The West Virginia City That Turned Against Jamie Oliver

Huntington, West Virginia has been hailed as a model of how to get school lunch right. No soggy cardboard pizza or mystery meat here: The school system makes nearly all of its food from scratch with produce that's grown locally. 

Now let's rewind back to 2010. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver — who is known for eating healthy — and his TV crews rolled into town to overhaul the school lunch program for his eponymous show "Food Revolution." Huntington seemed like the right place to do it: A 2008 report from the CDC had just highlighted the city as the unhealthiest in the United States. At that time, its public school food looked to Oliver like a model of how to get school lunch horribly wrong. So, Oliver and company went to work trying to fix it. His team opened a production center downtown where fresh food could be cooked and sent to the schools.

It didn't work. West Virginia University, which studied the results of Oliver's change, found that over 75% of the students were "very unhappy" with Oliver's new menus. There might be some untold truths about Oliver, but one thing was clear as day about his revamp: The new food clocked in with much higher fat and saturated fat rates than the USDA's targets. And in the year following Oliver's visit, school lunch participation dropped 10%, per Highline. Huntington resoundingly rejected the "Food Revolution."

Part of the reason why Huntington and people became so angry with Oliver is that the city's food service team was portrayed on TV as apathetic bureaucrats, but in reality, they were already doing the work Oliver proposed. That's right, when the celebrity chef arrived in town, the county school district was already making half of its food from scratch, a number stubbornly difficult to increase. In fact, most problems that ail struggling food service departments aren't the fault of those departments, but of complicated federal guidelines, limited funding, and corporate lobbying. But that doesn't make for good reality TV.

Huntington didn't give up after Oliver's attempt. Instead, food service director Rhonda McCoy redoubled efforts to improve the food served in schools. Her program (started before the TV show) included buying local produce and expanding no- and low-cost meals. District cooks even reworked Oliver's recipes to be more appealing to students. All the while, McCoy worked to secure extra funding through grants and anywhere else that was available.

In 2011, the district food service team began training eight other school districts in the state on cooking fresh food. That fall, those districts all introduced new, fully scratch-made menus. Though McCoy no longer runs the food service program in Huntington, her legacy still lives on today in the form of Salisbury steak and chili con carne — homemade with locally raised beef, of course.