Last month marked the 10th anniversary of Jamie Oliver's restaurant Fifteen. At a dinner to celebrate the occasion he stood up and addressed a room full of friends and supporters. The meal had been cooked by five of the original 15 "graduates" of the restaurant, who a decade ago had swapped lives that had been derailed or drifting for the discipline and opportunity of the kitchen, and the TV series that attended it. Oliver is an emotional speaker at any time but the anniversary had been made doubly poignant by the recent suicide of one of that original cohort, Kevin Boyle. When Oliver stood up he talked about the fact that 340 young people had now gone through the Fifteen kitchens, in London, Cornwall and Amsterdam; he talked about the culture of mentoring that the restaurants had fostered, about the high excitement and "brilliant risk" of the launch, and he also talked about Kevin.
On the wall of the restaurant is a framed photograph of the original group of Fifteen and Oliver went through them one by one outlining with a paternal kind of pride what they had gone on to achieve. "Ralph I saw two months ago in New York, head chef of the Spotted Pig, with a Michelin star, just moved to LA to do his own thing. Ben is sous chef at Fifteen Cornwall, so they are starting to come back in the family. Tim here is one of our great young talents, owner of the fabulous Trullo up the road. Warren is running the Anchor & Hope doing just an incredible job. Kerryann is a full-time mum at the moment but helping in the community in Hackney showing people how to cook…" He then looked at the next face and tried to collect himself, failed and went on anyway with his voice cracking and his eyes filling with tears. "And then there is Kevin here, whose mum and dad are sitting over there. Sadly Kevin is not with us. We lost him but he was a beautiful boy and a great, great talent and one thing I know for sure is he would have just loved being here tonight…"
By the time of that dinner I have spent quite a lot of time trying to get the measure of what Jamie Oliver is about these days. I've been up to his Ministry of Food in Bradford, I've watched a group of kids at the Lilian Baylis school in Kennington (about which Conversative MP Oliver Letwin once said he would rather beg on the streets than send his kids to) making cakes as part of the Home Cooking Skills qualification, and talking passionately about their ambitions to be chefs; I've spoken to headteachers who have signed up to the latest Oliver initiative for school kitchen gardens; I've eaten in his restaurants and cooked from his books, and flipped through some of his magazines. I've watched him on YouTube giving a TED lecture to Bill Gates and Al Gore among others, and I've re-watched him scolding American moms for feeding their children Coke in babies bottles, and berating corporate executives for dishing up "pink slime". I've also sat down for an hour or two with Oliver himself, before and after another long-haul mission to spread the gospel of his food revolution in South Korea and Australia.
For all that, though, it is when I talk to Kevin Boyle's mother Patti, after the dinner, that I properly understand what it all might mean.
Kevin Boyle took his own life after being diagnosed with diabetes, the latest in a lifetime of physical setbacks, and one he feared might take away his opportunity of doing what he lived for, cooking, and moreover, cooking with Jamie. "As I said at my son's funeral," Patti Boyle recalls, proud and heartbroken, "we had struggled on our own with Kevin, for a long time. It was Fifteen that actually gave him another 10 years. For that I will be eternally grateful to Jamie. Kevin was an amazingly generous person, but very troubled. The goodbye letters that he wrote to us, he wrote in church. The funny thing was that his friends there who saw him writing said they just thought he was writing menus as usual…"
Kevin Boyle had holes in his heart, he was an asthmatic, he had a speech impediment, he had problems with his ears, and he had all the difficulties that come with depression. He never thought he would achieve anything much until he started to cook. After Fifteen he worked at Le Caprice and Smiths of Smithfield. He cooked for the Prince of Wales and the prime minister. But he never really left Fifteen. "If Kevin had a couple of weeks off or was between jobs he would just come in and volunteer," Oliver recalls. "At the last student graduation in October, he was setting up for the night, he was serving drinks and looking after people and he was last man here at one in the morning stacking chairs." When Boyle died, Oliver went through all the emails they had exchanged in the last few years. "It was immensely sad, just because he was always so positive, always writing about how we could help other people. Nothing about himself or what he was going through."
When it came to Kevin's funeral, Patti Boyle became a bit frantic about catering, knowing that her son would have wanted to put on a proper spread. But Oliver already had all that in hand, and organised the lot in a way that would have made Kevin proud. "The thing about Jamie," she says, "is that because he has been turned into a brand, people forget he is still a human being, and quite a remarkable human being. For all that Kevin and the others learned, I also think Jamie learned a lot from them about what could be achieved by working together. As he said at Kevin's memorial, when he started out at Fifteen you would never have got those people in the same room, let alone working with each other, but by the time they left they were the firmest of friends." She gestures around the restaurant itself. "You know what this place is, it's a little bit of light in a lot of people's worlds."
