‘QUICK TO COOK AND EASY TO REMEMBER’
Jamie Oliver looks at fundamentals in new book
In 5 Ingredients: Quick & Easy Food, Jamie Oliver takes home cooking back to basics. Each of the more than 130 recipes relies on just five core ingredients (plus basic pantry staples such as olive oil and sea salt). After all, a lengthy ingredient list can be a powerful disincentive, and Oliver wants to lure people into the kitchen.
“I’m kind of embarrassed it’s taken me 20 years to actually work out that probably, possibly, this is one of the biggest reasons as to whether the modern-day person decides to get a take-away, reheats something from a jar, gets a pizza or cooks something,” Oliver says.
It’s been nearly two decades since he debuted as The Naked Chef and more than 12 years since he started advocating for healthful meals in his documentary series Jamie’s School Dinners. Oliver emphasizes that the question of how to get more people to enjoy cooking is still what motivates him to go to work every day.
“It’s about opportunity. It’s about a child’s human rights,” Oliver says. “If one in three Canadian kids is overweight or obese, should it be a child’s human right therefore that they learn how to cook and the life skills of cooking and where food comes from?”
Last year, Oliver met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to discuss child health issues including a tax on sugary drinks, junk-food marketing to kids and the importance of food education in schools. Recently, he wrote an opinion piece for the Globe and Mail calling on more Canadians to support the push for a soda tax.
“The one thing that we know is that whether it’s America or Canada or the U.K., we cannot afford the cost of obesity. We cannot afford the cost of Type 2 diabetes. We cannot afford the absenteeism created from those things, and the lack of productivity,” Oliver says.
“We’re working quite a lot with the Canadian government to try and get certain bills through … and collaborate on certain strategies that we know work within food education and kids and supporting pregnant women ... It’s
an important time right now.”