It's happy-ending time for Huntington, W.Va.: Six-year-olds can now distinguish between tomatoes and potatoes. Cooks are tossing apple-cucumber salads with honey dressing for the lunch line. College students and parents are learning to make omelets and soups in free cooking classes. And Jamie Oliver, the crusading British chef who arrived last fall to help change habits in "the unhealthiest town in America," has apparently won the hearts, minds — and stomachs — of the locals.
With the finale of his ABC program this Friday, "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" has officially been televised. But can the six-part, prime-time series help a real revolution take root?
"Reality TV . . . it's like junk food, really. It's a quick fix and it usually has zero depth and it ain't going to help you much in life," the 34-year-old chef said in an interview at Dulles International Airport, where he was en route to London after his final day of filming in West Virginia last week. "But the TV route is so important in this country. TV to this very day is the most important communicator of everything."
As far as Huntington is concerned, Oliver appears to be right. Anyone who has watched the show knows that town officials, parents and students were initially skeptical about Oliver's project. West Virginia, a poor, rural state, is already the butt of too many national jokes, as the locals see it, and they feared they would once again be singled out for ridicule. But residents now say they have embraced Oliver's message. The public schools have made permanent many of the celebrity chef's recommendations. By June, most of the processed food in the district schools will be gone, replaced by Oliver's from-scratch menus, which include dishes such as barbecued chicken and brown rice with carrots, raisins and orange dressing. (Spoiler alert: According to one local official, even Oliver's TV kitchen nemesis, Alice Gue, now "is the number-one proponent" of from-scratch cooking.)
In the broader community, the growing interest in healthful eating has helped spur investors to open a grocery store in the once-down-and-out city center, advocates to form a state food council, and residents to pack a new restaurant, Huntington Prime, that sources its ingredients locally. "There were already things going on. What's happened is that a lot of those things have gained momentum," said Phoebe Patton Randolph, an architect and president of the board of Create Huntington, a nonprofit community group.
Oliver has made notable progress. But the hard work, compromises and setbacks continue after the cameras have disappeared.
The flavored milk that Oliver reviles and banned from the lunch line because it contains four teaspoons of sugar per serving is back, thanks to a ruling from the West Virginia Department of Education's Office of Child Nutrition. (Sugar was deemed a lesser evil than the possibility that students would miss out on the nutrients that milk provides.) And though the goal was to rid school kitchens of all processed foods, some will remain. This year, the source is a freezer full of chicken nuggets, pizza and other items that were ordered long before filming began and must be used up. But there will be more next year, too. Like many school districts, Cabell County, where the program was set, relies on donated foods from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which does not offer many fresh ingredients. To break even, the district will have to use some processed and canned products, said Rhonda McCoy, director of food services.
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