Food Revolution

Like his mother and like his daughter, Will Allen meant to escape the life of a farmer, only to learn he never really could - nor did he really want to. The son of a sharecropper, the 60-year-old Allen has become an icon of the urban agriculture movement. He runs a farm and education center in Milwaukee called Growing Power that produces food and soil for thousands, tries innovations in composting and growing, employs more than 100 people, trains many others and aims to help transform the food system.

The Good Food Revolution Growing Healthy Food, People and Communities Will Allen with Charles Wilson Gotham Books: 272 pp., $26

Parma ham and Philly cheese steaks. Quesadillas and Cobb salads. Pastas and pasilla -marinated chicken breasts. Visible kitchen. Visible duct work. Track lighting. Cappuccino and martinis. Intelligent, capable waiters, some with ponytails. Gipsy Kings over the sound system. Call it trendy. Call it formulaic. Call it anything you want, but 410 Boyd Street is a restaurant that unabashedly reaps the spoils of the food revolution of the '80s.

Like his mother and like his daughter, Will Allen meant to escape the life of a farmer, only to learn he never really could - nor did he really want to. The son of a sharecropper, the 60-year-old Allen has become an icon of the urban agriculture movement. He runs a farm and education center in Milwaukee called Growing Power that produces food and soil for thousands, tries innovations in composting and growing, employs more than 100 people, trains many others and aims to help transform the food system.

Jamie Oliver, the English chef who took on the "lunch ladies" of Huntington, W.Va., in an attempt to make school food more healthful, has been told thanks but no thanks by the Los Angeles Unified School District. "Our feeling was that his time would be better spent or invested in other communities," Melissa Infusino, the director of partnerships in the superintendent's office, said Friday. Oliver is bringing his "Food Revolution" reality television show to L.A. for its second season, and he and his family plan to move to the area in January, a spokeswoman said.

HOT: Maternal Charlize Theron Churchill on Sundays Snow cones Scott Conant (Scarpetta executive chef) crush NOT: Awesome and mean "Young Adult" Charlize Theron The Hudson on Sundays Cupcakes Jamie Oliver ("Food Revolution") crush — Matt Donnelly

Los Angeles school district officials were wary of a celebrity chef's reality television show precisely because they wanted to avoid the conflict and drama they know the genre can bring. The district said no, yet the conflict and drama still came. Jamie Oliver, the British chef, focused the second season of his ABC television show, "Food Revolution," on Los Angeles public schools. In Tuesday night's premiere, Oliver was a defiant rabble-rouser challenging the superintendent and school board who were stonewalling his mission to bring in healthy food and combat rampant obesity.

Chocolate and strawberry milk are out. Next to go: Corn dogs and chicken nuggets. The Los Angeles Unified School District on Tuesday, with a 5-2 vote on a new dairy contract, became by far the largest district in the country to remove flavored milk from its menus, part of its effort to make school food healthier and help combat childhood obesity. The milk issue has overshadowed other changes in the district's food services division, which serves 650,000 meals a day at 1,000 sites.

"Pink slime," a food additive made from spare beef trimmings that's treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill off E. coli , salmonella and other possible bacteria, continues to rear its slimy head. Last month, as KTLA reported , McDonald's decided to cease using the additive in its hamburgers.  This decision came after prodding by TV chef Jamie Oliver. On his "Food Revolution," the disgusted food activist says the additive is made of " all of the bits that no one wants . " The USDA, however, says the additive is safe to eat. The department is so satisfied with the stuff that it plans to buy 7 million pounds of ground beef containing "pink slime" in coming months for the national school lunch program, the Daily reported on Monday.  And that's created a whole new stink.

In a downtown parking lot sits one of the most impressive things that Jamie Oliver, the chef-activist-TV personality, has brought to Los Angeles for his "Food Revolution" television show: a red-and-khaki-striped big rig tricked out as a traveling cooking school. Even in food truck mad L.A., this behemoth, 70 feet long, stands out. Demonstrations have been held on board for officials, potential donors and others. But last week, the first classes began for young people. At lunchtime, 16 teenagers from the youth development program Inner City Struggle came to cook marinated chicken and chopped salad, which they rolled together in whole-wheat tortillas.

