William Leith 

‘Rich people have never had it better. The poor have never had it worse’

Since he first hit our TV screens, Jamie Oliver has been loved, loathed and, most recently, respected. Ten years later and passionate as ever, he tells William Leith about his ambition to become the government's food tsar.
  
  


Sitting at a chunky pine table in his big London office, Jamie Oliver describes himself as 'relaxed'. It's 9.30 in the morning, and I wonder what he had for breakfast.

'I can tell you what I would like to have had,' he says. His voice is cheerful Estuary; his hair blond and messy. 'I've got an Aga, right. What you do, to start off, is you put a crumpet on the right-hand side of the Aga. Also, I'll be completely honest; I've never been able to poach an egg.'

He is far from relaxed.

'Never. I gave up doing it about three years ago. I was just fed up with seeing Gary Rhodes make a whirlpool and plop the egg in and get it perfect.'

Ten seconds into the interview, and here is the essential Jamie Oliver. He's an accomplished chef who would like you to believe he has trouble poaching an egg; he's a geezer with an Aga; he's the subject of an interview who likes to control the conversation. His office, by the way, is huge, and full of media-types working on Jamie projects. Every so often, he jovially shouts something at them, such as does anybody have this or that Jamie-based book or tape. They shout back, happy with the attention.

Jamie continues. 'But then a week ago,' he tells me, 'I poached a perfect egg.'

His entire philosophy, you might say, boils down to this: if you try hard enough, you can learn to cook, and if people learned to cook, no matter how poor they were, they could always eat well. In fact, Jamie believes that poor people's food is better than rich people's food, and has been throughout history. He once explained this to me, and it's because poor people are always forced to improvise, and become creative, whereas rich people have servants, who cook them rubbish.

'Anyway, when I poached this egg,' says Jamie, 'what I did was I fried smoked rashers of bacon in a pan, I got one beautiful crumpet, tiny bit of butter, put a few rashers of bacon on the crumpet, and a little blob of HP Sauce...'

Jamie's cooking has always been about doing things as quickly and easily as they can be done, without losing the essential dish. He knows that his job, as a communicator of food, is not to expand the horizons of connoisseurs, but to get people to cook nice things who otherwise would have cooked horrible things. The first time I met him, he said, 'My formula's not rocket science. Absolutely not, and never has been. It's accessible, tasty, non-purist. The British public don't care if you're 100 per cent right. They want to know maximum impact, minimum effort.'

Now he says, 'So you've got the crumpet, the butter, bacon, sauce, right, and when you cut into the egg, it fills up every little hole in the crumpet. And it's like...'

At this point, Jamie makes sub-orgasmic noises. One thing about him is that he's very extrovert, and, like all extroverts, likes showing off in front of an audience.

And his audience has grown and grown. His career has been unlike many people's - first, he was loved, like a new puppy, and then he was hated, absolutely loathed by the press in particular, and now he's loved again, and also respected. Everybody says it was the School Dinners campaign that turned him around. And he certainly needed it; it's easy to forget how low he sank in 2000 and 2001.

Five years on, and here he is aged 30, the winner of the OFM Outstanding Achievement Award. Giorgio Locatelli said, 'As a father, I think it is great that Jamie got people thinking about the food that we feed children, that, in itself, is worth an award.' Gordon Ramsay said that 'Jamie scared the living daylights out of parents. Job very well done.'

But he's never been as popular as he is now, and there's something strange about this popularity. What I mean is that a lot of people love him. All is forgiven. For instance, when he killed a sheep, on camera, in his last series, the controversy was tiny. A few months ago, I interviewed him on stage, in an event organised by his publisher. Jamie was going to talk to an audience about food, and sign some copies of his new book, Jamie's Italy. A thousand people turned up. This, remember, was about a hardback cookery book. And when Jamie walked on stage, there was this screaming, a sort of girlie Beatlemania noise. And just about everybody in the audience was over 25.

Anyway, it's 9.30 in the morning, and Jamie Oliver has just had his breakfast, which was not the bacon, the egg and the crumpet. 'That's what I wanted,' he tells me, 'but time wasn't on my side.' So what did he actually have?

'An apple.'

No, he's not relaxed. He's not relaxed at all.

'There are definitely two Jamies,' he says expansively. The first Jamie, he explains, would like to be 'tucked up in my own restaurant committed to nothing other than that and my family'. We all know about his family. He's been with the same girl, Jools, for ever. She was a researcher on one of his early TV shows. He used to drive a Maserati, and then a Porsche, and then a scooter. It was on this scooter, an Aprilia, that he dashed across London carrying his own semen, in an effort, eventually successful, to get Jools pregnant. Now they have two daughters and live in Primrose Hill, north London.

