Listening English Practice [Teach Every Child about Food – TED Talks]

English Listening Practice [Teach Every Child about Food – TED Talks]

10 minutes of English listening practice …

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10:49 (Sighs)

10:51 Ten percent of what we spend on health care, as I said earlier, is on obesity, and it’s going to double.We’re not teaching our kids. There’s no statutory right to teach kids about food, elementary or secondary school, OK? We don’t teach kids about food, right? And this is a little clip from an elementary school, which is very common in England.

11:12 (Video) Who knows what this is?

11:14 Child: Potatoes.

11:15 Jamie Oliver: Potato? So, you think these are potatoes? Do you know what that is? Do you know what that is?

11:20 Child: Broccoli?

11:22 JO: What about this? Our good old friend.

11:24 Child: Celery.

11:25 JO: No. What do you think this is?

11:27 Child: Onion. JO: Onion? No.

11:29 JO: Immediately you get a really clear sense of “Do the kids know anything about where food comes from?” Who knows what that is? Child: Uh, pear?

11:36 JO: What do you think this is? Child: I don’t know.

11:39 JO: If the kids don’t know what stuff is, then they will never eat it.

11:44 (Laughter)

11:46 JO: Normal. England and America, England and America. Guess what fixed that. Two one-hour sessions.We’ve got to start teaching our kids about food in schools, period.

12:00 (Applause)

12:05 I want to tell you about something that kind of epitomizes the trouble that we’re in, guys, OK? I want to talk about something so basic as milk. Every kid has the right to milk at school. Your kids will be having milk at school, breakfast, and lunch, right? They’ll be having two bottles, OK? And most kids do. But milk ain’t good enough anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I support milk — but someone at the milk board probably paid a lot of money for some geezer to work out that if you put loads of flavorings, colorings, and sugar in milk, more kids will drink it. Yeah.

12:44 Obviously now that’s going to catch on the apple board is going to work out that if they make toffee apples they’ll eat more as well. Do you know what I mean? For me, there isn’t any need to flavor the milk.Okay? There’s sugar in everything. I know the ins and outs of those ingredients. It’s in everything. Even the milk hasn’t escaped the kind of modern-day problems. There’s our milk. There’s our carton. In that is nearly as much sugar as one of your favorite cans of fizzy pop, and they are having two a day. So, let me just show you. We’ve got one kid, here — having, you know, eight tablespoons of sugar a day. You know, there’s your week. There’s your month. And I’ve taken the liberty of putting in just the five years of elementary school sugar, just from milk. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but judging the circumstances, right, any judge in the whole world, would look at the statistics and the evidence, and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse. That’s my belief.

13:56 (Applause)

14:03 (Applause ends)

14:04 Now, if I came up here, and I wish I could come up here today and hang a cure for AIDS or cancer, you’d be fighting and scrambling to get to me. This, all this bad news is preventable. That’s good news. It’s very, very preventable. So, let’s just think about, we got a problem here, we need to reboot. Okay so, in my world, what do we need to do? Here is the thing, right, it cannot just come from one source. To reboot and make real tangible change, real change, so that I could look you in the white of the eyes and say, “In 10 years’ time, the history of your children’s lives, happiness — and let’s not forget, you’re clever if you eat well, you know you’re going to live longer — all of that stuff, it will look different. OK?”

14:52 So, supermarkets. Where else do you shop so religiously? Week in, week out. How much money do you spend, in your life, in a supermarket? Love them. They just sell us what we want. All right. They owe us to put a food ambassador in every major supermarket. They need to help us shop. They need to show us how to cook quick, tasty, seasonal meals for people that are busy. This is not expensive. It is done in some, and it needs to be done across the board in America soon, and quick. The big brands, you know, the food brands, need to put food education at the heart of their businesses. I know, easier said than done. It’s the future. It’s the only way.

