Ask Not What You Can Eat for Your Country

When I last checked in with Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution in Huntington, West Virginia, he was running into a brick wall, in particular a battle ax of a woman who seemed determined to batter him with lard and deep fry him in the roiling oil to serve to schoolchildren.

It turns out that once the cameras left town Oliver's "nemesis", Rhonda McCoy, pulled an about-face, and has done a pretty fucking stunning job in turning around kid's school lunches in what was the nation's fattest city:

Over the last two years, Rhonda McCoy—the school food service director who was portrayed on the show as an aloof bureaucrat more concerned with budgets and caloric counts than kids' health—has redeveloped recipes, held after-hours taste tests, sourced fresh and unprocessed ingredients at affordable prices, bought new equipment and trained school cooks. She also endured an unprecedented four regulatory audits to ensure that the new meals met federal nutritional and caloric standards. She passed. 

McCoy hasn't stopped there. This year, she introduced free meals for all low-income students and free meals for all students at one county elementary school. She also plans to introduce lower-sugar flavored milk, and to buy a projected 12,000 pounds of sweet potatoes for the district, grown by a county high school's vocational agriculture students. 

Now, deservedly, McCoy's county is a model in the state. Last spring, Dr. Jorea Marple, the state schools superintendent, visited Cabell County and decided that other districts need to follow its path. As a result, eight counties—most of which are in the poor, southern coal fields— this fall will introduce 100 percent from-scratch meals at breakfast and lunch – and provide them to all students, regardless of their family's income, free of charge.

Notwithstanding the fact that such a thing would make you-know-who shit herself with anger, it's too bad that both McCoy and Jamie Oliver aren't getting enough attention for this, particularly since on the very day this article comes out, a study informs us that by 2030 exactly half of all Americans not only will be fat, but obese.  And yes, you're right in asking "it's gonna take THAT long?"

Amidst all the faux-hysteria-meets-gridlock over the debt, or the deficit, or any of the endless wars we're fighting, it's hard to climb over our collective ennui and dream of something huge (bad timing with that word, I know) we can undertake as a country, and while it doesn't have the sexiness of "let's put a man on the moon by the end of the decade," a rallying cry of "let's NOT all be obese by 2030" to me sounds like an amazing thing to actually pull off, and people like Jamie Oliver and Rhonda McCoy should be seen as heroes for their efforts towards this goal.  Also, don't forget the Lunch Project! Healthier Americans mean more productive Americans, which means more Americans spending more and more $crillah.