The main thing about the first Jamie is that he's excited by food. When he describes the act of making a meal, something comes over him, almost a kind of lust, and he's there, doing it, moving his hands around, rubbing imaginary ingredients between his fingers. The first time I met him, he told me something he'd just discovered about roast chicken, and it was as if he'd found the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. He was more than excited. He talked about 'a fucking...little...fragrant...time bomb!' The thing he'd discovered was that, if you boil the lemon for a while, and then puncture it, and then put it into the chicken, the lemon flavour goes deeper into the meat. 'It's... just incredible,' he told me.

Roast chicken is a very emotional meal for Jamie, because of deep Sunday-lunch family connections, and because roasting meat was the first thing he ever did that got real praise from his father. But then again, Italian food makes Jamie come over all emotional, too, because he went to Italy recently, on a proper chef's tour, the most grown-up he's been. He really saw the food from the outside, and understands it with a foreigner's zeal. He also loves it, and he wishes that we could be like them, with serious regional dishes and poor people haggling with butchers and greengrocers, rather than just buying ready meals and getting fat.

For a while, we talk about risotto. Jamie cooks the rice with the stock, sometimes throws in a handful of peas towards the end, and adds the Parmesan after he's turned the heat off, but before the risotto leaves the pan. 'I add it not as a cheese, but as a seasoning,' he tells me. 'It's quite salty. But it's the fattiness in your mouth. When you put it in your mouth, it just works.'

Jamie says, 'Some combinations were born to work. Peas and mint. Peas, mint and goat's cheese. Parsley and garlic. Pork, butter, thyme. It's funny, because people like Heston Blumenthal have proved that pretty much anything can work, but the truth is that some things... well, the Big Man Upstairs just wanted it to work.'

He says, 'Give me an ingredient.'

'Mushrooms.'

'Right. Give me another random ingredient.'

'Bacon.'

'Well, there's something about pigs and mushrooms that work anyway. You think of wild boars and truffles. Once you've rendered fat out of a bit of bacon, to cook mushrooms in it would generally be nice. And some thyme and rosemary - that's gonna work. Now give me something more challenging.'

'Sea bass.'

'And?'

'Cabbage.'

'And?'

'Sweet potatoes.'

'Right, that's interesting. That's a bastard, that is. That's a real hard one. Um. How can we make that work? Well, that's a bloody tough one, that is. Sweet potatoes are really clumsy, clumsy vegetables. Delicious, but... well, it would be nice to eat seabass and greens and sweet potatoes, but it's not a symphony. What I was trying to prove to you was how you could link things together with a couple of ingredients. But saying that, I've just pissed on my chips, as my mother used to say.'

For a while, the first Jamie and I talk about the making of food; he describes a pasta sauce he made for his wife the night before, which has a mixture of tuna and pilchards, sweeter than just tuna, and is cooked in oil with cinnamon and lemon zest, another magic combination Jamie loves at the moment. And he tells me about 'the most emotional risotto he's ever made', on a hilltop in Italy when he was doing his Italian series. The emotional thing was that a shepherd turned up out of the blue, with a flock of sheep, and ate it, more or less silently, and swigged a copious quantity of Jamie's wine, and then just walked away.

But it's not long before the second Jamie puts in an appearance. The first Jamie is enthusiastic about food, and loves making it; the second Jamie is angry about food, because people in this country eat so badly. He's angry because food, to him, seems such a simple and positive thing, and he can't understand why a whole nation would mess it up, and he's also angry because, in a way, the fact that good food is not taken seriously feels like a personal snub.

'In Italy and France,' he says, 'poor people eat well. And they will duck and dive, they will get down the markets, they'll slow-cook organic meat, and they'll only have it three times a week, but they do really well out of it. And here, our perception of value is confused. It's all about, 'Fuck, that's cheap, so cheap I can afford to have another pint.' He says, 'As brilliant as the past 10 years have been, the truth is that probably 85 per cent of the country don't cook that often. It's all polarised. Rich middle-class people have never had it better. And poor people have never had it worse.'

Every so often, he apologises. He keeps saying, 'Sorry - I'm ranting.' He tells me not to quote him when he curses too much. He develops his theme, getting more and more animated. As he keeps saying, the problem of nutrition is very easily solved. But circumstances conspire against it. He tells me that, when he lived in east London, a lot of his neighbours were unemployed. And what was in their trolleys? Packets of processed food. Nothing fresh.

'It's cheaper to buy raw ingredients,' he says. 'And it's tastier. And it's better for you. But there's one thing missing in this country, which is the knowledge to turn a beef shin and two carrots and an onion and water and a pinch of salt and pepper into an incredible glippy bastard of a stew that you just wanna mop up with some good bread that costs bugger all and will feed eight people.'

So why can't we cook? One of the reasons is that children are taught very little about cooking in school. Jamie says, 'Twenty years of governments don't see a serious place for food. We've given up teaching kids how to cook at school. How can that be unimportant? How can looking after yourself and, most important, just prepping you in the bare essentials to be a young parent not be a part of it?'

