Meeting Jamie Oliver is like being hit by a precious meteorite. No, really. The enthusiastic, energetic 42-year-old is talking at a million miles an hour with such passion and ballsy candour you can’t help but want to jump on his bandwagon and cling on for the ride. And while he bowls you over, the chef, TV star, foodie activist, global entrepreneur and father of five also leaves you so inspired you just know you’re going to roll up your sleeves, get stuck in and follow his lead.
On his latest visit to Sydney, I watched Jamie captivate a packed room of mums and grandmas. He had flown in late the night before, was racked with jetlag and, frankly, looked a bit green about the gills but was utterly exhilarating to watch.
“I’ve grown up a lot in the last 20 years and as a father there are a lot of things I want for my kids,” he said, fixing his gaze Mona Lisa-like on every smiling face in the room. There’s definitely an air of the charismatic preacher about Jamie, and his down-to-earth logic makes easy sense, which is why he’s so seductive.
“School is the frontline. Feeding kids right at school is feeding their brains and part of their education. It’s not genetic that kids eat burgers and pizza, that’s brainwashing through ads,” he says, barely pausing to breathe.
Jamie’s healthy food mission has always been the cornerstone of his cooking, but since the global obesity epidemic has flowed down from adults to children, as a dad as well as a foodie, Jamie’s become angry. And when Jamie’s angry, he’s unstoppable.
“I never grew up being political or socially minded. But I’m not a very good liar and I’m not very good at keeping quiet when things really upset me,” Jamie explains, now back in London and talking exclusively to The Australian Women’s Weekly.
The bouncy lad from Essex who grew up in a pub and gleaned a love of cooking from his mum and grandma, making pub meals as a teenager in the family business, has grown into an incredibly well-informed and astute educator. And that’s even more impressive when you factor in that Jamie is dyslexic and to this day has only ever finished one book – Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games.
“I was in special-needs groups all of my secondary school life,” Jamie says.
“I got chucked out of classes and had the piss taken out of me and it was not great. The way of dealing with dyslexia when I was a kid was to get me to stand up in front of 880 boys in an all-boys school and read five minutes of Shakespeare. Are you kidding me? It was terrible, with all the boys doing all the gestures and signs.”
Today though, Jamie sees his dyslexia as his secret weapon, and says it’s fuelled his success.
“Our brains just work in a different way and it’s definitely a gift, but you’ve got to use it,” he posits.
“If you’re dyslexic then you’re not conventional. If you’re dyslexic you won’t see stuff the same as others. They think I’m barmy for a year or more sometimes before they finally say: ‘Oh yeah, I get it.’ It’s just a different way of looking at the world.”
To dyslexic kids, Jamie says: “There’s nothing to worry about, you’ve just got to try – because the things that you can flourish at might not be in school. I’m all into maths and English and science, but they were put there by a bunch of clever monks, it’s not what makes the world go around. There are loads of places for creative people or people who can physically express themselves in different ways.”
Dyslexia certainly hasn’t stopped Jamie from getting where he wants to be. He’s currently studying public health at university and doing a Master’s in nutrition and, through his bloody-minded determination and hard, hard yakka, has armed himself with the scientific facts and figures he needs to fight politicians and massive corporations like Coca-Cola… and it’s working.
In the UK, he managed to persuade the government to implement a sugary drinks tax. “It was in the budget, it’s been ratified, now it’s a potential billion pounds of new money given to primary schools for food education, breakfast clubs and sport.”
For Jamie it is a global campaign and New Zealand hasn’t escaped his notice. In June he spoke to the FIZZ health symposium in Auckland of his disgust at the NZ government’s failure to introduce a sugar tax on fizzy drinks.
Sugary drinks are just the start in Jamie’s battle, but they are key – “the single largest source of sugar in our children’s and teenagers’ lives,” says Jamie, who is quick to add that he doesn’t want to be seen as the sugar Grinch.
“I am not anti-sugar, I love my maple syrup, I love my honey, and I love cake. Who wouldn’t? It’s about the misuse of sugar and it’s about lying to the public and it’s about going down an aisle of the supermarket that’s selling cereal, where it’s basically selling cake, but saying it’s great for you because it’s got a bit of vitamin D or some other s*** thrown in there to look good.
