By West Virginia standards, Michael Alonso is not large — but he’s working on it. At 6.52pm on Thursday he lowered his head for his first bite of a Home Wrecker hot dog; 12 inches long and nearly six inches wide, and weighing a chunky 1.3kg (3lb). If he ate it in 12 minutes he would get a free T-shirt and his picture among hundreds of others on the walls of Hillbilly Hotdogs.
Huntington, West Virginia, is a neat town on the south bank of the Ohio River with a famous college football team, a quiet talent for self-parody and the unofficial but still unwelcome title of the Fattest City in America.
Two months ago Jamie Oliver came here and cooked a Home Wrecker. He also built a Bubba’s Big Bad Double-Wide Burger, made with almost 5kg of minced beef and half as much again of toppings — price $49.99. The footage will be broadcast in the US in February as part of a reality TV series billed as Oliver’s attempt to do for the American diet what his supporters say he has done for Britain’s.
Not everyone was happy about being told they didn’t know what to eat or how to cook. Informal casting calls for families hoping to appear in the series were turned into “forums for people to come and rant and vent”, according to one of Oliver’s staff. A community leader begged him to show the town a little more respect after he told Sky News that what he had seen in Huntington made his hair stand on end. “People at Hillbilly’s said they found him stand-offish, snobbish and rude,” said Edward Carbajal, who served him and who says his film crew tried to leave without paying the bill.
Six weeks on, in a modest triumph of hope and spinach over adversity and bacon fat, Oliver is winning converts. As in Greenwich, so in Huntington: he has enlisted schools, church groups and doctors to the cause of dietary revolution and persuaded at least some critics that his heart is in the right place. “If by going to these schools he does get something started, then God bless him,” said Kenny McLain, who turned down the chance to appear in the TV series because he “didn’t want to look like an idiot”.
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The Governor of West Virginia has made Oliver an honorary West Virginian, and Pastor Steve Willis, of the First Baptist Church of Huntington, has called him a godsend — literally. “He arrived just when I had realised we needed to focus on our diet, which is out of hand,” Pastor Willis said. “The timing was perfect. I believe it was the work of the Lord.”
Heaven knows the area needed help. A year ago Christina Cook, 19 and weighing 22 stone, was put on a ventilator in an intensive care unit, having suffered heart failure. “They said, ‘you either put her on a diet or you lose her’,” her mother, Angie, said. With the help of James Bailes, a paediatrician who has met Oliver several times and found him “very genuine”, Angie has put her daughter on a low-carb diet — and put a lock on the fridge. Christina has since lost 133lb.
In Huntingdon, 34 per cent of the population is clinically obese and Dr Bailes often sees children aged 4 or 5 who weigh twice what they should. Obesity costs the US $150 billion (£90 billion) a year. It is bringing down the starting age of what used to be called late-onset type 2 diabetes to as young as 8, according to the American Heart Association.
Huntington hosts two large hospitals, which are the city’s biggest employers and world leaders in the treatment of obesity. It also hosts Jamie’s Kitchen, a television studio now morphing into a non-profit “cooking education centre”, directly opposite a Five Guys burger joint and a brand new Benny’s Cheesesteak outlet. It offers free lessons in cooking and shopping, with volunteers available to guide people to unfamiliar sections of the supermarket.
On Thursday Pamela Preston and five other well-dressed women took a cooking class with a local Oliver prot?g?. They made boiled potatoes and red cabbage with bacon, and ate it with some wilted spinach and garlic prepared by the chef. Pamela was thrilled. “For 40 years I’ve cooked chicken and potatoes, beef roast and potatoes, pork tenderloin and potatoes,” she said. “I’d like to find something easier and healthier. This is it.”
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The notion that an Essex boy could upend centuries of culinary tradition based on “a cup of bacon grease with every dish”, as Kenny McLain describes it, still seems far-fetched. “We have a generation in their late twenties and early thirties who have never made a meal,” said Stacy McChesney, who runs the kitchen. She blames long commutes, a chronic shortage of time and a regional crisis of selfesteem when the coal-based local economy collapsed in the 1970s.
Mr McLain lived through that time, working in pizza restaurants and expanding to 36 stone and a 72-inch waist. “I was bigger around than I was tall,” he said. “That’s how God lets you know it’s time to slim down.”
He was mortified when a tabloid anointed him leader of an anti-Oliver resistance movement, and regrets not taking part in the TV series. “I’d like a chance to look Jamie in the eye and say: ‘Sorry — I’m not leading a revolt against you’,” he said.
Oliver was in town last week and will be back next week, but whether the country that put men on the Moon can learn to eat better will depend ultimately on its own food missionaries. Michelle Obama, with her White House kitchen garden, is one.
Julia Cotts, of the Episcopal School in Los Angeles, who runs a sustainable school food programme intended as a model for greater Los Angeles, is another. Most American school food “is just a substance with calories,” she says. “It’s not food, and the tragedy is that it keeps kids from getting excited about food — but a student who’s watched red and orange eggplant grow from seed can’t wait to eat it.”
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Back in Hillbilly Hotdogs, Michael Alonso has eaten half his Home Wrecker in 3½ minutes. At 5½ he says he thinks he’s going to “go to sweats”. At 8 minutes he looks about to vomit. At 11 he clears his plate and heads out, to rousing applause, for some antacid pills.
The manager looks on. Is he going to change anything about his menu?
“I don’t think so,” he smiles.
JAMIE OLIVER CV
1975 Jamie Oliver is born in Essex. As a child he works in his father’s pub-restaurant, The Cricketers in Clavering
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1991 Studies at Westminster Catering College
1994 Pastry chef at Neal Street Restaurant under Antonio Carluccio
1996 Sous chef at River Caf? with Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers
1998 Spotted by television producers when he appears in documentary about the River Caf?
2000 Stars in The Naked Chef, zipping around London on a scooter and hosting parties for his friends, frequently describing foodstuffs as “pukka”. An accompanying book becomes a bestseller. Marries Juliette “Jools” Norton, with whom he now has three children — Poppy, Daisy and Petal
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2001-02 Return of the Naked Chef and Happy Days with the Naked Chef cement his status as a household name
2002 Starts the Jamie’s Kitchen project, in which he mentors 15 unemployed or homeless young people to become chefs in his new restaurant, Fifteen. There are now four Fifteen restaurants around the world
2003 Appointed MBE; ranks 28th in Channel 4’s “100 Worst Britons” poll
2005 Launches Jamie’s School Dinners in which he works with school dinner ladies to make nutritious meals in bulk on tiny budgets. Some schools face a backlash, with parents delivering burgers to their children through the school gates
2008 Nintendo video game What’s Cooking? Jamie Oliver is released, to mixed reviews; lobbies ordinary people to cook healthily in Jamie’s Ministry of Food
2009 Invited to cook for Barack Obama and other world leaders at G20 meeting in London Sources: JamieOliver.com, Times database