Jamie’s Food Revolution: Huntington Schools 2 Years Later Gilt Taste
Oh yeah, what ever did happen to that school in Huntington, West Virginia where Jamie Oliver tried to overhaul the student lunches? The story, as told in a recent article on Gilt Taste, will warm even the most skeptical and embittered of hearts.
As Jane Black says in her Gilt Taste article, “Times have changed” since Jamie Oliver first rolled into Huntington and started working on Food Revolution. In short, the school made it work.
The lunch room is serving a daily menu of from-scratch meals like chicken quesadillas, brown rice, and a stromboli that Black says she could barely keep from scarfing down whole. These lunches are being used as a model for schools in eight other West Virginia counties. Cooks in those lunch rooms will receive binders of recipes and training to help get them on their feet – with a lot less drama and bureaucratic headache than Huntington suffered.
The biggest surprise are the main players. Rhonda McCoy, who Black points out came off looking like “an aloof bureaucrat” in the TV show, has worked to push these changes through the system and make them work within federal nutrition and cost standards. And that huffy lunch cook Alice Gue, who butted heads with Jamie Oliver, is now one of the people training cooks in the new school districts.
We don’t hear a lot of good news about the school lunch system these days. Knowing that this one school district has made it work is definitely cause for some celebration.
Don’t you think so?
• Read the Article: The Triumph of Jamie Oliver’s Nemesis by Jane Black on Gilt Taste
(Image: Jedd Flowers / Cabell County Schools via Gilt Taste)