The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
‘A f***ing celebrity chef steering government is ridiculous’
Jamie Oliver on getting the country cooking, the heartbreak of closing restaurants, and why his fight against childhood obesity isn’t over yet.
The night before I’m due to meet Jamie Oliver there are whispers from his headquarters of a big announcement. ‘All will become clear!’ they say. The next morning, news duly breaks that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, will ban junk-food advertising on the capital’s Tube and bus network, as well as the opening of hot-food takeaway shops within 400 metres of schools – the culmination of 28 months of close collaboration between Oliver and Khan. ‘It’s a mega day,’ Oliver tells me at Jamie HQ, his new, Google-meets-saturday Kitchen youth-filled warehouse refurb in north London, just down the road from the Emirates Stadium. There’s an open-kitchen canteen, shelves of old china, mismatched tables and chairs, and assorted sofas. One wall bears the legend ‘Big Love’ in large letters, and upstairs, metal joists and beams soar over the assembled workers. Oliver, dressed in jeans and a pale-green shirt, is on his way to do a series of television interviews. ‘I worked with Sadiq on a cross-party letter. It took a lot of effort, but now he’s standing up and saying, “I’m pulling the levers.” This is big, bold and rare for Britain. Internationally, too. Mrs May could be famous for this,’ he adds. ‘You can’t be strong and stable without healthy kids in Britain.’
Quite apart from his terrific television career and 21 cookbooks (most of them bestsellers), the reported £240 million net worth, the £9 million Hampstead house and Essex farm, the lovely Jools (his wife, in whose honour he has just collaborated with UK footwear brand Seven Feet Apart on a new trainer design, the JO-18, to mark their 18th wedding anniversary), and their children, Poppy Honey, Daisy Boo, Petal Blossom Rainbow, Buddy Bear and River Rocket, Oliver is perhaps best known these days for his crusade against childhood obesity. (His aim is to halve numbers by 2030.) He has been campaigning for more than a decade. ‘I’ve been through five prime ministers. Mr Blair was the first person to admit that the state was responsible for children’s health between the ages of four and 16. The state was doing nothing about how this group are fed, while being right on the case of dog food.’
Fifteen years on, he’s beginning to notice a change in people’s attitudes. ‘Over the last six months the climate has begun to shift – the people who bang on about the nanny state are beginning to look dangerously old-fashioned and out of step.’ The chef ’s crusades have certainly brought him some brutal stick, from those who took exception to Oliver’s suggestion that Turkey Twizzlers were not quite the thing, or that BOGOF deals in supermarkets should not be kept exclusively for unhealthy, sugar-laden foods. He’s been accused of being the ‘fun police’, running a ‘nanny state initiative that penalises poor people’, of endangering the revenue of advertising agencies, being hypocritical, upsetting American mothers, and failing to understand what it is to be poor and unable to afford healthier food. ‘Yes,’ says Oliver. ‘I don’t like [the criticism]. I got my arse kicked left, right and centre for 10 years. It makes me feel sick, but defend-
‘I’ve done nothing clever in 15 years. It’s all common sense’
ing my position is more important. On the whole,’ he adds with some irony, ‘all of the people I care about most – obese children and their parents – are the ones who don’t like me.’
Oliver admits that he was ‘never like this before. I was a simple boy who liked to cook. I hated school. I wasn’t political.’ He was born in Essex and worked in his parents’ pub, The Cricketers, as a child. His first cooking job was as a pastry chef at the late Antonio Carluccio’s now-closed Neal Street restaurant, from where he moved to become sous chef at The River Café – scene of his biggest piece of career luck. The BBC was filming Christmas at the River Café, in 1997. Oliver, filling in for an absent colleague, made an unscripted appearance and immediately caught the attention of the director. The BBC ran a show based on Oliver entitled The Naked Chef, from which stemmed his first eponymous bestselling book. The River Café also gave Oliver a taste for Italian food which, as the years have progressed, has developed into a full-blown passion for the country and a series of books about its food.
His newest, from which you will find exclusive recipes on page 56, returns to this fertile theme with a road-movie-style culinary tour of Italy in the company of Oliver’s old mentor and friend, Gennaro Contaldo, and is dedicated to his first London boss, Carluccio. Jamie Cooks Italy (‘again’ is the word that hovers subliminally) comes 13 years after the publication of Jamie’s Italy. Why does the country continue to seduce him? ‘It’s got a spirit that draws me back,’ he says. ‘It’s not pretentious.’
But even Italy, it transpires, is not going quite the way Oliver would like. In his book he had wanted to explore rustic food, cucina povera, but because ‘Italy is changing’, he tells me, ‘young girls there are at least as bad if not worse than their British counterparts when it comes to buying fast food and not cooking’. We’ve lost touch with the old ways of food, he tells me, because women now work and don’t have the time, and because the lack of a presence – male or female – in the kitchen has given the food industry an opportunity to step in to offer alternatives – hence ready meals – all motivated by profit rather than good ingredients.
So for the new book he has gone back to a previous generation – Italy’s nonnas (grandmothers), still going strong on their excellent Italian diet, and still cooking in the places he visited: Piedmont, Naples, Basilicata and Puglia. Oliver’s Italian trip sounds an absolute blast (it also airs on television later this year), an incident-filled road trip featuring blokes on bikes, swimming trunks, ice-cream cones and campfires. Indeed, Oliver wants this to be a ‘go-to Italian book… a manual of deliciousness’, encompassing family recipes, classic as well as new flavour combinations, and handy tips. Highlights include a Tuscan soup he describes as ‘the feral cousin of ribbolita’; a luscious white risotto; slow-cooked beef ragu; and four ways with octopus.
