Let’s edit that a bit and apply it to Jamie Oliver’s American “Food Revolution” for a near-perfect description of what’s going on – ‘When a smutty work of Reality TV about a very serious issue gets the world talking ad nauseum, you can be sure it has touched something in the public mood’.

The ambiguity of “something in the public mood” is apt too, because even the fast-talking public can’t seem to figure out what exactly the issue is. The series (which no one outside the US has actually seen – except for me, perhaps, living as I do in a magic twilight zone where there are no broadcasting boundaries) is about “fighting obesity”. But the gamut of responses gives the lie to the possibility that it is about any one thing, which is exactly what most commentators seem to miss.

For television stations, the biggest news was that when it premiered on a Friday night, it was the highest-rated Adult 18-49 premiere for any network on the night (returning or new) since September 2007. (Even when it was rebroadcast that Sunday evening, nearly 1.5m people tuned in to watch Jamie rather than Desperate Housewives). With these kinds of numbers, who cares what it’s about, people are watching!

Early reviews criticized the show (which competes, let’s not forget, with Desperate Housewives) for regurgitating “the worst of reality TV pap“, and for not stressing “our culture’s politicization of food — the whole arugula divide, the high cost of eating right, the class issues over portion size, the constant character judgments strewn between a fine meal and the drive-thru.” Problem noted: Reality TV is not political enough.

The “our culture” in the above anticipates some of the most vehement “analyses” which postulate that Jamie’s problem is that he is a ‘pushy Brit‘ – or more accurately, that ‘Americans don’t take kindly to being reproached, particularly by one of their former colonial masters.’ Problem noted: Jamie is British. (Question: why are more people apparently listening to him than to their very own Rachael Ray, or Michelle Obama, both of whom are also “fighting obesity”?).

Another writer summarily debunks the British angle as ‘nonsensical and egocentric’ and offers her own take on Jamie’s “failure”, which has nothing to do with anything, really: ‘In truth, what makes America think Britain is small isn’t some limey guy falling on his face while dressed up like a pea; it’s Britain’s neurotic obsession with what America thinks in the first place.’ Problem noted: America and Britain have broken up.

Then there are the serious, “in-depth” analyses like this one which spends 6 pages explaining why the series has has ‘flunked out’ (I’m sure ABC would beg to differ). To the author’s credit, there are one or two intelligent statements like that ‘the “Food Revolution” is a failure because the entertainment narrative is unable to deal with complexities or systemic issues’. (Problem op cit: Reality TV is not political enough). But that would have been much more credible had it acknowledged the more general truth that Reality TV is probably not the place to deal with systemic issues in the first place – but that this example (like Jamie’s School Dinners before it) does indeed show that Reality TV might be a useful place to get people talking and maybe eventually making *some* kind of change. But this entire article is so stuck up the arse of the system that Jamie Oliver is trying to do something about that its lightbulb moment is acknowledging that ‘after the first two months of the new meals, children were overwhelmingly unhappy with the food, [chocolate and strawberry] milk consumption plummeted and many students dropped out of the school lunch program, which one school official called “staggering.” On top of that food costs were way over budget, the school district was saddled with other unmanageable expenses, and Jamie’s failure to meet nutritional guidelines had school officials worried they would lose federal funding and the state department of education would intervene.’ Problem noted: We don’t have time to wait for revolutions.

Meanwhile, someone who actually works with school lunches in the US responds with a depressing confirmation that the Reality aspect of the show (‘A high-school cafeteria that serves nothing but pizza, fries, spaghetti, and iceberg lettuce in the salad bar? A kitchen manager who drinks soda in the kitchen and seemingly spends more time complaining than working? Adults who think students won’t eat lunch if the meal doesn’t come with fries? A food service director with a permanent smirk on her face who appears to hope the whole experiment fails?’) are dangerously close to reality: ‘I’ll cut to the chase: yes. These scenes are tragically ubiquitous in our nation’s public school system.‘ Problem noted: Reality TV is too real. Lest I misrepresent her, she does actually ‘suspect that Oliver will ultimately be successful on some level, if not in Huntington, then in countless other American school districts’.

Marion Nestle at The Atlantic is similarly sympathetic, and refreshingly level-headed too: ‘Take a deep breath. Try not to get turned off by Oliver’s statement that “the food revolution starts here” (no Jamie, it doesn’t). Try not to cringe when he calls the food service workers “girls” and “luv” (okay, it’s a cultural problem). Remember: this is reality TV.’

