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TV review: Jamie Oliver aims to make school lunches more healthful

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In the film “We Are Marshall,” the town of Huntington, W.Va., reels, then regroups after most of Marshall University’s football team is killed in a plane crash. Forty years later, Huntington is at the center of yet another potential turn-around tale. Only this time, rather than a phoenix emerging from the ashes, the image is more of a grilled chicken breast rising from a landfill of deep fryers.

In ‘Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,’ the boyish and preternaturally media-friendly British food guru known for a while as ‘The Naked Chef’ because of his penchant for simple food, comes to Huntington in the hopes of transforming the unhealthiest town -- i.e. the fattest town -- in America. After overhauling the menus for the British school system, and with half a dozen TV shows to his credit, Oliver seems just the man for the job.

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After a brief wrangle with a hostile local radio talk show host, he attempts to slay the dragon of the local school lunch. It’s a brilliant move, narratively speaking. Not only do we meet all the fabulous ‘lunch ladies,’ including one Alice Gue, who I am fairly certain ran my elementary school cafeteria, but we also discover there isn’t a person alive who won’t joyfully bash school cafeteria food. Read more here:

Jamie Oliver trys to transform the way kids look at food on ABC’s ‘Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.’ (Holly Farrell)

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