This second, ranting Jamie waves his hands around. 'What the hell is that all about?' he says. 'It's moronsville. Total moronsville. One: learning to cook is not compulsory. Oh, yes, it should be. If you want to have an NHS that can stand up to the next 50 years, oh yes it should be. Basically, diet-related problems affect about 75 per cent of everything that goes through a hospital. This is major. This is hard-core. If you speak to anyone who knows anything about obesity and heart disease, they will give you the hard stats. And we do nothing about it.'

This idea, that cooking should be taught in school, looks like it might be his next big thing. 'Look,' he says, 'We're getting all excited about the Olympics. But we're the most unhealthy country in Europe. It's ridiculous. It's unfair. It's not right. And no one's in charge. No one's in charge, to say to anyone, at any level, "No, you're wrong, you're totally wrong." The thing about kids is that they're creatures of habit.' And what he wants to do is to change their habits. I can feel another series coming on.

What were Jamie's habits as a kid? He grew up fairly wealthy, the son of a publican and restaurateur. Jamie's father ran The Cricketers in Clavering, Essex, one of the first gastropubs in the country. The food was robust and decent without being poncy; you can see its influence throughout Jamie's books. The Cricketers was about roast meat, and good sandwiches, and big, fat burgers the size of cricket balls. Jamie helped a lot in the kitchen, mucking in, clearing plates, hauling kitchen trash.

'You know,' he once told me, trying to sum up his childhood in a froth of words, 'food, local vegetables, local community, chefs, chefs' regalia, all that shit, dad going to market, all that was normal, Lego, Meccano, kitchen, food. Lived and breathed it. Had no choice.'

But he didn't do well at school. When he talks about his younger, pre-TV self, he's usually rather self-deprecating. When I asked him what subjects he was bad at, he said, 'Everything.' Then he said, 'I got an A in art. I assure you that I'm crap at art. But I tried hard. And art's very subjective.' He described his art as 'a load of shit, but subjective shit. I couldn't draw to save my life, so I did T-shirts and sculpture and montages - stuff that would divert their eye from the fact that I absolutely couldn't draw.'

He told me about two important moments in his childhood. The first was when he made a sandwich for another boy - 'a skinny little runt. Lovely boy, though. He'd lived on jam sarnies all his life. I know what the kid used to eat. Just jam sarnies - and bad jam, and bad bread. Jamie made him a smoked salmon sandwich. 'Good brown bread, fucking nice, beautiful, smoked, dry-cured salmon, salt, and lemon juice. I know what it's like to eat it. And this kid - his face exploded.'

The other important moment concerns the first meal he ever cooked - a roast chicken. Jamie was 13. At the time, he was in a remedial English class. 'Everything was academic and I'm not good at academic at all,' he told me. But he made this meal for his father, who was, of course, a chef.

'I had a fantastic dad,' said Jamie, 'I mean he certainly wasn't detrimental or critical about me. But because I wasn't ever a kid who did very well at school, I wasn't used to shit-loads of praise.

I cooked this meal and he just patted me on the back and said, "Well done, son, that was flipping amazing."'

You wonder what Jamie's childhood would have been like if cooking had been compulsory at school. He'd have felt a lot better about himself. In any case, he left school at 16, went to catering college, and got a job in the kitchen of the River Café in Chelsea, which is where he first got spotted by a TV producer. What was he like? Rose Gray, one of the chef/proprietors at the River Café and Jamie's first boss, described the 20-year-old Jamie as 'a chirpy little boy'. When it came to food, she told me, he was 'intuitive'. You can describe a dish to him, she said, in terms of taste and consistency, and he'll work out a way to cook it. She described his food as 'eclectic'. When I asked her how she would describe him as a chef, one of the words she used was 'Australian'.

It's 10 years since Jamie made The Naked Chef. 'When I look back on it,' he says, 'I think: funny haircut and all that, but that was me when I was 21, and I was being probably like you were when you were 21. I suppose I can make all the excuses I like. But that was me. But the one thing I did - it was me, at home, my friends, my family, down the market, people that I had relationships with, and sort of breaking it down in ways people could understand - people like students and young parents, not just food lovers.'

He sits in his big office, waving his arms around, generally happy with himself, less and less relaxed as the interview goes on. He has a frighteningly busy day - photo session, some writing, a consultation with Sainsbury's 'to talk about fish'.

But what he really wants to talk about is what he might be able to do in the next decade. He wants cookery to be taught in schools as a compulsory subject. Of course, when people learn about food, they learn about other important things, too - geography, for instance, and history.

'Let's do this properly,' says Jamie. 'Crack team. Headhunt, headhunt. This is Great Britain. We used to be able to do this stuff. That's my dream. Do it properly. If they wanted me. Time, for free. Unconditionally. For as long as you want.'

He looks at me and says, 'There. I'm ranting again.' OFM

· Fifteen in Cornwall opens on 18 May.

 

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