Jamie Oliver reduced to tears (and so are the Americans as they reject his healthy eating advice)



Jamie Oliver knew it wouldn't be easy changing the eating habits of the unhealthiest city in America.

But he was so shocked by the hostile reaction to his crusade that it reduced him to tears.

The celebrity chef crossed the Atlantic pledging a food revolution in a country where two out of three people are overweight.

It's all too much: Jamie Oliver breaks down in the playground after a confrontation with dinner ladies at a school in Huntington, West Virginia

Heading straight for the clogged-up heart of the problem, he chose a city where schoolchildren are served up pizza and chocolate milk for breakfast.

But there was little appetite in down-at-heel Huntington, West Virginia, for the cheeky-chappie Londoner.

At one point he ended up sitting in a school playground in tears, complaining: 'They don't understand me because they don't know why I'm here.'

Big problem: An American child is given a lesson in healthy cooking by Jamie

The TV show following his efforts didn't go down very well across the rest of the country either.



Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution drew a comparatively modest 6.1million viewers for its network premiere on Sunday night.

The locals in Huntington were already smarting over being branded America's fast food capital by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control.

And, if the first episode of Oliver's stateside reality show is to be believed, they certainly weren't happy about being told what to eat by a foreigner with a funny accent.

His first stop took him to a radio station where the interviewer made him about as welcome as a bowl of cold broccoli.

'We don't want to sit around eating lettuce all day!' said DJ Rod Willis, on the Rocky n' Rod morning show at a country station. 'Who made you king?' he demanded.



While Oliver's efforts to introduce better school meals in the UK met with some success, and led to a trip to Downing Street five years ago, he appears to have a much bigger job on his plate in the U.S..

Poor diet: Mother-of-four Stacie, surrounded by a week's worth of deep fried food, starts to cry as Oliver tells her her cooking will kill her children

He meets the lunch ladies at a Huntington primary school just as they are serving up 'breakfast pizza' smothered in eggs, sausage and cheese to 450 children.



Later, the same canteen lays on a lunch of chicken nuggets and instant mash. 'It's that kind of food that's killing America,' Oliver declares.

'You don't have processed food in England?' snaps back head cook Alice Gue. Oliver is also left incredulous when he holds up tomatoes on a vine to a boy, who thinks they are potatoes.

The next day, Oliver returns to whip up a healthy lunch of roast chicken and wild rice, while the school cooks provide a pepperoni pizza alternative, which proves far more popular.



Tough talking: Mother-of-four Stacie is brought to tears over Oliver's food warning

It didn't help that Oliver was forced to apologise after the local Herald Dispatch newspaper attacked him for being rude about Huntington.

He said of Americans: 'When you meet these people, they are not stupid. They are not ignorant. It's just that they have never had food from scratch in their life.'

Swearing the remarks were taken out of context, Oliver ends the first show in the school playground in tears, upset that he is being judged so harshly.

He also visits a local family who live on fried food and pizzas and reduces the mother to tears by lambasting her diet. 'This is going to kill your children,' he tells the mother of four.



