A wish: to see our children grow up and live better, healthier lives than we. It’s common to all of us, to the point that it helps define who we are as human beings. Jamie Oliver’s recent TED Prize wish speaks directly to this wish we all have, and at his conclusion he clearly voices his wish as a call to action to make it come true.
Oliver is a chef I’ve long admired. In the age of celebrity chefs few have used their notoriety as admirably as he has: Pouring his passion and energy into helping others, he has launched several campaigns to connect kids and adults to good food, and a highly successful charity aimed at giving wayward youth a positive direction. There are a lot of people talking about how to improve the outlook for the health of our children, and we need the dialogue, but we also need doers. Jamie is most certainly a ‘doer,’ and he’s calling for more of us to be. I hope you’ll heed his call.
His speech is about twenty minutes long. Even if you don’t have the time to listen to the talk, fast forward to the last 2 minutes by going to 20:30. Alternatively you can view the summary here.

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Nature is constantly in a state of transformation. Plants grow, then bloom, and shed leaves. Animals bulk up and hunker down, and later leap into frenzied action. Our rivers flow fiercely, and wane to a trickle. We are inextricably linked to nature’s cycles, too. Our bodies are tuned to handle the varying climates of the season, and especially to eat according to what nature has available during any given time of year.

The majority of nutrition experts are in agreement that whole foods, mostly from plants, are the best foods for fueling, growing, and regenerating our bodies. These are the foods that our bodies have adapted to eat over tens of millennia. We have all we need to process them into energy and cells right inside us. The modern age has brought with it a whole host of processes that ‘pre-digest’ foodstuffs for us, and in turn make them into things that we were never meant to eat – ‘near food’ or ‘food like substances.’ Advocates of a whole food diet do sometimes miss a turn, though. We can easily glaze past the idea that our modern conveniences have also allowed us to eat fresh whole foods that couldn’t possibly grow in the place that our bodies live. Eating fresh, whole foods in season provides us the best possible source of nutrition.
Now that I can kick the soapbox aside…foods in season just plain taste better! There is so much more joy in eating the fresh tomato, bursting with ripe sweet/tart juices and layers of flavor not even approached by its mid-winter freight-lined distant cousin. That argument, though, is so ubiquitous now it’s beginning to border cliché, though still very, very true.
The real fun stuff for me is in this cold weather, when kids actually get excited about eating kale, cabbage, sweet potatoes, and rutabaga. These too, have an abundance of flavor when they are freshly harvested, in their season, and simply prepared. There is as substantial a difference between an in-season cabbage and its trucked-in cousin as there is in the same example of a tomato. The best part is that I don’t have to preach this concept to a group of students who took part in growing their food, learning through every interaction they had along the way. It’s just there, in the garden, in every moment of preparation, and every delicious bite.