Jamie Oliver: Passionate Casual Caring Revolutionary

I’m sure his hum­ble begin­nings had no small influ­ence on his down-to-earth, street-level approach. “I grew up in my par­ents’ pub and I’ve been cook­ing since I was seven years old,” Jamie told Organic Connections. “Cooking was the one thing I did really well. I was ter­ri­ble in school, so I just kept cooking.”

From the Essex pub in which he first worked (still run by his par­ents, Trevor and Sally), Jamie went on to grad­u­ate Westminster Catering College, not long after which he took a job at London’s famed River Café. He was there for three and a half years, work­ing with two of his biggest influ­ences, renowned chefs (and own­ers of the River Café) Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray. “The women really influ­enced me,” Jamie said: “Ruth Rogers, Rose Gray, Elizabeth David and Alice Waters.”

It was while at the River Café that Jamie was dis­cov­ered by a film crew doing a fea­ture on the restaurant—and The Naked Chef was born. Jamie has never looked back.

Easy Peasy

The thrust of The Naked Chef, and the many books and tele­vi­sion pro­grams that have fol­lowed, has been the instruc­tion of oth­ers in the cook­ing of sim­ple but deli­cious cui­sine. Jamie has never believed it difficult—and he has spent a con­sid­er­able por­tion of his time try­ing to con­vince every­one else of that. “With just the lit­tlest bit of instruc­tion, any­one can learn to cook tasty, inex­pen­sive and lovely food,” said Jamie. “The prob­lem isn’t acces­si­bil­ity to food; it’s acces­si­bil­ity to food edu­ca­tion. Our par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion didn’t grow up learn­ing how to cook, so they didn’t pass on the skills, and the schools have all but stopped teach­ing peo­ple about food and cook­ing. That’s why I’m try­ing so hard to get food edu­ca­tion back into schools. Cooking is a nec­es­sary skill.”

When one hears the words “Jamie Oliver” and “schools” in the same sen­tence, one can­not help but think about his many endeav­ors in this arena. Probably the most pub­lic of Jamie’s activ­i­ties has been his hard work in the trans­for­ma­tion of food in schools. His ini­tial foray into this arena was in 2005 in the UK, with the series Jamie’s School Dinners. The effect from the show was pro­found: sub­stan­tial changes were made to the food being served through­out the UK schools.

Cafeteria Revolution

As shown in the series Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Jamie then came to America (Huntington, West Virginia) to work with the city, which, at the time, was listed as hav­ing the high­est obe­sity rate in the nation. Over the six weeks he was there, he seri­ously impacted lives and, per­haps more impor­tantly, gave broad pub­lic expo­sure to the crises of food qual­ity within our schools.

For the fol­low­ing sea­son, Jamie chose Los Angeles and began film­ing the show. In the third week of shoot­ing, the super­in­ten­dent of the Los Angeles Unified School District pulled Jamie’s per­mit to film the pro­gram within the schools.

This did not stop Jamie—in fact it hardly slowed him down. Immediately on the heels of the stop­page, Jamie and his foun­da­tion began cir­cu­lat­ing a peti­tion, gar­ner­ing tens of thou­sands of sig­na­tures. They cre­ated a Facebook page that quickly grew to 10,000 members—the largest Food Revolution con­cen­tra­tion in the coun­try. They con­nected with local orga­ni­za­tions and began for­mu­lat­ing a plan.

Shortly there­after, a new school super­in­ten­dent took over. He was greeted on his first day by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Food Revolution, along with 10 other orga­ni­za­tions in col­lab­o­ra­tion, and was pre­sented with an enor­mous col­lec­tion of let­ters from local cit­i­zens, includ­ing over 500 from school children.

Throughout the fol­low­ing sum­mer, local events were held includ­ing a screen­ing of the first episode of the show. In September, when school opened, the school dis­trict unveiled a brand-new menu with more fruits and veg­eta­bles and less processed food. Some of the least nutri­tional items were removed, such as Tater Tots and chicken nuggets. The new super­in­ten­dent appeared with Jamie on Jimmy Kimmel Live and agreed to remove fla­vored milk from the menu as well—which he then fol­lowed through on.

Have we made progress? “I’d like to think so,” responded Jamie, “but really it’s two steps for­ward, one step back. In L.A. we got fla­vored milk out, but they put pizza back in as a veg­etable. It’s deci­sions like that that make me crazy. It’s absolutely the government’s respon­si­bil­ity to feed chil­dren prop­erly at school, 180 days a year. Properly means fresh food, cooked from scratch by some­one who cares. It’s not rocket sci­ence; it just takes train­ing for the cooks and edu­ca­tion for the kids. And yet school boards and gov­ern­ments resist. I give a lot of credit to Mayor Mike Bloomberg in New York City. Banning super­size fizzy drinks is bold and brilliant.”

