Jamie Oliver now wants us to cook with just 5 ingredients – he tells us why
I had been forewarned that Jamie Oliver is as hyperactive in person as on screen, which turns out to be no exaggeration.
Ask one question and Jamie is off, easy charm in full flow, at a million miles an hour. The celebrity chef, restaurateur and household foodie favourite, is set to continue his culinary domination with a new cookbook, 5 Ingredients – Quick & Easy Food. Not content with reducing our cooking times to a mere 15 minutes in previous tomes, he’s now trimming our shopping lists with dishes that require just five ingredients (give or take some additional seasoning).
“Some books just want to be written,” Jamie enthuses. He originally wrote the recipes with four ingredients in mind, but added an extra when he realised something was missing.
“I wrote 70% of that book but then realised it was just ‘good’ and I don’t think people want to buy a ‘good’ Jamie Oliver book,” he explains. “So the extra ingredient is that balance between creativity and getting straight to the point.”
With fewer ingredients, Jamie is hoping to make people more aware of what’s going into their food – something he’s keen to do himself. He embarked on a nutrition course three years ago and is now studying for his masters.
With the rise in health and wellness fads, Jamie wanted to be able to debunk much of the misinformation being circulated. He says: “You’ve got people who are taking 200g of butter out of a brownie and putting 200g of coconut oil in and saying it’s healthier. It’s just not true. I knew I had to go to school.”
And he’s absolutely loving it. “It’s literally one of the coolest things I’ve ever done,” he exclaims.
Discussion of education and learning about food inevitably leads Jamie to what he calls his ‘life’s passion’: child health. “My personal goal – what gets me up in the morning – is to help halve childhood obesity in 10 years,” he says.
With nearly a third of children aged 2-15 overweight or obese, he is justifiably concerned about this issue, especially given its links to middle-aged mortality, mental health and an increase in type 2 diabetes. No wonder Izzi Seccombe of the Local Government Association calls it a “major public health time bomb”.
For Jamie, tackling this is not going to be easy given his relationship with the present government. He worked closely with the previous four prime ministers on child health but things haven’t gone so smoothly with Theresa May.
“We exchanged a few letters and I’ll keep writing them but there’s not much coming back really,” he says.
He is particularly angry about the changes the prime minister made to the anti-obesity strategy formulated under David Cameron. May’s version failed to include restrictions on advertising and promotional deals on junk food, two actions that would have a huge impact on childhood obesity, he says.
“What that lot get up to baffles me. It baffles me economically and it baffles me morally.” He believes we can halve childhood obesity in 10 years but only if we tackle education and advertising, and generally make it easier for people to be healthy.
That’s not the only matter that needs to be dealt with, Jamie believes. When asked what he would do if he was in charge of the country, the chef is uncharacteristically tongue-tied, but after a brief pause he returns to the conversation with gusto.
If elected prime minister, first and foremost he would tackle education. He says: “Teachers need to be re-incentivised, they need to feel like they’re on the front line of our country and, therefore, they need to be paid accordingly.
“It’s a very complex thing to tackle but I think losing great teachers because they’ve had enough is just not what we need right now.”
He firmly believes children need to be better educated about food to be able to make healthier choices. “You don’t die young because you didn’t do your geography homework.”
Don’t expect Jamie to stop talking about childhood obesity anytime soon. He says: “It doesn’t matter where I could be, if I was in front of the Queen and she asked me about it, I’d just go off on one.”
The Press Association
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