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Food Revolution Day

Richard Lemmer | 21.05.12

Last Saturday, revolution had never tasted so good. Thousands of people attending over 400 public events and over 500 dinners parties celebrated Food Revolution Day, a worldwide series of events organised by Jamie Oliver. The day’s aim was to encourage people to re-engage with food (the real and unprocessed variety): it is "a chance for people who love food to come together … to pass on their knowledge and highlight the world’s food issues," according to the campaign's website.

Our world faces super-sized problems. "Imagine if you lived in a world where diet related disease cost over $200 billion in healthcare," Jamie says in the campaign's video. Unfortunately, this is the reality of our 21st century world. According to WHO, in every region of the planet, obesity has doubled between 1980 and 2008. Every year, over 2.8 millions adults die as a result of being obese or overweight. “I started learning about food at the age of five in the kitchen at my Dad’s pub,” Jamie wrote in the Huffington Post, “About one in every 15 people in the UK was obese. Just 30 years later, its almost one in every four people.” It seems like we need nothing short of a food revolution.

Can Food Revolution Day create a better system? “Our focus this year is to plant the seeds for local teams that can grow the food revolution beyond a single day. That starts with raising awareness,” a spokesperson for the Food Revolution Team told the Edible Schoolyard Project. “We hope to be able to bring food education boxes to thousands of classrooms this year through donations.” The campaign has so far featured in hundreds of news articles and features and has been tweeted about over 6,000 times in the space of two days.

Jamie’s Foundation is trying to prepare the next generation of food lovers with the knowledge they need to make informed diet choices. Donations to the foundation will create a Food Education Box to be sent to UK and US schools. Each box will include a particular fruit or vegetable along with a recipe, fun facts and lesson plan, to provide the first step in getting kids to taste fresh fruits and vegetables.

To support the campaign, this week will see the Greenhouse PR blog feature interviews with some of our clients and a series of Greenhouse recommended recipes, to get people out of the Ready Meal aisle and back into the kitchen!