“I think it’s the lying that drives me mad. In a weird way, a chocolate bar is the most honest sugar on the planet. They never lied. You always knew if you had five bars you were greedy. When it’s in your bread and your cereal and your pasta sauces, it then becomes such an environmental misuse and that is why Aussie and England are side by side with some of the most unhealthy, overweight, obese kids on the planet.”
In August, Jamie released what he’s convinced will be his most successful cookbook yet, which is quite an ask for one of Britain’s best-selling authors. Yet he could be right. 5 Ingredients – Quick & Easy Food is all about cutting through the trendy food fads and listening to what people want.
“It’s the simplicity of it, really,” he explains. “There’s a lot of noise in food. It’s so bloody obvious, that I never did it for 20 years. I don’t want to be emotional or nostalgic or historical. It’s five ingredients; restraint, the most precious, important ingredient, number six, is restraint. Don’t do it. Don’t add another thing. You know, you see it all the time, and it’s hard, especially if you’re a man where we have a few more slightly pretentious things in our pantry,” he adds, laughing.
Helping put great nutrition into simple family meals is a driving force for Jamie and one of the reasons – along with a great pay cheque – he agreed to become an ambassador for Woolworths supermarkets.
“Ultimately, my passion is to upsell fruit and veg, nuts and seeds and beans and get people to be more mindful about the meat they’re consuming. Any initiative that gets kids trying new things. The free fruit for kids in store at Woolies is something I am really proud of.”
I ask Jamie how he manages to persuade his own five kids, who range from 15-year-old Poppy, to Daisy Boo, 14, Petal Blossom, eight, Buddy Bear, six, and River Rocket, almost one – to eat healthily at home.
“I don’t want to be oversimplistic, but you only eat s*** at home if you buy it in the first place, and we don’t buy it,” he says quick as a flash.
“It really is as simple as that. My wife Jools is even more hardcore than me, but if my boy wanted to grab a Coke, I would let him have one as a treat, at the fair or on holiday, of course. It wouldn’t get past my missus, but I’m fine with it. Do we have any at home? Absolutely no way! Why would you? We’ve got real food. We buy food and we buy veg and we buy tins and preserves. It’s really hard to eat badly when you’re buying the food.”
Jools, 42, cooks all the kids’ meals at home, but she won’t cook for Jamie, he admits with a throaty chuckle.
“She cooks really well for the kids and then when she comes to cook for me she falls to bits. That’s fine because I like to cook for her. It’s my way of giving her some love, which is good.”
Jools also does the lion’s share of the child care. They divide their time between a home in London and their manor house in rural Essex.
“Since we had Poppy we’ve been really structured about time. Could I do better? Probably yes. But I get my six weeks’ holiday a year, I get my weekends off, and that’s family time,” says Jamie, who confesses it’s a tough work-family juggle.”
“I could do more in the weeks, definitely, but I’m struggling, it’s too hard, my head is down Monday to Friday lunchtime. But by Friday afternoon I just want
to get home. Then I do the hardcore, family, quiet weekend.
“I think many of your readers do exactly the same as me. For anyone who has a job out of the home, that is standard practice. We guard that precious time really heavily.”
Despite the breadth of ages, the Oliver kids are a close-knit bunch. When baby River Rocket was born in August 2016, the eldest two sisters were in the delivery room with Jamie watching their mother give birth, and Poppy cut the umbilical cord.
So are any of his brood interested in following Dad into the world of cooking? “They’ve all done their fair share at different ages but the only one that is even sniffing a bit at the industry is young Buddy.
“Mum drives him to school, and with the London traffic it can take an hour and she told me his conversations are gold. She started recording them. Buddy was basically berating me, saying, ‘Listen, I’ve got a problem with Dad because he’s not letting me cook enough,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, that ain’t true because I do.’
“Then he said he wanted to be a chef and he said, ‘Basically, I’ve got to make sure that I’m better than Dad. I want to take over Daddy’s restaurants but I want to take his name off them.’ The little bastard’s already trying to write his old man off and wants Buddy in there. Probably ‘Jamie’s Italian’ will be ‘Buddy’s Italian’ in the next decade!”