15:33 Fast food. With the fast-food industry you know, it’s very competitive. I’ve had loads of secret papers and dealings with fast-food restaurants. I know how they do it. I mean, basically they’ve weaned us on to these hits of sugar, salt and fat, and x, y, and z, and everyone loves them, right? So, these guys are going to be part of the solution. But we need to get the government to work with all of the fast-food purveyors and the restaurant industry, and over a five, six, seven-year period wean of us off the extreme amounts of fat, sugar and all the other non-food ingredients.

16:08 Now, also, back to the sort of big brands: labeling, I said earlier, is an absolute farce and has got to be sorted. OK, school. Obviously, in schools, we owe it to them to make sure those 180 days of the year, from that little precious age of four, until 18, 20, 24, whatever, they need to be cooked proper, fresh food from local growers on-site, OK? There needs to be a new standard of fresh, proper food for your children, yeah?

16:38 (Applause)

16:43 Under the circumstances, it’s profoundly important that every single American child leaves school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life. Life skills.

16:55 (Applause)

16:57 That means that they can be students, young parents, and be able to sort of duck and dive around the basics of cooking, no matter what recession hits them next time. If you can cook, recession money doesn’t matter. If you can cook, time doesn’t matter. In the workplace, we haven’t really talked about it.You know, it’s now time for corporate responsibility to really look at what they feed or make available to their staff. The staffs are the moms and dads of America’s children. Marissa, her father died in her hand, I think she’d be quite happy if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly. Definitely they shouldn’t be left out. Let’s go back to the home.

17:37 Now, look, if we do all this stuff, and we can, it’s so achievable. You can care and be commercial.Absolutely. But the home needs to start passing on cooking again, for sure. For sure, pass it on as a philosophy. And for me, it’s quite romantic, but it’s about if one person teaches three people how to cook something, and they teach three of their mates, that only has to repeat itself 25 times, and that’s the whole population of America. Romantic, yes, but most importantly, it’s about trying to get people to realize that every one of your individual efforts makes a difference. We’ve got to put back what’s been lost. Huntington’s Kitchen. Huntington, where I made this program, we’ve got this prime-time program that hopefully will inspire people to really get on this change. I truly believe that change will happen.Huntington’s Kitchen. I work with a community. I worked in the schools. I found local sustainable funding to get every single school in the area from the junk, onto the fresh food: six-and-a-half grand per school.

18:39 (Applause)

18:41 That’s all it takes, six-and-a-half grand per school. The Kitchen is 25 grand a month. Okay? This can do 5,000 people a year, which is 10 percent of their population, and it’s people on people. You know, it’s local cooks teaching local people. It’s free cooking lessons, guys, in Main Street. This is real, tangible change, real, tangible change. Around America, if we just look back now, there is plenty of wonderful things going on. There is plenty of beautiful things going on. There are angels around America doing great things in schools — farm-to-school set-ups, garden set-ups, education — there are amazing people doing this already. The problem is they all want to roll out what they’re doing to the next school, but there’s no cash. We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly, identify them, and allow them to easily find the resource to keep rolling out what they’re already doing, and doing well. Businesses of America need to support Mrs. Obama to do the things that she wants to do.

19:44 (Applause)

19:51 And look, I know it’s weird having an English person standing here before you talking about all this. All I can say is: I care. I’m a father, and I love this country. And I believe truly, actually, that if change can be made in this country, beautiful things will happen around the world. If America does it, other people will follow. It’s incredibly important.

20:14 (Audience) Yeah!

20:15 (Applause)

20:21When I was in Huntington, trying to get a few things to work when they weren’t, I thought “If I had a magic wand, what would I do?” And I thought, “You know what? I’d just love to be put in front of some of the most amazing movers and shakers in America.” And a month later, TED phoned me up and gave me this award. I’m here. So, my wish. Dyslexic, so I’m a bit slow. My wish is for you to help a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

21:20 (Applause)

21:31 Thank you.

21:32 (Applause continues)