pretty bad. Salt is definitely bad in excess. As with most things to do with diet, moderation is probably the important thing - and it's hard to achieve moderation of salt and sugar when eating a "processed" heavy diet because it's often loaded with those things to make it tastier for cheap. Sure, manufacturers could add mushroom powder or miso paste or something to add umami and richness to their nuggets but why bother when a hefty dose of salt and some sugar to balance the saltiness does just as well for a fraction of the price?
Just as an aside there's no way I'd serve spaghetti in a school setting, especially with younger kids. They'd all come back from lunch covered in sauce. I'd go lasagne.
It can be hard to tell, though. It's one of those things where the precise definition is fairly hazy and context dependent, and it kinda depends on the person.
It's also why the pink slime nuggets demonstration from Oliver was so lambasted. It seemed to pull back the curtains and nail his definition: it's about the actual act of changing food. After all, he absolutely did not add salt, nor sugar. His entire argument to the kids was, "wow, ain't this icky, you're eating blended chicken carcass". And I think that kind of puritanical, "oh, you can only eat things mother nature made" is where the "classist" (which I'm personally not sure is exactly the right label) claim.
As an aside, there is a real market of health-oriented ready made processed foods now. It's just that the good ol' price tradeoff triangle is still there: cheap, tasty, and low effort - you can only pick two. So either it tastes... bad, or it's a good bit more expensive, considering we're pinning on "low effort" given the premise. So it's also a thing that high income classes partake in, mostly.
It's been a long time since the show was on (2005) but I did watch it at broadcast and I don't recall the pink slime bit being particularly lambasted back then. Just watching clips nearly 20 years later removes the context of what was almost four hours of TV specifically aimed at 2005-era British people. A TV show in which he talks a lot about additives - and sure, I don't disagree that "chemicals" are often misunderstood and that preservatives and other food additives aren't necessarily bad - but again, lots of focus on sugar and salt. Also he talks about "junk food", which is rather less ambiguous. I am fairly sure nobody I knew was talking about the mechanical process of blending some bits of chicken. You might not have seen the clip where Oliver talks about the washing of carcasses with bleach and other chemicals to chemically and later mechanically recover every last scrap of possibly edible material. I might be misremembering which show that was from, but I'm fairly sure it was School Dinners.
Oliver's campaign was pretty popular at the time. He got a quarter of a million people to sign a petition which he took to the Prime Minister and eventually ended up securing almost £300m in additional funding for school meals. Also he got fizzy sugar water (coke, etc) banned from UK schools, a ban which stands to this day.
btw in case you're interested, turns out the campaign led to better exam results and decreased absences
I think you are getting a bit too confused in the details because it honestly sounds like you're taking what I'm saying to extreme conclusions. I said that it is possible to have too much calcium, not that Oliver's nuggets had enough to become toxic. You'd have to probably toss a whole stick of blackboard chalk into the food processor to get that much calcium in them. Nowhere in my comment did I advocate for eating an all-raw foods diet; I think that's both extreme and unwise. Cooking is a necessity of life. In any case, the reason why I brought up cooking was to demonstrate that almost every kind of processing including cooking will reduce the nutritional value of food.
The problem I see in your line of thought have to do more with the way you use terms like "healthy" and "superior nutrition". Both of those are so ambiguous in this context that they are essentially useless. There is no such thing as food that is "healthy" or "unhealthy"; what is healthy or unhealthy is your consumption of that food when taken in the context of your overall diet and lifestyle. "Superior nutrition" can simply mean a food has more calories, or it could mean that the food has a superior balance of nutrients given some defined standard or model - which, I should mention, we have yet to establish. In any case, there is not going to be any one food that is a perfect nutrition source; once again, you have to consider things as part of a diet.
There's actually quite a lot of problems with your lentil spaghetti example. One of which is that the reason why children are less likely to eat lentils rather than spaghetti is because we give them things like highly processed spaghetti to begin with. The main ingredient in many baby foods are mashed legumes, including lentils; parents end up accidentally teaching their kids to dislike them! Lentil spaghetti is also a pretty good example of why too much processing can be a bad thing. Compare Barilla's lentil spaghetti with their whole wheat spaghetti. Both have roughly the same amount of calories. The lentil spaghetti does have one advantage with higher protein, but the whole-wheat spaghetti has more than double the insoluble fiber, which makes the food more filling and helps prevent the eater from overeating. And then it has a whole host of extra nutrients that are completely missing from the lentil version and their regular enriched pasta (the kind most people would regularly buy).
If you compare all three of these pastas, there is one main difference between the lentil and enriched wheat pastas vs. the whole-wheat pasta; the enriched wheat and lentil pastas have an extra step where they are completely de-hulled before they are ground into flour. It's especially stark when comparing the enriched to the whole-wheat version; the enriched pasta has extra vitamins and minerals added back in because they got rid of all of them when they de-hulled the wheat! Even after the enrichment, they still don't have all the minerals that the whole-wheat version has but it has a bit more calories, a bit less protein, and less than half the insoluble fiber.
By almost every measure, the whole-wheat version is the superior option to serve. Even if you think that the lentil version is better because of the protein, keep in mind that we're only talking about the spaghetti and not the complete meal; that can easily be remedied with the sauce it is served with (meat sauces are pretty common, no?) or by adding a side.
Preservatives are a bit off topic, but I do agree with you generally. I will say, though, that the way that USDA just gives a pass to anything we don't explicitly know has bad effects on human health is incredibly foolish; we're essentially risking people's health for food megacorporations to be able to take in more profit.
This is one of my favourite videos on YouTube, I've watched it a number of times since it came out. I was totally ready for some hot nonsense from Jamie Oliver in the usual vein of his antics. That it turned into something rooted in classism caught me off guard and really turned what could have been another Two-Minute Hate into something informative and revelatory about the purpose behind the initiatives and messaging.
Dan Olsen really is a cut above almost everyone. All of his videos are incredibly insightful and remarkably well considered, he's a treasure. But I suppose that's to be expected from any of Lindsay Ellis' longtime cowriters.
His videos on Suicide Squad and Annihilation are some of my favourites.
I'm really impressed by this video. The author addresses something apparently mundane with insight, humanity, and erudition without sounding pedantic or needlessly aggressive. That is not easy.