I found this article at Parent Dish written by Christopher Healy and it raised some interesting thoughts on my mind. Link to source article below.

“You don’t need to work very hard to decipher the message behind Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.

The new ABC reality series, which documents the amiable British chef’s campaign to reform school lunch programs, doesn’t shy away from blatant, unequivocal statements about how American schoolchildren have horrible eating habits.

But there’s also a subtler (perhaps unintended) moral that viewers can draw from the show: The reading habits of these kids are just as bad.

On the show’s second episode, which aired this past Friday, Oliver presented a classroom full of kindergartners with a visual pop quiz on produce. He held up one vegetable after another and asked the children what it was. The kids couldn’t identify any of them (as far as the program’s editing showed us, at least).

Many of the veggies received nothing but blank stares, and the ones that did inspire the children to take guesses only garnered wrong answers (beets were thought to be celery, an eggplant mistaken for a pear). Very common food items, like tomatoes, potatoes and cauliflower stumped the kids.

The scene is rather unsettling, really, and makes the obvious point that these children have had little or no exposure to fresh produce. But that’s not all it tells us.”

Read the full article here

Some very interesting comments have also been left. Personally I find it shocking that kids can’t identify vegatables such as a potato [I can understand not being able to identify a beet] don’t parents go shopping with their children or prepare freshly made meals at home?