UNITED FLAVOURS OF JAMIE
Sue de Groot spoke to Jamie Oliver about his global crusade for healthy cooking and eating
In conversation with the all-conquering chef
‘IT’S absolutely pissing with rain here,” says Jamie Oliver on the phone from London. He’s in a car, being driven from one meeting to another and working, as always, in between.
Oliver doesn’t sound like the head of a massive global empire. He sounds like someone you’d meet down the pub, all casual and relaxed and matey, his conversation liberally peppered with “like” and “sor’of” and “d’youknowwhatimean”.
Anyone who has seen Jamie Oliver on TV (and who has not seen Jamie Oliver on TV?) will be familiar with his expressive speech patterns and his irrepressible energy. It is difficult to imagine him downcast or cynical or apathetic. Possibly because he never is.
Oliver approaches everything with the enthusiasm of a small boy in frog spawn, whether it’s a new book, TV series, restaurant or child, campaigning against obesity, lobbying for a sugar tax, slaughtering a lamb on camera or studying for a master’s in nutrition (yes, he’s doing that too).
Today he brims with glottal-stopping excitement about his latest book, Super
Food Family Classics. Detractors love to claim that celebrities who run empires don’t have to do any of the actual work themselves. That is patently untrue in Oliver’s case. It pains him that he can’t personally oversee every restaurant bearing his name, since there are dozens of these scattered around the world — “it’s a bit like having someone else look after your children”, he says — but when it comes to a new book, he changes its nappies himself. He took all the photos for this one and developed the recipes.
“My family are constant guinea pigs. I’ve got a small army of kids and they’re the most honest customers in the world. Just when you think you’re cracking them they stitch you up. Trying to cook for kids is like a psychological nightmare, because you can take the same thing and present it at different times of the day and they will accept or not accept it.
“You can give ’em a plate of fruit and they’re like ‘nah, not having it’ and you go and put it in a liquidiser with a swig of coconut milk and they’ll drink it in seconds. You’ve gotta have a few tricks up your sleeve as a parent.”
Oliver seems to have a bottomless box of tricks. His previous 20 books have sold like low-GI hotcakes, whether they contain budget food, comfort food, speedy food, country-specific food or special-occasion food, but he says there is a common thread holding them all together.
“For me it’s always felt really clear. It’s not about showing off, it’s not about pushing things to the nth degree. It’s about what the bloody hell do you have for dinner? If you look at The Naked Chef, which was nearly 20 years ago, the recipes are still legit and it doesn’t feel like the club you can’t be in. It’s totally accessible.”
There has, however, been a progression in terms of pushing for more ethical eating and farming practices (which in Jamie’s world is often called “higher welfare”) as well as in his knowledge of nutrition.
Becoming a card-carrying member of the nutritionist fraternity comes with challenges for a lad who doesn’t mince words. “These clever people are brilliant and wonderful and we’re very grateful to have them, but they are very precise . . . you need to say ‘research is showing this’ or ‘patterns of that’ . . . it’s quite an anal
‘It’s not about showing off … it’s about what the bloody hell do you have for dinner’
world that I now live in.”
There was some murmuring in this world about Oliver using the disputed term “super food” in book titles, but he defends his choice vigorously.
“There is no one ingredient that is a golden bullet and is a super food, but I do think there’s a philosophy of clustering groups of stuff together to make what you could definitely call ‘really good’ or ‘super’ food, and that’s what we’ve tried to do.
“If you’re being literal, some people get uptight about it — the nutrition fraternity was very much against the word, and I thought fuck it, I’m just going to do it, because our duty is to deliver something that the nutrition fraternity would say is absolutely a great balanced meal.”
His motto is to show “what good looks like” and to this end he employs four nutritionists. “I’m trying to raise the profile of a part of the science and nutrition fraternity that often was shunned and not listened to enough and called the party-poopers, but actually, once you use them properly, it’s not about what you can’t have, it’s about what you can have extra.
“We create content together, and if you look at this book and the last book, the portions are generous, you’re gonna be stuffed, but also it’s balanced, controlled, and that’s the promise, that’s what we’re trying to do.”
If “super food” has many interpretations, “budget” has even more. The book and TV series Save with Jamie were smash hits all over the world, including in South Africa, but Oliver admits that the reality of “cooking on a budget” is infinitely varied.
“What is a fair budget? To be honest, when I did Save with Jamie in the UK, I didn’t know how to calibrate it, so in the end I just looked at the price of a Big Mac meal and then made my budget one third of that. In the UK at the time, most of those meals were coming in at about 80p to £1.60 (R15-R30) per portion, but it’s a really tough one . . . it really depends.
“The thing that costs a lot of the money on people’s shop is always the protein, it’s always the meat, and probably if you look at
Super Food, the protein is always kept under control from a really optimal health point of view, which means you either save money or can afford to trade up to higher-welfare methods of farming.”
He cites the shepherd’s pie in his new book as an example. “It’s a massive classic in Britain, lots of people do it every single week, and often it’s quite indulgent, so I’m like, right, guys, I know you know how to make this, but I applied a few new techniques to get massive flavour, and I pulled the amount of meat back, and the recipe was more authentic — like it was 200 years ago — and healthier and cheaper.
“If you look at what we perceive as wealth, it goes along with the amount of protein we consume, as well as sugary sweetened drinks. When I was in Mexico last year I was in an area where they still eat a super food diet so they should have massive longevity, but one of the only things that has changed is the volume of soda they consume, which is about two litres a day per person. If you visit someone and you get Coke, that’s posh, that’s like Gucci — it’s absolutely a status symbol.
“Then when progress settles for a few generations, they realise that it ain’t cool eating shitloads of highly processed shit, cos people start dropping dead from cancer and all sorts of things.
“A lot of my foundations are about food education and trying to work with parents and schools to get kids growing stuff and cooking stuff. Although the content might change, the principles are exactly the same, whether we’re in Britain, Europe, China, India or Africa.”
The Jamie train is approaching its next station and is on a tight schedule. With the staff support he now has he can afford to get a good night’s sleep, but says this was not always so.
“For too many years I was getting three or four hours, now it’s six, if I’m lucky seven, and I feel the difference. When you get sleep down, and when you can eat the kind of food that’s in the last two books four, five days a week — oh my God, the transformation: mentally, physically, energy, productivity . . . phenomenal. You can’t do the food bit and not get the sleep bit right.”
Family Classics (Penguin Random House, R395), published in SA this week.