Pizza-gobblers have superchef in tears

He swaggered into town with a can-do attitude, a cheeky-chappie smile and a burning desire to help the world's fattest schoolchildren.

But less than an hour later, the impertinent English superchef was being reduced to tears as hostile locals told him to lay off their beloved nuggets, pizza, and chocolate milkshakes.

Jamie Oliver crossed the Atlantic on Monday, hoping to administer the sort of wake-up call that five years ago saw him invited to Downing St to explain what Britain's school canteens should do with their Turkey Twizzlers.

But like many a British star before him, he found America a tough nut to crack.

He rolled into Huntington, West Virginia, to launch the ABC series Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, a hybrid version of the TV series in which he has attempted to educate people about the virtues of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Bringing that message to Huntington proved a challenge: it was named by the Centres for Disease Control as the least healthy city in the least healthy state of America, the most overweight nation in the developed world.

At the local talk radio station, the "shock jock" told him to take the busybody act elsewhere: "We don't want to sit around eating lettuce all day! Who made you king?"

Complaining that he "thought miserable bastards like that only existed in England", Oliver adjourned to the local school, where children were tucking into their daily breakfast: pizza and chocolate milk.

"I have never seen pizza served for breakfast," he said, shocked.

Oliver then watched aghast as ladies whipped up a lunch of chicken nuggets and reconstituted "pearls" of processed potato. "It's that kind of food that's killing America," he announced.

Oliver met the morbidly obese wife and children of a truck driver whose entire diet consisted of fried, re-fried, deep-fried and microwavable junk.

"This is going to kill your kids," he declared. The mother duly broke down in tears.

If there's one thing middle America hates it's being lectured to by sniffy foreigners. And the tense atmosphere in Huntington reached boiling point when a newspaper quoted Oliver suggesting his host country's obesity epidemic might be due to ignorance.

True? Maybe. Oliver was promptly forced to issue a grovelling apology.

"They don't understand me," he tearfully declared, "they don't know why I'm here!"

A (rotund) Huntington councillor, Brandi Jacobs-Jones, complained to CNN: "People think we're all morbidly obese, walking around eating pizza.

"We have 5K [runs] every weekend ... We have our teeth. We have master's degrees."

- INDEPENDENT