Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize Wish

I follow the great chef Jamie Oliver on twitter (@Jamie_Oliver) and knew he had been award the 2010 TED Prize. He mentioned on his twitter account about it and then linked to his speech after wards. I opened the link in my browser and figured I would back to them.

Last night I could not sleep because I had a few things on my mind. So I noticed that my good friend Justin Thorp(@thorpus) had written on his food blog (Justin Loves Food) an article about Jamie’s prize. It was entitled “Seriously, Watch Jamie Oliver’s TED Talk About Food Education!”.  I read this post and watched Jamie’s TED prize video and the following is the comment I left on his blog.

My Response to Jamie’s TED Prize Talk

The following is my response to reading Justin’s blog post and then watching Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish. I felt so passionately about it I created my own blog post so more people will be able to see it an hopefully help with the problem.

I have been following Jamie Oliver for a few years on his different cooking show and have been a big fan of his style of cooking. I even watched Jamie’s series on how to improve the British school lunch system.

It took a bit of time to get the parents, students, and even the lunch ladies to start realizing that real food was better for the students. Once the students started eating better they paid more attention in classes and improved their grades and all they did was improving their eating habits at school and at home.

While at TEDxMidAtlantic this last fall (2009) there was a great talk by Tony Geraci, who is a “Fresh Food Advocate” for the city of Baltimore. You really need to watch Tony talk passionately about getting kids foods that are good for them. I strongly recommend that you watch his video from TEDxMidAtlantic – http://tedxmidatlantic.com/live/#TonyGeraci

So impressed with Jamie’s idea that I’m up at 3:25 AM after watching his TED wish that I’m writing this comment to make sure I get this out to you and your followers.

I know I have a way to go myself to improving my food habits and health. By starting to do more home cooking myself and bringing my lunch to work that will help me out in the long run. Doing so will improve my health without a lot of extra effort and if I add some exercise it will make it even easier.

P.S. I even listed to Tony’s whole talk while writing this comment. Please take the time to watch both of these powerful videos.

Start with Yourself

Please watch both Jamie’s TED talk and Tony’s TEDxMidAtlantic talk, along with read all the linked articles.

Finally, please start with yourself and spend more time cooking real food as Tony says. This will make you fell better and set a good example for others and even your children if you have any.

I plan on improving my eating habits and if you see me straying please remind me of that fact.

What do you think you can do to help improve this countries obesity problem?

Accessibility DC Meet-up and Other Events

At this months Accessibility DC event (February 16, 2010) Eric Wright (@ewaccess) will be discussing and demoing how to navigate the Web hands free on a PC. He will showcase speech computing software including Dragon Naturally Speaking, KnowBrainer, and Windows Speech Recognition. Eric will talk about what elements are important for ensuring speech accessible HTML, and show some basic HTML tags that will help people talk to your Website.

At the first Accessibility DC event Eric do a short demo of Dragon Naturally Speaking on how to set the software up in just a few minutes. He has a great knowledge of the product and seemed so at ease talking to the crowd while being put on the spot to help us kick-off the meeting.

The next few months it seems we have some cool talks and demos planned or at least almost finalized. Next months talk on Accessible PDFs by Carol Klinger and Dona Patrick, will be not be on third Tuesday of the month, because I will be at SXSW in Austin, TX. Their talk will be on March 23, 2010, starting at 6:30 PM same as other months.

In the last few weeks that has been a lot of talk on Twitter by others that they are  starting the planning process to do their own Accessibility Camp’s in Seattle, WA, Boston, MA, and London, England. Hoping that the ones in Boston and Seattle are not the same weekend so that I can maybe go out to both events

Please make sure to register for this months event and follow @AccessibilityDC or @jfc3 on Twitter for monthly information about the events and other accessibility news.

Hoping to have more information about this falls Accessibility Camp DC in the next few weeks.