No thanks, Jamie

EVERY self-respecting school chef in America these days yearns for a food revolution. After all, the consequences of all that junk food are everywhere: fat and unhealthy children who become even fatter and unhealthier adults. If present trends continue, says the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, one in three American adults could have diabetes by 2050.

This is why, in the winter of 2009 Huntington, West Virginia, a place ranked as America's fattest town at the time, welcomed Britain's famous Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver, into its school district. Mr Oliver brought his camera team and turned the ensuing food education into a reality-television series—called Food Revolution, of course. In a nutshell, Mr Oliver, with his cheeky Essex accent and urbanely messy hair, stars as the British saviour of fat and benighted West Virginians who must be got off pizzas, fries and burgers and onto grains and veggies.

For the second season of Food Revolution, Mr Oliver was planning to do the same in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), America's second largest. So he and his family moved to Los Angeles. Apparently to his surprise, the LAUSD has so far told him to get lost.

Why? Robert Alaniz, a spokesman for the LAUSD, gets strangely worked up as he enumerates the reasons. For starters, the district has had bad experiences with reality-TV shows. But the main problem, it seems, is Mr Oliver himself. The folks down in Huntington are contractually barred from talking, but have apparently hinted to the LAUSD that it may need to watch its bottom line.

Anybody can show up and make beautiful Caesar salads, says Mr Alaniz, but Mr Oliver must prove that he can cook good food for their schoolchildren on a budget of 77 cents a serving, buying all his ingredients from approved vendors. California is in the middle of a full-fledged budget crisis, after all. More generally, Mr Alaniz says, the district has already cut down on trans-fats, sugar and junk. A food revolution is well under way, he says, even without cool Brits in charge. Mr Oliver may have to take his cameras and cooking lessons to some other school district, or into the private kitchens of willing, and suitably fat, Californians.