Excuse us while we uncurl our toes, we’ve got to tell you about Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Day because, well, if we don’t pass it on then we’ll have to suffer having his charity song on loop in our head. Forever.
Jamie, much better known for making nice meals, teamed up with Ed Sheeran, Hugh Jackman, Professor Green, Sir Paul McCartney (absolute king of cringe), Jazzie B, Jamie Cullum and Alesha Dixon (whose rapping voice has sadly been missing from the world of music since Mis-teeq’s reign around the top 10) and a children’s choir to make a pretty good charity record. Check it out here:
We said it’s a ‘good’ charity record, because, actually, despite Simon Cowell and Bono’s best efforts to make charity songs so WORTHY and EARNEST, a charity record doesn’t need to be an actual good song to get people signing up to its cause.
Jamie and co, who rap things like ‘feed the kids right through their stomach and minds’ and ‘when you wake up first thing that you do, make yourself a promise that you eat better food’ know that it’s more embarrassing than being that person who once did a poo in a sink at a houseparty, but they don’t want you to buy the bloody song.
It’s just there for you to grab your attention so you sign the petition they’re rapping about.
What’s the petition, you ask? Well, it’s to lobby G20 governments (those are like, the biggest, richest countries in the world) to make food education compulsory – because there’s a global obesity epidemic, with 42 million children under five either overweight or obese.
And the petition has got 1.2 million signatures at the time of writing this.
Yes, the song redefines ‘embarassing’, and is frustratingly stuck on loop in our heads right now. But what’s valuable about Chris Martin and Olly Murs pulling ‘mmm, we care’ faces and Liam Payne pretending to look sad? One of the best charity moments of our lifetimes was David and Victoria Beckham being interviewed by Ali G (despite his problematic intro), where we saw two ultra-famous celebrities let down the whole earnest façade and simply embarrass themselves for a more important cause.
Though programmes like I’m A Celebrity – where just-about-famouses do gross things for money that never gets to charity – have skewed our expectations of why celebrities would ever embarrass themselves, Jamie’s video redresses the balance.
If this food revolution’s worth a celebrity taking their sunglasses off/losing all their chill/looking like a dweeb, all for free, it’s probably a worthy cause.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.