What on earth is that?
I think it's officially chickenfoot.
I honestly, honestly have no idea what is in that.
Look at us we're in a beautiful room surrounded by beautiful children.
Innocent, pure.
Their bodies and their bones are growing up.
Most important time in their life.
And, you know, we're being fed this.
It's not right.
It's not right these kids deserve better.
School dinners are in a deepening crisis
with a diet of fatty processed foods threatening our children's health.
The government doesn't seem to have the answers.
So Jamie Oliver wants to prove they can be better by transforming
what kids eat at school.
First you'd have to get the dinner ladies cooking Jamie style.
This isn't working out either.
Getting the kids to eat it ((I don't like it, it's nasty)).
And all on a tiny budget.
I've never, ever banged my head against the wall so many times.
Can Jamie Oliver change what Britain's kids eat at school?
I'm doing this because I want the kids to eat better food.
I want the kids to be healthy.
I want them to grow up with better habits.
I want us to have a fucking better, cooler, cleverer healthier nation.
Jamie will be starting his campaign
at Kidbrooke's school in Greenwich.
Although kids pay around a pound for their main course,
there's only 37p to spend on ingredients.
So head dinner lady Nora Sands mostly cooks cheap junk food.
Come on now you haven't got time to be talking, start serving.
Which is exactly what these kids want.
The kids
here eat more than a quarter of a ton of chips a week.
This is how much
veg goes in a school in a day.
Is that the only veg....
That is the only veg that we've got on.
They could have 'em but you couldn't even give them away.
I don't think he's going to be able to do it, because it's not, it's not that
he can't do it, it's just you can't just pick this up overnight.
Nora's been feeding kids junk
food for 13 years.
It's the start of term and Jamie's up early.
'Dear daddy, good luck on your first day
at school.'
The thing about school dinners is this right?
20 years ago, the government
gave up responsibilities for the nutrition
and kind of dealings of school dinners, right?
And basically what's happened is, in the last 20 years,
the food has just gone down and down
and down to what we have now, which is basically an absolute shit fight.
Quiet please.
At Kidbrooke, 1400 kids, 150 staff and head teacher Trisha
Jaffe are waiting for Jamie to address their morning assembly.
Nice one.
All right guys?
Lovely.
Nice to meet you all.
Listen, I'm gonna be here for the next couple of months, intermittently, and...
nice one.
And basically...
one more...
sweet.
I'd love to get to know some of you guys.
I'm sure it's gonna be a bit colourful and a lot of fun.
It's also gonna be a lot of hard work from my point of view.
So to the teachers and the students, thanks for having me.
And uh...
yeah, nice one.
It's just a few hours
till lunch, so Jamie's taken straight to the kitchen.
Hello.
Nora!
Oh, that's him!
Hello pleased to meet ya.
How are ya, you alright?
Jamie's never done mass catering, so he'll work
as one of Nora's dinner ladies to find out how her kitchen operates.
But I won't let anything happen to you. Thank you Nora.
I'll come back in a minute.
He's the very same as if he's on the telly!
Oh, but you've got the wrong knife for fish.
I'm not cutting fish. I'm only opening a bag.
All right. To be honest... Oh hold on, no!
You're gonna get all the bits in the bottom.
Good lad that's it, put them up there.
Now what kind of cod is it, is it fillet or is it sort of reconstituted?
Minced.
Minced. Reconstituted.
See, this is a problem.
When you're dealing with a lot of mincemeat
and a lot of minced things or reconstituted or reshaped things,
you know, that's when things are added and you can't keep track of them.
If you look along the side of the table now,
everything
is essentially the same.
Reconstituted sausage rolls, mincemeat there.
I don't know what's inside.
Fish fingers, the same.
Sausages reconstituted.
Probably synthetic skins, probably a shitload of additives.
A chicken looks like chicken.
Soon as it's minced up, you know,
you don't know what...
it's hiding things.
Interesting smell.
It smells funny doesn't it? Yeah.
Beef or turkey, I don't know.
Close up of my left hand.
Nice.
Cat food.
The food's obviously all shit, I mean...
it's not her fault.
She runs a tight ship don't get me wrong, those girls are great.
But they're...
what are they doing?
They're running a tight ship.
They're cooking or reheating things very effectively.
Good attention to detail.
But what they are reheating is shite.
Transforming these school dinners is gonna be tough.
And he hasn't even met the kids yet.
In the canteen
the lunchtime supervisors are meeting their new dinner lady.
Oh my good God!
Oi, I'm getting scared!
That is not fair that you come up and encroach on his time.
You see?
But what is in them?
Potatoes, they're deep fried.
Pizza and smilies?
Burger and smilies.
Smilies, beans, and one fish finger.
Two hot dogs.
Yeah man.
There you go geezer.
There's a totally unbalanced lunch for ya.
Fucking unbelievable.
I can honestly
say that 97% of people in this room today had a totally unacceptably
unbalanced diet.
Do you guys all eat in the canteen?
Yeah.
So what things do you go for when you get in?
Like pizza sometimes, salad and stuff like that.
What about you mate?
Just chips and some custard mostly.
Chips and custard? Yeah.
What stuff do you like at home?
Normally at home it's normally just chips anyway.
Better than you get here at school but it's just the same thing every day.
What at school?
Yeah.
Why do you think people buy so many burgers here because I... why?
Because they're nice. Really?
Well they are nice occasionally.
But if you have them over and over again they start to get a bit boring.
Jamie's
first shift as a dinner lady is over.
Everything went absolutely fine, Julia.
Absolutely lovely you could work with him all day long.
I'm not a bit frightened I was petrified last week, and once he walked in
with his little face on him this morning, I was back to me normal self.
Yeah, happy as Larry.