But apart from being a crash course in domestic Italian cooking, it also perhaps illustrates a yearning to return to a simpler, less stressful, less controversial life; back to the time when Oliver first met Contaldo at Carluccio’s Neal Street restaurant, nearly 30 years ago. As for the television series, ‘It’s overbudget, it took two years, and you’ll love it,’ Oliver enthuses. But plainly, cooking with nonnas wasn’t easy. ‘They were always needing to lie down and sleep, or forgetting things. It was tough. But I loved them.’
One of Oliver’s greatest talents is his ability to connect through television and books. It’s a tragedy, really, that he got
sidetracked into the restaurant business. Six years after he launched the award-winning Fifteen restaurant in east London and its apprentice programme, the first Jamie’s Italian opened in Oxford in 2008; at their peak there were 42. But the chain has begun to crumble, shedding jobs and suppliers. Lately, losing 12 of his 37 Jamie’s Italians and both Barbecoas, the fire-andmeat restaurants he set up with a US barbecue expert, as well as seeing his Australian outlets founder, has hit him hard. He is genuinely upset, and shows me pictures of the St Paul’s Barbecoa (which he’s since managed to buy back) with touching enthusiasm. ‘It’s lovely,’ he says. ‘There’s £400,000 worth of extractor [fan] in there, which the customers will never see. We had an open wood fire before anyone else. Look at that view of St Paul’s. I love it.’
He may have been able to save the City site but he admits ‘it’s really hard on the high street. Not enough people, not enough money. I’ve always paid over minimum wage and used sustainable fish and well-sourced meat. If you’ve got values and you care, it’s hideous in the industry at present. Prices, rents and rates go up and everyone ends up going shit. Barbecoa in Piccadilly took £90,000 a week, but I needed £110,000 to survive.’ He has said having to close the restaurants is one of the worst things that has ever happened to him.
Why do you put yourself through all this, I ask? Why don’t you just sell the lot and become an MP and continue your fight in Parliament? The suggestion seems genuinely to shock him; indeed, he stops talking for at least three seconds. ‘But you wouldn’t want me in Parliament,’ he says eventually. Well, I would actually. He’s passionate, single-minded, energetic… but he’s not having it. ‘I’ve done nothing clever in 15 years,’ he says. ‘It’s all common sense. All I’ve done is create conversations that newspapers report on. Having my own children changed me. It made me realise that those annoying kids down the street were someone’s children, and so they mattered. Childhood obesity is the first thing and the last thing I think about every day, which isn’t normal.’
As you might imagine, Oliver and his family eat well at home. He has even lost a couple of stone himself, mainly by eating less meat and more vegetables and nuts, and doing a bit of exercise. But he has admitted that his own children make the occasional visit to Mcdonald’s. ‘If they want to go, I let them because they get really well fed for the other 95 per cent of the time,’ he says. ‘If they want to go out and have a fizzy drink I don’t care because we have none in the house.’
So if it’s OK for his own children, albeit intermittently, why not for others? Why does he campaign? ‘I don’t have a choice,’ he says. When you view the statistics, you begin to understand why. Recently published figures supplied by the National Child Measurement Programme show that around 37,000 children between the ages of four and 11 are classed as severely obese, making the UK the most obese nation in Western Europe. ‘Eighty-five per cent of those obese children will be obese in adulthood,’ Oliver says. ‘They’ll be less productive, suffer early mortality and be more unhappy, and will cost the state a lot of money. I’ve spoken to [governor of the Bank of England] Mark Carney, and his view is that healthier kids are better for the economic health of the UK. Healthier kids help the NHS – the best gift you can give to the NHS.’
Oliver’s obesity campaign faltered when Theresa May’s 2016 legislation (Chapter One) included a tax on sugar content in drinks but nothing about restrictions on junk-food advertising. ‘It’s absolute bollocks that parents are totally to blame for childhood obesity; incompetent legislation is to blame. Cereal makers are banging on about vitamin D and fibre, but are still full of sugar – that’s being a bullshitter.’ Some drinks companies have since changed their recipes to avoid the tax, but Oliver also wants to clarify labelling on food, and tackle junk-food advertising near schools and before the watershed on television. ‘It’s basic common sense,’ he says. ‘I was mortified by Chapter One. It was traumatic.’
At the end of last month, Chapter Two was published, banning sales of energy drinks to children and introducing new advertising restrictions to stop foods high in salt and sugar being targeted at children. ‘It’s a vast improvement,’ says Oliver, ‘but there are still parts of the very first strategy that haven’t been delivered.’
So what else needs to be done? ‘Food education in schools,’ he enumerates. ‘Mandatory targets for the food industry.’ Ofsted should ‘evaluate our schools on food education and school lunches’. He throws his arms in the air to emphasise his point. ‘The tax [on sugar in drinks] was my idea, but having a f— ing celebrity chef steering government policy is ridiculous; they should be doing it. It’s not my job. My job is to listen to my viewers and readers.’
What does he really like doing? ‘Television,’ he says immediately. ‘It gives me loads of pleasure. It’s the best thing in the world. When I was a boy I was lousy at school but good at Meccano and Lego and cooking. Television is like the Meccano. I love all the technical stuff.’ He has run his own production company for 17 years. ‘It’s such a gift to have a platform. Growing stuff and cooking stuff – that’s what I like showing on TV. What I’d like to do now is get in a Land Rover and drive to Scotland and do a bit of fishing and cook the results on a grill by the river – that’s where I’m happiest.’
Turn to page 56 for exclusive recipes from Jamie Cooks Italy