To understand anything about Oliver you have to start with Fifteen. It is really where it all began for him, he believes. It's when he turned from a celebrity chef on a scooter to one-man global food missionary. He was 25, not that much older than the unemployed teenagers he had taken on. He had already done three series of The Naked Chef, after being spotted working on the grill at The River Café by a smart Channel 4 producer looking for a new TV cook in 1998. His series had gone all round the world, there had been books, but the money had only just started coming through. To start Fifteen he mortgaged his house against the restaurant without telling his wife, Jools. "It was a moment of madness really," he says now. "But I was a kid with a new lump of cash and thought, sod it."
Cynics will say that nothing Oliver does is without a knock-on commercial advantage but he is unrepentant about what success has allowed him to achieve. If Fifteen had just been a one-off, he says, then his detractors might have had a point. In fact he has trained his 30 or more chefs a year out of his own pocket, at £25,000 each. Most of them came to him through the parole service. Three quarters still work in the industry, many highly successfully. "Back in the first three years the tabloids were always running 'exposés' of how so and so has been on drugs or has a record for robbery from before they came to Fifteen," he says. "It took a lot of years to explain, 'Yes these are the people we are trying to get involved. Kids from prison or kids from broken homes or just kids that needed a break.'"
Talking to Oliver you quickly realise that the reason he knew for sure that food could change people's lives, and bring them together, was that his own life has been changed so immeasurably by it. He has faith in his recruits at Fifteen because he could have been one of them himself. When he was at secondary school, he recalls, he was in special needs classes for maths and anything involving reading and writing. "The only things I got any marks in were art and geology which were the only subjects I did that had any practical hands-on aspect to them. I loved school, but I was rubbish at it. Luckily I was cooking from the age of eight and it stopped me resenting that experience."
At the Lilian Baylis school there are plenty of kids who were just like Oliver once was. The children in Miss Rusling's cooking class have a bit of a reputation in school, several are on statements, most had behavioural issues when it came to maths and English and history, but for the hour in which I was with them, and they were working on their cooking, you could hardly have hoped to see a more engaged group of 14-year-olds. While they mixed their ingredients they were talking about the meals they had cooked at home in the previous week, shepherd's pies and curries. Before the school adopted Oliver's curriculum they would have been taught "food technology" which, as Rusling explains, was all about how food was produced: "They were asked, 'How can you market an omelette?' when many of them didn't know what an omelette was. They were supposed to be designing pizza boxes and so on…"
Oliver, having spent a lot of time in schools working on his healthy school lunches programmes, realised that part of the problem was that children had no direct experience of making food. "School cooking lessons weren't sufficient – you would have crap pictures of lemons on the page and yet no lemons in the classroom. That is one of the issues that we have tried to address."
For Oliver, of course, the issues don't stop coming. In his office behind Fifteen in Islington, among a creative-looking jumble of current preoccupations, page proofs, thank-you letters, magazine covers and plans for his next book (of 15-minute suppers), he smiles at the idea that any of what he does is really planned. "I really wish it was Jamie Oliver the brand," he says. "But it really isn't like that at all. It has always felt more like a pinball sort of journey than any smooth career, I mean pinging between things that interest you, and anger you. In the mind of the public, I obviously work at a certain noisy level. But in my own brain everything I do still seems quite intimate and small, and parochial in a way. I still hope that by doing little things they can have a big consequence."
It is quite startling to realise just how far Oliver's parochial message has spread. His books sell in more than 100 countries. Four or five million people each month from across the globe use his website as a forum for all food-related information and discussion and recipes. One thing leads to another. The British School Dinners series was shown in 80 countries, and has resulted in "debates in parliaments where there wasn't even a school meal system. It got people talking about hospital and prison food, all these institutions, and had people asking whether any of these places were being catered to by forward-thinking people or by box-ticking procurement machines who bought any old shit".
When he talks about some of this, for all his relentless positive energy, I can't help detecting a background note of weariness. The first time I meet him he is full of flu – "the only time it's ever happened to me" – and is contemplating his flight to Australia. When I ask if he feels that the responsibility for global nutrition that he seems to have taken on seems onerous, he doesn't disagree too strongly. But he is not about to give up on it. "You can't just stir all this up and then walk away," he says, more than once.
His Ministry of Food projects are a case in point. I visited the one in Bradford, in a shop on the high street, and sat in while an animated group of men and women each made a Jamie Oliver jambalaya on eight hobs. They had come for different reasons – a couple of men had recently retired and wanted to know their way around a kitchen, some of the women were embarrassed that they hadn't had the confidence to make dinner for their children at home – but they now all shared this in common: six weeks earlier they hadn't been able to cook, and now they could, and they not only took a great deal of satisfaction in that, they were evangelical about teaching others.