Well, I could go on, but that would be boring. In fact the only piece I’d actually recommend reading in its entirety is this one from The Times, which impressively paints a good picture of how the Naked Chef found some clothes. It also contains the little gem that one of “best food moments” of Jamie’s life was at a “braai” barbeque in South Africa with people who “had nothing” – except, that is ‘chicks with their boobs out looking sexy and fellas looking all buff with their mirrored sunglasses. And the tunes going off and homemade hooch…’. His only regret, we are told, ‘was he didn’t have a film crew with him to capture it.’

Sigh. In South Africa we just have reality.

About half way through the film, we witness Governor Schwarze-muscle announcing one of the first bans on junk foods in schools – “This will be the toughest school nutrition reformation in the nation,” he proclaims. “We are going to terminate obesity in California once and for all.”

Then comes a scene which one reviewer describes as “Perhaps the most outrageous scene in Killer at Large….  The setting is the perimeter of an enclosed yard; it’s around noon.  A whole gaggle of kids, between eight and ten years old, are pressed up against a chain link fence, grasping through the links to procure some meager sustenance from altruistic aid workers who are unloading supplies of food from stacks of boxes. There’s a certain mad desperation to it all, like we are watching bare survival at its most primal and basic.”

“Is this some sort of refugee camp in a war torn Third World country?” he asks. “Some horrible prison for children in some benighted corner of the globe, far from America? In fact no, it’s an elementary school in California, and the adults handing food to the children are concerned parents. But the “who” involved is not the real shocking part – it’s what they are passing to them:  piles and piles of junk food – cookies, candy, soda, etc.”

Well, the “who” here does matter, I think. Because this particular scene is NOT from Hollywood High, as we are led to believe by the narrator. Here are a few shots from the actual movie (compiled with the aid of the snipping tool, my favourite new Windows 7 gagdet):

If, like me, you have been keeping up with the doings of a certain Mr. Oliver over the years, you’ll very quickly recognise this exact scene as that of the infamous “sinner ladies” who were demonised for selling “junk” to school children after they refused to eat the “healthy” meals that Mr. O helped to put in their canteens. It was The Sun that published the infamous picture in the UK in 2006, which unfortunately I cannot reprint here without permission (!!), but you can click here to see it for yourself.

This one is from The Daily Mail:

The other reason that this was so easy to identify (and therefore seriously sloppy plagiarism) is because Julie Critchlow, the short-haired blond woman, went on to become a bit famous for getting an apology from Mr. O for badmouthing her, and for becoming one of the main players in his Ministry of Food series. Here they are in the first episode sharing a spot of curry in her living room:

Jamie’s Ministry of Food was also, incidentally, the “inspiration” for his upcoming Food Revolution USA, which is basically him taking his Rotherham show on the American road. Well, actually on the West Virginian road, to Huntington, the “unhealthiest city in America” (all of which surely also helped to getting Mr. O this year’s TED prize). Watch the splendiferous preview here.

I digress. This is not about Mr. O (for once). This is about the sensational twaddle that is Killer at Large. Could I be overreacting? If we’re having a conversation about whether obesity really is a killer, and at large, then perhaps. There are some truths to those claims, and a small forged scene doesn’t detract from the facts.

But we have to seriously question ALL of the “facts” when it turns out that even one of them is manufactured. Yes, that scene did take place, but in a different time and place (on a different continent!), and it is dishonest and shameful to present it as otherwise. Also, you can’t help wondering why bother? If obesity really is the killer at large that the filmmaker sets out to “document”, then why the need to falsify evidence at all?

Misrepresentation and intellectual dishonesty (or just laziness) are the killers at large. How are we supposed to get anywhere with this sort of rubbish making the rounds?

Need I say more?

Of course there are lots of medical doctors saying things too. ‘We live in an “obesogenic environment” ‘.’ True hunter-gatherers that we are, we’re all genetically programmed to not stop eating until all the food is gone’. Which begs the question: why, then, aren’t we ALL obese, and in the tragic situation of “having to” undergo liposuction at the age of twelve?

Well that’s because beneath all the talk of obesity as viral, global, “not your fault” (ie. BEWARE, it can GET YOU too),  is a beautifully masked lie that we are all the same. It’s this absurd game of political correctness for a bunch of “experts” to sit around and blame the environment (rather than people who just eat too much), when what they’re clearly doing is pitching their own tents on a desert island – somewhere naturally unaffected by the Plague. If it did come by, it would probably see that they have PhDs and grass-fed beef in their fridges, and just waft on by to the next Twinkie-sucking sucker. (It’s a clever Plague).

Me, I blame it all on the penny polony.

My friends gave me this and I didn’t eat it. Is something wrong with me?