By Arun Gupta
After two months, kids hated the new meals, milk consumption plummeted, and many students dropped out of the school lunch program altogether.
You’ve never seen a school lunch like this one, made with hydroponic vegetables and free-range chicken by a brash British superchef. Not that the elementary schoolchildren care. Most sing-song “Pizza!” when given a choice between the gourmet grub and the reheated factory-made frozen pizza. At the end of the lunch period, a mound of chicken sits untouched, and even more is dumped into the trash after a few wary nibbles.
That much we do know from watching Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” reality TV series now airing on ABC. But we’re not supposed to know that Jamie is substituting high-end foodstuffs that normally grace three-star restaurants for the cheap, institutional fare dished out in public schools like West Virginia’s Central City Elementary School, the setting for the first two episodes.