Oliver unbowed after "Food Revolution" snags in LA

NEW YORK — Turns out Jamie Oliver's revolution won't be televised — at least not from Los Angeles school kitchens.

The second season of the crusading Brit's healthy eating reality show, "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution," started poorly when the city school district barred his cameras, a serious snag for a program that focuses on school lunches. The Los Angeles Unified School District, which previously had a bad experience with an unrelated reality show, more or less treated Oliver as if he was a cast member of "Jersey Shore."

"I think we swam into a minefield," Oliver told The Associated Press this week. "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."

But the trouble didn't end with school officials. There are signs in the first episode (airing on ABC on Tuesday, April 12) that the people of Los Angeles — the city where Fatburger was founded — aren't fully embracing the revolution either. Only a modest crowd comes out to watch Oliver fill a school bus with a week's worth of the sugar added to the flavored milk served in L.A. schools (actually 57 tons of white sand).

Oliver dejectedly tells the camera: "This is cold-shoulder stuff."

So did L.A. prove too much for the chef? Hardly.

Oliver remains focused on the multi-national healthy food campaign that has consumed him for more than five years. During an interview shoe-horned between a late-arriving flight from London and an appearance on David Letterman's show, the father of four was passionate and ticked off as he talked about the lousy food fed to too many school children and politicians too short-sighted to tackle the problem.

"You only have to affect 2 percent of the population to make radical change," Oliver said, "and that's what we're talking about, really."

In a TV landscape cluttered with sudden-death cook-offs and flamboyant chefs, Oliver's latest show has an unusual recipe for success — asking strangers to do what's good for them.

For the second season of "Food Revolution," that entails Oliver jousting with school bureaucrats, trying to help parents and kids make better choices and lobbying for healthier food at a local hamburger joint. It's not easy. In one scene, the fast-food operator goes wide-eyed when Oliver suggests he make burgers with grass-fed, black angus beef that costs $1.30 per 6-ounce patty (Oliver said he eventually was able to get the price down to 65 cents).