Food’s fresh face
The celebrity chef ’s call to arms against junk food hasn’t been quietened by his sugar-tax victory.
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s call to arms against junk food hasn’t been quietened by his sugar-tax victory.
Jamie Oliver bats off the tributes. A new baby, River Rocket Oliver, his fifth child with the legendary Jools. “Yeah, he’s a little beauty.” A new cookbook, Super Food Family Classics, jazzing up familiar comfort-food family recipes with “a brilliant boost of goodness”. “Yeah, yeah, it’s going well. Thank you.” A new Christmas cookbook coming out? “Yeah, I’m really honoured, a lifetime opportunity, perfect timing to gather up all my favourites.”
The British Government’s decision to slap on a sugar tax, expected to channel around £520 million a year into sports in primary schools? On the end of the phone in London, it sounds like he’s suddenly pacing the floor.
“The data is clear – the single largest source of sugar for kids and teenagers is sugary sweetened drinks.
“As an ingredient, sugar is delicious, we love it. I grew up in a pub, I know the drill. On the beach, a lovely glass of Coke, fantastic. Going to a fairground – brilliant, perfectly in context. But having litres and litres of the stuff in the fridge at home every day, week in, week out – that was wrong then and it’s wrong now.”
“Then” was the early 1980s. Oliver’s parents ran, and still run, a gastropub in the village of Clavering, north Essex – local game, local meat, all food made on the premises. “But it was around that time that the big food and distribution companies came into town. I clearly remember the summer when the freezer vans started turning up. The back door would open and all the freezer smoke would come out.”
It was space age, he says, but marked the beginning of frozen food, bought by the precooked bag and whacked in the fryer: “the scrotum burger – filthy, horrible, Spam fritters”.
The Naked Chef-turned-kitchen crusader is talking war: child obesity, type 2 diabetes, fat, salt, hidden sugars (“weirdly, a bar of chocolate is the most honest sugar on the shelf), the estimated £16 billion a year the UK’s National Health Service spends on dietrelated diseases. Last month, he lambasted Prime Minister Theresa May for the limited scope of her Government’s childhood obesity “plan of action” – no new restrictions on junk-food advertising, no ban on promoting sweets at supermarket checkouts, nothing to force food companies to change their practices.
“There are 150 things the Government can do to help parents make better choices. We’re not mad. We’re not jumping around eating lentils and swinging burning sage. What we want is an environment where it is as easy to buy fresh stuff as it is to buy highly processed shitty food.”
Fresh and affordable stuff. As he says, the cheap “buy one, get one free” marketing ploys for high-salt, high-sugar, high-fat foods will always appeal to families on a limited budget.
“Wouldn’t it be morally fair if you are taking the second-largest amount of money a family spends in its lifetime to give it the same choice? It is not about being boring or a party pooper – if we just rejig some stuff, we’ll all see the benefit.”
Oliver’s been on the nutritional warpath for 11 years, since campaigning on children’s dietary habits in his 2005 TV series Jamie’s School Dinners. Then, he says, there were really rigorous standards for dog food, “and if you didn’t adhere to them the company would be sued and the chief executive
“Take the humble jar of peanut butter – people don’t want it made with palm oil from deforestation.”
would be liable”. But there were no standards for school food.
Since then, he’s had to dodge some bullets. Some rebelled against his blunt message: a bunch of parents rushed to rescue their kids, passing fast food through the school fence in protest at his school food campaign. Some were appalled at Oliver’s description of a mother feeding her baby Coke in a teated bottle as “thick as shit”. Some just don’t like his accent. But Oliver is not coming down on parents. They’re busy, he says, juggling a million and one things. Many have no access to good food – he recalls his time in Huntingdon, West Virginia, “the most unhealthy town in the US”: “If you wanted to make a good choice, you’re screwed, mate, you’ve got a 40-minute journey.”
And in Britain, at least, he says, many were never taught to cook or given the right information. “But if you give them good, clear information, nine times out of 10 they make better choices.”
FRESH FOOD’S FRONT LINE
Now he aims his criticism at politicians. “Do they really give a shit about public health over the next 25 years or are they just thinking about the election cycle? The biggest concerns to global health are water displacement, antibiotic resistance and obesity – these all play a huge part in the food system and the state has to take responsibility.
“The industry has got away with self-regulation for years. Now governments have to grow some balls and stop dithering.”
He comes down on supermarkets: “After your mortgage, the second largest amount of money you spend in your life will be in the supermarket. It’s got a responsibility to have a clean back-of-house. Take the humble jar of peanut butter – people don’t want peanut butter made with palm oil from deforestation. They just don’t want it.”
Unsustainable farming is also in the firing line: “Taking the piss out of the land or the water tables [and contributing to] dirty waste.” And the food industry gets a lashing: “A lot of high-level restaurant training is about controlling nature. You’d get on the phone and say, ‘I want that vegetable’ – completely out of season, from halfway around the world. Or 60 racks of lamb. No one would think, ‘Christ almighty, that’s 30 sheep.’ They’d have no interest in the shoulder or the legs; no concept of carcass balance.
“When I worked at the River Café with Rose [Gray] and Ruthie [Rogers], it was never about control. It was about responding to what had just come out of the ground. It sounds obvious, but that’s not how the industry works.”
There is change. People are trying to eat more vegetables, farmers’ markets are making fresh food easier to get, Britain has a sugar tax and the idea of super foods is catching on. The recipe list of Super Food Family Classics includes dishes such as squash mac ’n cheese, cheat’s pea soup, seven-veg tomato sauce and Italian superfood burgers.
“There is no one super food, no silver bullet. If you are going to call something a super food, it should be good for you, it should be balanced and it should be brilliant.”
Oliver’s a tireless campaigner for good food and growing your own veges – “I’ve never worked with children who grow stuff and cook it and won’t eat it” – and he won’t stop hammering at the doors of power. “By nature I’m impatient, but weirdly, on this subject I am in it for the long haul. It is my job to be relentless.”