FARTHER AFIELD Just inside the Madera District Fair turnstile, I rubbed my eyes in amazement. Garish, carnie venues are known for deep fried Snickers bars, not the mirage beheld on a lawn before me: “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Big Rig Kitchen”. I climbed several steps into a 70-foot-long kitchen Disneyland on wheels, four pop-out bays of which create space enough for eight prep stations, four sinks, double ovens, microwaves, two refrigerators and dishwashers. Within, I greeted culinary educator-missionaries Henry Perez and Scott Bottemer, sent Madera-ways "To create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity." That “wish” won the British celebrity chef 2010’s TED Prize plus $100,000 seed money to design and construct this gleaming, $1M kitchen classroom that caravans our Golden State over the next seven months. Madera was first stop on this California Endowment-sponsored tour schedule including The Big Fresno Fair Oct. 10-13, after which Jamie’s Kitchen lingers to host “Learning to Cook” classes Oct.17 – Nov.8. Pugnacious, 30-something Oliver hails from a village north of London where his parents owned a pub. Admittedly dyslexic, Jamie favored apprenticeships over formal education. The chef-in-training’s exhibitionist kitchen flair attracted BBC’s attention in 1997, launching his immensely popular series, The Naked Chef. Demonstrating how kitchen skills can transform bachelors into babe magnets soon yielded to loftier concerns and another series, Fifteen, in which Oliver reformed delinquents through culinary instruction. Fame landed Jamie a lucrative media ambassadorship at Sainsbury’s, Britain’s third-largest supermarket chain, worth $2M a year until the decade-long relationship foundered over his growing disdain for industrial junk food. Wealth enabled his passionate and notably successful campaign to improve the quality of food served to children in British schools. This upstart Limey cook crossed the pond in 2009 to redeem America’s “most unhealthy city”, purportedly Huntington, West Virginia, where he infiltrated school district cafeterias and conducted flash mob stir- frys on city streets. That caper, documented by ABC’s Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, moved west the following year where a forewarned Los Angeles Unified School District stubbornly barred the chef from their kitchens. Hopefully, Jamie Oliver Food Foundation’s high tech chuck wagon meets the welcome wagon in our San Joaquin Valley. I bestowed produce gifts on Henry and Scott who had hosted near one thousand Madera third graders at the fairgrounds that day, convinced teaching children the joy of cooking will heal this nation. -Tom Willey
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 18:27:42 +0000