This Side of the Mountain: The Naked Chef in West Virginia

The news in the spring of 2010 was dominated by the worst coal mine disaster in decades at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia and in the summer of 2010 by the worst oil spill ever in the Gulf of Mexico. There is a strong connection between these sad events and many other dimensions of our society, particularly in this region.

In March and April, 2010, "The Jamie Oliver Food Revolution" was featured on abc-tv as a prime-time show set in Huntington, West Virginia. This improbable "reality tv" mini-series centered around an attempt by "the naked chef" to transform Huntington from its designation as America's fattest city to the city with the world's healthiest eating habits.

Jamie Oliver is one of Great Britain's best-known celebrities, a tireless advocate of eating fresh, local, organic food as opposed to "junk food." His sobriquet, "the naked chef," was created by Patricia Llewellyn, a British television producer, in 1998 for the name of a tv show starring Oliver. It refers to the simplicity of his recipes and has nothing to do with nudity. Oliver was born in 1975 in Clavering in the British province of Essex, the son of the owner of a pub called The Cricketers. He left school at the age of sixteen but attended cooking school and then worked in several restaurants before he was chosen to appear on television. As a result of the success of that show, his cookbook, using the same name, became a British best seller. In 2000, Oliver married the former model, Jools Norton. That same year he signed a two-million-dollar endorsement deal with a British supermarket chain. In 2002 he launched a campaign to rehabilitate ex-convicts and ex-addicts by providing jobs for them in the restaurant business. This has resulted in the establishment of a successful multinational restaurant chain. In 2005 he initiated a campaign to reform school lunches in England. He is the author of fourteen books and has been involved in almost twenty television programs that have been shown in forty countries. Jamie Oliver and his wife have three girls, Poppy Honey Rosie, Daisy Boo Pamela, and Petal Blossom Rainbow, and they are expecting again in September of this year.

Needless to say, when this foreigner appeared in Huntington vowing to start a revolution, he was greeted with some skepticism by many—including principally both those who had been working for healthier food habits in Huntington for years and those with an interest in the status quo. But Jamie Oliver is a master media manipulator, and he pulled off some really clever major coups. In the first place, his reaction to opposition was to see it as opportunity. He seized upon negative comments made by a popular local radio talk-show host and used this conflict to stir controversy and thus publicity. When he took the radio personality to a local funeral home to show him the caskets they made for the morbidly obese, Jamie Oliver had a convert.

The challenge to teach a thousand Huntington area residents to cook healthy food was a wonderful publicity gimmick, and then Oliver's brilliance shone brightly when he needed to enlist Marshall University students. He started by organizing the campus dance team and used them to attract attention to his campaign by performing on the campus commons.

Those of us who are seeking to change policy and practice, not only in agriculture and the food industry, but in other dimensions of society, have much to learn from this innovative organizer. Oliver made a lot of progress in many areas, but it turned out that his greatest enemy was not the ordinary people of Huntington, or its ruling elite. West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin even fixed "slow food" on his show. The biggest barrier to progress was the United States Department of Agriculture's guidelines for school lunches.

The common thread in the story of Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine explosion, British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig explosion and subsequent leak, the persistence of...