Review by
DAVID SEXTONLAST WEEK, the telly chefs began their annual assault on the Christmas best-seller charts. Rick Stein, Gary Rhodes and Nigella Lawson all launched their latest recipe books – but the one to watch remains Jam
ie Oliver, because he at least is doing something different to the rest.
Naturally, it ties into a new TV show. In 2006, the Jamie's School Dinners campaign to improve the school meals system resulted in angry parents in Rawmarsh, near Rotherham, in South Yorkshire, supplying their children with contraband burgers and chips over the school wall. "Children are locked up like caged animals inside there, starving all day," complained one mum, Julie Critchlow, furiously blaming Jamie Oliver. "It's him that started it."
Oliver's response was to go to Rotherham, meet these women and set up his "Ministry of Food" there, giving cookery classes and trying to change attitudes. It was, in a way, quite a punchy thing for him to do. He has now, he says, made friends with Ms Critchlow, and there's a double-page picture of her sitting in her untended garden with a plate of "vegetable jalfrezi curry which I made from scratch – I'd never done that before as it's always been out of a jar or a takeaway".
Oliver remains an odd mixture himself. On the one hand, he is a genuinely impressive campaigner, trying, where governments have failed, to improve food standards and train up duff youths. On the other, he's big business, with the TV shows, books and Sainsbury's ads.
There's quite a sense of strain here as he introduces his Ministry of Food concept. "Hi, guys – I'd like to ask you a favour: I need your help with a new food movement I've started," he begins, perennially bloke. He's had the front to copy the Ministry of Food set up so successfully to improve diet in the Second World War, no less.
"It's such a shame that it takes a bloody world war to focus people's attention on health, but we have a modern day war on our hands now and it's over the epidemic of bad health and the rise of obesity. We eat more ready meals than the rest of Europe put together and have the highest obesity levels," he points out, predicting: "This will be the first generation of British children to live shorter lives than their parents."
His solution – "the pass it on pledge" – looks a bit implausible. In an attempt to create the basic cookery culture this country lacks, he urges his readers to learn a recipe from the book and then "pass it on". In fact, he's actually printed a pledge in the book for readers to sign. So it's an attempt at pyramid selling, or viral marketing, of cookery skills.
After this effortful intro, Jamie's Ministry of Food swiftly turns into just another Jamie cookbook, albeit with a Fifties-nostalgia design and fewer pictures of himself than usual. Instead, the illustrations show the food being prepared step by step. Interspersed with the recipes are big, slightly Martin Parr-style photos, by David Loftus and Chris Terry, of people presumably all from Rotherham and soon to be on our screens, testifying to what a difference being "passed on" a recipe has made to them.
Oliver makes, by the way, little fuss about food sourcing, other than to say bacon should be "preferably free-range or organic", and there's no calorie-counting either (he includes a monstrously fatty recipe for serving a baked whole Camembert on pasta). The aim is just to get people cooking for themselves – and, yes, if he does tempt even a few thousand families to try that for the first time, he'll have made a difference and deserves congratulation.
The full article contains 645 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