Soraya Overend, who has run the Bradford Ministry for the three years it has been open, explains how they run sessions for boys who have been in young offenders institutes, for recent widowers, for mothers who don't know the basics and children who want to learn, and corporate groups who want to build teams. Since day one the courses have been hugely oversubscribed; the comments book is full of the most heartfelt praise. The Bradford centre is mostly funded by the council; elsewhere, in Leeds for example, the local NHS trust helps out. But funding is at best erratic, and Oliver's hopes to have a ministry in every city have not materialised. He seems tired at having to make the arguments again. "It doesn't cost much money. Whereas the problems it addresses – chronic health issues related to bad diet, and obesity – cost us all a huge amount of money. It's clearly working. So, I ask politicians, 'Are you going to crack on with it?' They tell me no, we want to have your name above it. Well, if it's got my name above it then I need to be in charge of all the standards. So then all of a sudden I became responsible for yet another thing…"
You hesitate to ask Oliver if he is spreading himself too thin because it is obviously the argument that he has with himself all the time. For a person who seems almost clinically optimistic, it is hard for him to let any opportunity to sell his message about eating well go by. It was the reason he took his school dinners road show to America, to the corporatised fast-food belly of the beast, with predictably incendiary results. Wasn't there a voice in his head telling him he couldn't take on the whole world?
"Of course. And America is the worst use of my time commercially, let alone in terms of my family. But I was offered a primetime show on the biggest network in the country to talk about food politics, a subject that had hardly ever been aired at all on American television. So I had to do it."
His battle narrowed to a campaign against "pink slime" – the modified scrapings of carcasses that had once gone to dog food but had, due to an industrial rinsing process, become a component of three quarters of the "ground beef" in supermarkets and burgers. A couple of years after he aired the issue, Oliver is winning. Under unprecedented pressure from American consumers, some supermarkets and fast food chains, including McDonald's, have begun to drop products containing pink slime.
In his campaigning, Oliver is not afraid to play a long game, to get the facts out there any way he can and hope others take up the cause. His speech to America's 2,000 corporate leaders, that followed his $100,000 TED prize two years ago, resulted in 1,800 offers of partnership and support. If he has a vision for the next 10 years it is to get some of those up and running. If he has a plan, it often looks like working on everything all at once. "We have small teams working on various projects," he says. "We are currently trying to be robust in America and Australia." On his trip to Melbourne he signed off a £3m project funded by the state government and a corporate partner to establish Ministries of Food across Victoria. "But trying to be an octopus in all these places is almost impossible. And obviously I have a family as well. So I have had to make hard decisions about finding some time to be of some use at home. I feel I can't work any harder than I am because I have four young children of my own to look after, too…"
The Australian investment is something he is particularly enthusiastic about. "I often seem more welcome over there than I am here," he suggests. If he has lost any faith over the last decade it is in the efforts of British politicians to make a difference. Having fought to get minimum nutritional standards for school food universally agreed, he is now watching those standards be eroded by the academy system which allows schools to opt out of everything, including health guidelines.
"I'm apolitical," he says, "in that I haven't voted since I started being involved. I don't think it's a party political issue. It's a national issue and the arguments are clear. Me and Mr Gove haven't got very far on this one though. This mantra that we are not going to tell schools what to do just isn't good enough in the midst of the biggest fucking obesity epidemic ever. The public health of five million children shouldn't be left to luck or chance…"
Oliver believes that the dismantling by default of the child nutrition white paper is the single most dangerous thing the coalition has done. He is not going to give it up without a fight. He has urged cross-party support for a debate on the issue, which led to an early day motion from the Tory MP Zac Goldsmith. A global "Food Revolution Day", on 19 May, will boil down its British message to one word he suggests: "Gove."
"We don't want bullshit about the big society. We want a strategy to stop Britain being the fifth most unhealthy country in the world. The most unhealthy country in Europe. This is the first generation of kids expected to live not as long as their parents. Tell me, Mr Gove, Mr Lansley, how you plan to change that? Two out of five kids are obese. What is in your arsenal? The fact is, they are doing nothing…"
As he develops this rant, formidable in its frustration, I wonder if he believes his own perceived success has begun to get in the way of his message, that in the usual British way we half believe that with all his money he should be sorting out these problems himself?
He suggests that may be the case. And that is one of the reasons why he has been "quite commercial in the last four years" (he has opened 30 more Italian restaurants, and launched the Union Jack's chain alongside publishing the bestselling cookery book of all time, Jamie's Thirty Minute Meals). He suggests these ventures have begun to look like a means to an end. "Part of what I am trying to do now is to set up some really sustainable businesses so I can hive off some cash into pots to prove some of these ideas about children and food – school gardens, fresh and healthy eating, cooking skills – to a point where public opinion will be so strong that no politician dare argue. That's the vision for the next 10 years I guess. I want to really show them."
Oliver says this with all his usual laddish goodwill, but also with a note of adult resolve, as though it is his fate, somehow, not just his mission. What started 10 years ago for him with Fifteen, with a group of hard-to-reach kids like Kevin Boyle and a small, powerful idea about how food might change lives, has grown into something even Oliver with all the chutzpah going, couldn't quite have imagined, but which he is determined to advance. It is interesting to watch him go about his business, local and global, stirring things up as best he can. After a decade at the barricades, he remains hopeful that his revolution has only just begun.
