The Food Revolution is going to be televised?

Posted on | April 14, 2010 | No Comments

I’m not a huge student of reality TV; however, you can understand how a student writing his thesis on Community Supported Agriculture as a Tool for Food Justice would be interested in Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Now I’ve already briefly talked about why I think the show has failed to address the underlying issues in our food system, but I wanted to take a look at the show from another angle: the portrayal of the planner and advocate.

Jamie Oliver came to Huntington, WV from England with his full cadre of ideas. Often times he says “this worked well over there, why doesn’t it work here,” and his language is full of the word “my.” My Plan, My ideas. My revolution. I need to get people on board with my plan.

The modern planner isn’t out there pushing his or her ideas or telling people how to live. I see a strong Jane Jacobs critique of the show that finds similarities between urban renewal and top down planning and less in common with the community based, people oriented planning that is generally practiced. Would Jamie have encountered less resistance if he sat down with the community and found out what they wanted and took their ideas into account? He claims that the people of Huntington need to open their mind to his ideas; I think the opposite is true. Jamie needs to listen to the people of Huntington to find out what they want.

I also see this thread of the top-down planner in other reality shows such as Extreme Home Makeover. Scale and values aren’t coming from the individual families or individual communities; it seems to be more about imposing a normative set of middle class values on struggling families and neighborhoods.

Its not that entertainment has to be true or even fair. Its TV, I do not deny its an escapist fantasy for millions of Americans every evening; however, I think its important for us planners who have very vested interests in issues such as housing, food and community planning to take note about how our profession is being misrepresented by people taking the language of “revolution,” “change,” and “plans” to impose their own values on people. Do those who watch these shows think differently about planners because of this? I don’t know for sure. It would be a compelling topic to research, as in many communities where planners are working behind the scenes Jamie Oliver and Ty Pennington might be the most visible representations of people who are influencing housing and food policy in our communities.

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Food Revolution by Aaron Knoll is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License;Based on a work at aaronknoll.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://aaronknoll.com/?p=85.

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