There's something about Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, the new ABC reality series launching Friday night at 8 ET, that comes as a total surprise. For a program about the dangers and proliferation of disgusting processed foods, it's shockingly easy to swallow. In fact, this has the makings of one tasty reality show...
Oliver, a British celebrity chef, hammered out the template for his new series in Food Revolution, a program produced and presented in his native England earlier this year. The idea was simple: try to reverse decades of bad habits, and bad food, by introducing healthier cuisine into a single school system. And it worked there, so why not transplant both the series concept, and the host, to the United States?
That emigration, after all, worked brilliantly for Gordon Ramsay and his Kitchen Nightmares, where his attack-and-revamp approach to failing restaurants has proven to work just as well on either side of the Atlantic. So why not Oliver? Why not OUR schools, and OUR kids?
Why not, indeed?
For the opening target of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, this ABC production descends upon Huntington, W. Va. -- a city hardly chosen at random. Statistically, based on disease and death rates and dietary information, Huntington is the least healthy city in the United States. So Oliver decides to start here, in the worst of the worst.
The added bonus, of course, is the backwoods vs. British, city vs. country conflicts that are set up automatically. But Oliver, unlike Ramsay, doesn't descend with snarly attitude and sharp insults. His targets aren't the parents, or the "lunch ladies," or even the administrators. It's the system, which he intends to change from the bottom up.
He's given one week to effect a measurable, positive change at one Huntington grade school, using the lunch ladies as both his assistants and his control group. Round one, for example, gives the elementary school kids an option: They can try Oliver's roast chicken and wild rice, made fresh, or they can go with the familiar, highly processed pepperoni pizza. Which meal do the kids prefer?
Elementary, my dear Watson. Both the school, and the result.
But this only makes Oliver more determined to make a change, this time by soliciting the input and cooperation of the students and parents. He attacks one on one -- making one mother's kitchen table groan under the weight of the junk she feeds her kids -- and also en masse, holding rallies that make the same disgusting point on a grand scale.
It's good television... and good FOR you, too. Do with the show what Oliver is asking the kids to do with their food: Take a taste.
Try it, you'll like it...