Jamie: Vegans hate me – and target diners at my restaurants
JAMIE Oliver says vegans hate him and have targeted customers at his restaurant empire.
The chef said his eateries are often subjected to raids involving ‘20 scruffy, weird looking fellas putting iPads of slaughtered animals in front of kids having spaghetti bolognese’.
The 42-year-old celebrity chef said he finds the diet ‘annoying’ and the so-called clean eating trend ‘really annoying’.
Oliver is a prominent healthy eating campaigner and has fought to reduce obesity levels across the nation. He has called for a sugar tax on all fizzy drinks and healthy school meals
He said the vegan diet – which rejects meat and animal products including eggs and dairy – had a good track record in terms of lower cases of disease.
But Oliver, who has 41 restaurants across the UK, explained: ‘They hate me because we do stories about higher welfare meat, which I am deeply passionate about, but for them it is on or off.
‘I have done more to push plant-based diets than any of them.’
The father- of-five added: ‘I am split these days because vegans do annoy me, but I also do care for them.’
He also criticised the clean eating fad spearheaded by ‘Deliciously’ Ella Woodward and the Hemsley sisters.
‘The clean eating thing really annoys me,’ he said, ‘but it is an energy that is coming out because the government and businesses lie a lot and because, while we are confused on packaging, we do not know what the f*** we are eating.’
The chef says he has written an unpublished book of vegetarian recipes but ‘Channel 4 do not want me to do the TV series because they did a veggie show once and it bombed.’
Oliver, who has a combined wealth of £150million with his wife Jools, a children’s designer, also criticised Theresa May’s watering down of the anti-obesity strategy and the now- shelved plan to scrap free school meals for infants.
The strategy, published in August last year, stopped short of ordering restrictions on advertising and promotional deals on junk food which campaigners had called for.
He told The Sunday Times: ‘ Look, I have met four prime ministers. They are all very different, but ... May’s government was completely locked down.
‘Her advisers, that have now gone - thank you, Lord - kept all the information away from even their own ministers.
‘It [the strategy] was released at the same time the A-level results came out, with no marketing, no comms, no PR. In code, that means, “We don’t give a f***.’
‘It could have been a moment of national pride and at least she would have been able to look everyone in the eye and say we are going to get some change in the obesity graph in ten years.’
Instead, he says, Mrs May ‘tore it up’. ‘But what’s even more scary ... I believe her team were genuinely chuffed with what they had done,’ he added.
Tory plans to scrap free school meals for infants in England were dropped after the election. Oliver said the policy was ‘like something a ten-year-old would do in basic maths to save cash’.