Delia’s day on a plate
Melbourne chef Shane Delia has a new series Recipe For Life which looks at his world outside the kitchen and in his community. He tells DANIELLE McGRANE why he made the show.
Delia: “The main drive of the show is that it’s about health in the broader spectrum … but health in the way of having a balanced lifestyle where you’ve got time to laugh and talk and you find time to eat.”
So how did the show come together?
I’ve got a very good relationship with the production company Essential Media who have been my producers from day dot and they’ve come to me a few times and asked, “What’s happening in your world this week?”. We started talking and they thought we could put together a series that shows people all the things I’m involved with. I was a bit reluctant at first, I’m not Jamie Oliver and I’m not trying to change people’s eating habits and I don’t want to criticise others, but as we started talking I agreed to it.
Did you essentially put your life on screen?
Yeah, pretty much. It follows me for about a two-year span, you watch my daughter turn from a six-year-old girl into an eight-year-old girl. It shows the things we do and the community we work with, me under pressure and opening businesses. I think what’s been good is that it shows you can still find that balance if you want to and that balance doesn’t mean finishing work at 5pm and sitting in front of the TV for a few hours and going to bed, that’s not balance. You can work 23 hours in the day and still find a sense of contentment and balance.
Do you do any cooking in the show?
There is a recipe or two in each episode but it’s in context with what we’re talking about. I may be working with some kids in the Feed the Mind program, I work with kids in high school and I may have had lunch earlier made by some refugees in another community I work in, so I’ll build a recipe around that for the high school kids. It’s about the communities that surround me and I try to create something with that.
What’s the show’s overall purpose?
I think that the main drive of the show is that it’s about health in the broader spectrum, not just about getting your heart rate up or eating low carbs and low sugar, but health in the way of having a balanced lifestyle where you’ve got time to laugh and talk and you find time to eat. And you make smarter choices about what you eat.
You can have a burger or a kebab or whatever, but as a part of a balanced week and it’s at the end of the week where you ran 5km as opposed to having it at 9pm on a Monday night after you drank six stubbies and went to bed. It’s just about being a bit smarter. You can have it all, just balance it out a bit.
If you didn’t create this show to change people’s habits then what is the intention behind it?
It’s just to get people thinking about it, I think it has to start somewhere. I just want people to think a little bit about what they do, that’s a big change. And it’s the first step, acknowledge it.
Did you get used to having the cameras follow you around?
It gets a bit annoying, especially because I’m not a television presenter, I’m a businessman. So it can get a little bit annoying when you’re trying to plan your work but I tried to understand it from the perspective of the production team. They want to capture everything, they want to capture the real stuff. It’s kind of nice now the show is done because I’ve got my life back.
Delia’s Recipe For Life
Thursday, 8.05pm on SBS