PR Food for Thought
May 3, 2010 by Alexis
I’m a big Jamie Oliver fan, so when I got wind of his “Food Revolution” show, I was sure to set my DVR. In addition to already liking Jamie, I am a former chicken-nugget-school-lunch-loving “fat kid.” This made the show’s premise – changing the attitudes toward food in the “unhealthiest city in America,” especially in schools – doubly interesting.
As I watched the six-episode season, I found myself repeatedly thinking, “Wow, that’s a great tactic,” and “that’s a solid way to gain publicity.” And in the middle of episode two, I realized how I should have been viewing the program all along: as a public perception campaign. Cooking flash mobs and truckloads of solid fat aside, the core of this initiative is trying to change the way the city’s residents think and feel about food.
What I like most is that Jamie’s approach reached out to people at all levels of involvement. This included:
- Working with children in local classrooms to educate them about produce
- Empowering high school students by having them cook an entire healthy fundraising dinner
- Providing parents with a hard-to-ignore visual about what their children are actually eating at school
- Teaching a local family about effective grocery shopping and basic (non-fried) recipes
- Working alongside school cooks in kitchens and district representatives in offices.
I realize that this is a TV show, so editing and scripting impact what we see as the final product. But, even after six episodes, I felt that Jamie’s time was well-spent. It may not have been as decisive a victory as he expected, but through “grassroots” campaign tactics, he got his foot in the community’s door and secured funding to make sure his influence lingered even after he’d gone back to England.
If you watched the show, do you think his approach was effective? If you were on Jamie’s team, would you have done anything differently?