Picky Eaters?

The tele­vi­sion series have been but one part of his work with food edu­ca­tion in schools. Jamie’s Kitchen Garden Project—operated through his char­ity, the Jamie Oliver Foundation—aims to help schools build the facil­i­ties and pro­vide train­ing and resources for teach­ing chil­dren the won­ders of grow­ing and cook­ing their own food. “Kids love grow­ing stuff,” Jamie said of the pro­gram. “And when they grow fruits and veg­eta­bles, they are really happy to eat fruits and veg­eta­bles. As the foun­da­tion expands, we hope to do more kitchen gar­dens too. In L.A. we put a gar­den into a school and the stu­dents took great pride in it.”

Despite the claims of par­ents to the con­trary, Jamie has always found chil­dren open to the idea of healthy food—when patience is uti­lized. “They are open to every­thing!” Jamie main­tained. “So many par­ents tell me that their kids just won’t eat any­thing. In my expe­ri­ence, whether in the UK or US, it sim­ply hasn’t been true. It takes some effort to get them to try new things, and they may not like every­thing, but there will always be some veg­etable or dish that the kids will eat.”

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Education and Training

Jamie’s train­ing has also extended to older stu­dents and young adults. A sec­ond pro­gram run out of the Jamie Oliver Foundation is the Fifteen Apprentice Program, which each year recruits 18 unem­ployed young peo­ple between the ages of 18 and 24 and puts them through an inten­sive 12-month appren­tice pro­gram at the Fifteen London restau­rant kitchen.

Jamie him­self has learned an inter­est­ing les­son from this program—that of sup­port for these peo­ple out­side the pro­gram itself. “I’ve learned that fam­ily is so impor­tant,” he observed. “What we real­ized is that the pro­gram can’t just be when the stu­dents are ‘at work.’ We need to cre­ate sup­port for them out­side of work too. Most of these kids have ter­ri­ble fam­ily sit­u­a­tions, and when we’ve been able to replace those with the Fifteen fam­ily and keep the pos­i­tive mes­sages com­ing, then the kids are more likely to suc­ceed in the long term—versus slip­ping back into their old habits.”

Another edu­ca­tional approach Jamie has uti­lized, called Jamie’s Ministry of Food, takes its inspi­ra­tion from a British ini­tia­tive dur­ing the Second World War. At that time of wide­spread short­ages and severe rationing, the gov­ern­ment set up a national net­work of food advi­sors and cook­ing teach­ers to edu­cate the pub­lic about food and nutri­tion so that they would be able feed them­selves prop­erly with the rations available.

In 2008 Jamie decided to rein­tro­duce this con­cept, open­ing cen­ters around the UK for cook­ing and food edu­ca­tion. According to Jamie’s web­site, the con­cept has now gone global and there are allied projects in Australia and the US.

“I’m still sur­prised that the gov­ern­ments aren’t fund­ing the pro­grams,” said Jamie. “We’ve shown them how the peo­ple love the classes, get new­found con­fi­dence, and make sig­nif­i­cant changes in their lives after just a few lessons. It seems a no-brainer for them to ded­i­cate a lit­tle money to putting cook­ing cen­ters all over the UK.”

In Los Angeles, the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation has set up a “Big Rig” Teaching Kitchen, a large mobile kitchen that has tra­versed the Greater Los Angeles Area host­ing cook­ing classes for chil­dren and adults alike. The big rig has aver­aged 320 stu­dents per week. “The truck is killing it in Los Angeles,” Jamie reported. “The US Foundation team has cre­ated these fan­tas­tic classes that the kids and par­ents love.”

It is evi­dent that Jamie’s mes­sage con­tin­ues to spread far and wide. A few months ago, Food Revolution Day saw events stand­ing up for real food in over 500 cities, in more than 60 coun­tries around the world.

One would think, with all Jamie is doing—and we didn’t men­tion his two new first-class restau­rants and many of his other activities—that he would have some favorites.

This is not the case, when we directly asked him about it. “Oh, mate, there is no way I could pos­si­bly answer that ques­tion,” Jamie replied. “I’m very lucky because I love almost every­thing I am doing. I love work­ing with the new restau­rants, Jamie’s Italian and Union Jack’s; I love writ­ing the books and mak­ing telly. Although the cam­paign shows are pretty rough on me, I can look back and be proud of what I accom­plished. The foun­da­tions are really start­ing to kick off, which has been fun—the first Food Revolution Day took place in more than 60 coun­tries. I was so hon­ored and proud that peo­ple care that much about real food to take the time to be part of it.”

For more infor­ma­tion on Jamie Oliver and his many endeav­ors, visit www.jamieoliver.com and www.jamiesfoodrevolution.com. Also, Visit NaturalVitalityLiving.com for some quick and easy recipes from Jamie.