"We're losing the war against obesity in the U.S.," says chef Jamie Oliver. "Our kids are growing up overweight and malnourished from a diet of processed foods, and today's children will be the first generation ever to live shorter lives than their parents. " About 1 in 3 adults and 1 in 6 children are obese, according the Centers for Disease Control , and such obesity-related diseases as Type 2 diabetes and some types of cancer have become leading causes of death in our country.

HOT: Maternal Charlize Theron Churchill on Sundays Snow cones Scott Conant (Scarpetta executive chef) crush NOT: Awesome and mean "Young Adult" Charlize Theron The Hudson on Sundays Cupcakes Jamie Oliver ("Food Revolution") crush — Matt Donnelly

"Pink slime," a food additive made from spare beef trimmings that's treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill off E. coli , salmonella and other possible bacteria, continues to rear its slimy head. Last month, as KTLA reported , McDonald's decided to cease using the additive in its hamburgers.  This decision came after prodding by TV chef Jamie Oliver. On his "Food Revolution," the disgusted food activist says the additive is made of " all of the bits that no one wants . " The USDA, however, says the additive is safe to eat. The department is so satisfied with the stuff that it plans to buy 7 million pounds of ground beef containing "pink slime" in coming months for the national school lunch program, the Daily reported on Monday.  And that's created a whole new stink.

Chocolate and strawberry milk are out. Next to go: Corn dogs and chicken nuggets. The Los Angeles Unified School District on Tuesday, with a 5-2 vote on a new dairy contract, became by far the largest district in the country to remove flavored milk from its menus, part of its effort to make school food healthier and help combat childhood obesity. The milk issue has overshadowed other changes in the district's food services division, which serves 650,000 meals a day at 1,000 sites.

In a downtown parking lot sits one of the most impressive things that Jamie Oliver, the chef-activist-TV personality, has brought to Los Angeles for his "Food Revolution" television show: a red-and-khaki-striped big rig tricked out as a traveling cooking school. Even in food truck mad L.A., this behemoth, 70 feet long, stands out. Demonstrations have been held on board for officials, potential donors and others. But last week, the first classes began for young people. At lunchtime, 16 teenagers from the youth development program Inner City Struggle came to cook marinated chicken and chopped salad, which they rolled together in whole-wheat tortillas.

Los Angeles school district officials were wary of a celebrity chef's reality television show precisely because they wanted to avoid the conflict and drama they know the genre can bring. The district said no, yet the conflict and drama still came. Jamie Oliver, the British chef, focused the second season of his ABC television show, "Food Revolution," on Los Angeles public schools. In Tuesday night's premiere, Oliver was a defiant rabble-rouser challenging the superintendent and school board who were stonewalling his mission to bring in healthy food and combat rampant obesity.

"I was just in the Northern California hop fields," says Raymond Sokolov in the genial, musing tone that seems to come naturally to him. "After they gather the hop blossoms, they dry them out on a heated floor. They do batch after batch, and as they go they shovel the dried flowers into a storage room for baling. "And if you fall into that room, you die. You drown in this loose, shifting sea of dried flowers. It's like quicksand, only you're fighting the disorienting aroma of hops as well.

A curious thing about food history is that historians, when they entertain it at all, consider it a quaint diversion. Given humankind's interest in food for nourishment and enjoyment, this lacuna is a surprise. The few extant food histories tend to be uncritical and unsystematic in their approach and characterized by antiquarianism.

Jamie Oliver presses a "happy cow" veggie burger on me with the fervor of a believer handing out religious pamphlets. He asks me whether I love it, but his smile is pure certainty that I will -- and even love him for making it. He's stepped out from the kitchen at Patra's, a Glassell Park drive-through where his crew is taping footage for "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution," a TV show that's not just about healthy food but also about converting skeptics and...

Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef who is beating the drums for a school lunch revolution, received a warm reception this weekend from hundreds of the people who make and serve food to children every day. It's the Los Angeles Unified School District that isn't so welcoming. "I'm going to be honest. I'm actually petrified," Oliver said as he started his keynote address Saturday at the annual meeting of the California School Nutrition Assn. at the Pasadena Convention Center. Perhaps he feared the "lunch ladies" might not be happy to hear from the man who clashed with their colleagues in Huntington, W.Va.