Jamie Oliver’s Pressure Leads LA Superintendent to Recommend Banning Flavored Milk
Jamie Oliver is nothing if not persistent. The host of ABC’s “Food Revolution” dogged efforts to become the Los Angeles Unified School District’s BFF started out with little hope as he was banned from working with any LA schools. But could the appearance of LAUSD’s Superintendent John Deasy on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week recommending the school district drop flavored milks mean the plucky Brit has finally earned some respect in Tinsel town?
Superintendant Deasy’s recommendation that the district stop serving the sugary flavored milks is a pretty huge deal, one that Oliver has been quite vocal about since landing in LA last year for season two of “The Food Revolution.”
The LAUSD has been extremely resistant to working with Oliver, which led him to perform media stunts, including a controversial one earlier this year where Oliver and The Food Revolution crew took the milk issue to task by demonstrating just how much sugar that equates to for the students by filling a standard sized school bus with 57 tons of sand, which represented the amount of sugar consumed by LAUSD students just in one week’s worth of flavored milk products.
Oliver credits grassroots community efforts from members of LA’s Food Revolution with putting enough pressure on Superintendent Deasy about the milk. On his blog, Oliver writes, “This success can happen in every city for every school in America — by building local networks of everyday people who want better for our kids in school, and who will take actions large and small to show it.”
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