Jamie Oliver

Every year the TED Conference awards at least one of its speakers a "TED PRIZE" to "an exceptional individual who receives $100,000 and, much more important, "One Wish to Change the World." Designed to leverage the TED community's exceptional array of talent and resources, the Prize leads to collaborative initiatives with far-reaching impact." This years recipient was Jamie Oliver, and this week he revealed his wish to the world.

I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

He speaks passionately about the need to educate children and parents about food. Repeating the haunting mantra expressed by so many other nutrition experts - that we have welcomed in a generation of children whose life span is less than their parents - he implores people to accept the reality of the situation and, even more important, accept the responsibility of it as well. He talks about obesity and bad health as a very serious and deadly epidemic (with diet-related diseases sporting a higher death toll than all other leading causes of death combined). Yet, unlike AIDS or Cancer, it is not only completely preventable, it is reversible as well. He presents simple facts and necessary solutions. Don't listen to me summarize - check it out for yourself in the video above.

Jamie Oliver is a celebrity chef who worked to revolutionize food in the British school system by launching a campaign entitled "Feed Me Better" and now has his sites set on America with an upcoming reality show "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" on ABC, where he takes on the fattest city in the nation, Huntington, West Virginia, in hopes of turning around their eating habits.

I am happy to see him gaining attention and finding a way to bring this topic into mainstream media outlets. Its truly embarrassing what we feed kids in schools, and our justifications for it just don't hold up.

His talk got me to thinking and I realized that most of the issues I feel passionate about, with regard to food, stem from us as a global culture distancing ourselves from food. We distance ourselves from the unpleasantries of factory farming, we distances ourselves from the environmental strain of large scale agriculture, we distance ourselves from knowledge about where our food comes from - we don't properly understand its nutritional value, and often times eat things that contain ingredients we know absolutely nothing about. We distance ourselves from the responsibility all these revelations entail. When we are not properly educated we are helpless. Below is a list of a couple of things Oliver outlined in his talk to help the US get back on track.

• Every child in the U.S. should learn to cook 10 meals before leaving high school.
• Supermarkets should appoint "food ambassadors" to explain to customers how they can prepare local, fresh and seasonal foods.
• Food companies should make education a central part of their business.
• Food labeling should be improved to accurately warn people about unhealthy food. In his video he calls America's current food-labeling system a "farce."