Jamie Oliver is a hit on TV — but it appears he’s still struggling in the school lunchroom where his new show, “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” is set.
The switch to healthy food in the Huntington, W. Va school where Oliver — the energetic 32-year-old British chef — is trying to change eating habits has been a mixed success.
Some kids have stopped buying lunch at the cafeteria, the school reports, and started to bring lunch from home.
“It was probably 50 meals a day for a while,” says Rhonda McCoy, the food services director of Cabell County schools.
“Fifty meals a day is a lot when you’re serving around 400 meals,” she says, adding, “It does look like it’s picking up again.”
Brown bag lunches come in two kinds, of course — healthy and not-so healthy.
“For parents who are conscientious about feeding their students, those are more nutritional,” says Central City Elementary school principal Patrick O’Neal.
“But from lunches I’ve seen, kids bring not one bag of chips but two, and maybe a handful of cookies,” O’Neal said.
And all the kids who do buy Oliver’s lunches are not happy campers.
“I’ve heard reports of these kids going home hungry and parents call and complain — but they don’t want to try the food,” says O’Neal.
Oliver’s new show, which debuted a week and a half ago, has been something of a sensation — thanks to a big push from Oprah and ABC, as well as the unassailable virtue of its message. Who could be against better school lunches for kids?
But it can get more complicated than that, especially for those who have to swallow it.
“At this point, [the kids] seem to reject the food, and that happened when he did this in England,” says Linnekin, a food blogger and lawyer who studies food policy.
“Forty thousand left the lunch rolls in England, a country that’s roughly 20 percent of the US,” he told The Post yesterday. “If you extrapolate from that, that would be like 2 million here.
“I mean, that’s a revolution,” says Baylen Linnekin, who wrote a skeptical article, “Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food Control,” last week for the magazine Reason’s Web site.
“I don’t necessarily think there’s anything inherently wrong with doing what he is, the problem is that he’s putting it on film,” says the blogger.
“As soon as he shuts off the cameras, I’ll believe he’s an activist and not just a showboater.”
So far, Huntington has rolled out Jamie Oliver’s program in 15 of its 26 schools, says McCoy.
But she wishes they had introduced the new foods more slowly, rather than immediately tossing out the pizza and chicken nuggets.
“We’ve noticed if you make a gradual change, children will adapt to it and not really notice you’ve changed things. We sort of did it all at once,” she said.
Still, the TV show is making Huntington famous.
“We’ve been contacted by neighboring states already,” she says. “A few food services directors have toured and they liked it. They asked for some of the recipes.”
Oliver’s show, meanwhile, is one of the unqualified successes of the TV midseason.
After a slow start two weeks ago, the show was seen by 7.5 million viewers last Friday night. It was the best start for a Friday night show on any network in more than two years.