Jamie's Food Revolution off to rocky start in LA

Jamie's Food Revolution off to rocky start in LA
Jamie's Food Revolution off to rocky start in LA (Image credit: Contract Number (Programme))

Jamie Oliver's second US series of shows in which he tries to improve the country's eating habits has started badly, with trouble filming in Los Angeles. Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution started poorly when a city school district banned his cameras. The Los Angeles Unified School District, which said it had a bad experience with an unrelated show, reportedly treated the celebrity chef as if he was a cast member of US reality show Jersey Shore. "I think we swam into a minefield. I'm really disappointed that I couldn't get in there at all. I'm disappointed that as public servants, they feel they have the right to not be transparent," he said. But the trouble was not just with school officials. There are signs in the first episode, which airs on the ABC channel in the US next week, that the people of Los Angeles are not embracing Jamie's revolution either. Only a modest crowd came out to watch the chef fill a school bus with a week's worth of the sugar added to the flavoured milk served in LA schools (actually 57 tons of white sand). Jamie dejectedly tells the camera: "This is cold-shoulder stuff." But he's not been put off by the snub, saying: "You only have to affect two per cent of the population to make radical change and that's what we're talking about, really." Jamie had better luck in West Virginia, where he was allowed into schools in Huntington, but he still had to tangle with reluctant school officials and children who preferred pizza and chicken nuggets to his fresh-made coleslaw. He said: "The dream was to do what we did. And eventually we pulled off everything we wanted to pull off. "In LA, you know, it's a completely different kettle of fish. I was banned from every school before I even touched down on the airport."

Patrick McLennan

Patrick McLennan is a London-based journalist and documentary maker who has worked as a writer, sub-editor, digital editor and TV producer in the UK and New Zealand. His CV includes spells as a news producer at the BBC and TVNZ, as well as web editor for Time Inc UK. He has produced TV news and entertainment features on personalities as diverse as Nick Cave, Tom Hardy, Clive James, Jodie Marsh and Kevin Bacon and he co-produced and directed The Ponds, which has screened in UK cinemas, BBC Four and is currently available on Netflix. 


An entertainment writer with a diverse taste in TV and film, he lists Seinfeld, The Sopranos, The Chase, The Thick of It and Detectorists among his favourite shows, but steers well clear of most sci-fi.