I meet Jamie Oliver on his first morning back at work after he has become, at 41, a dad for the fifth and, he insists, final time. He’s spent the weekend co-hosting his annual Big Feastival at friend Alex James’s farm in Oxfordshire. It’s nine in the morning outside a photographer’s studio in north London and Oliver suggests we sit on a junked sofa in the sun, apologising if he sounds a bit groggy – blame wife Jools’s heroic efforts to get three-week-old River Rocket on to a “hybrid Gina Ford regime”, and his DJ stint in Feastival’s cheese tent the day before, where he shared billing with Tinie Tempah and the Proclaimers. Despite his apologies, he need never really fret about losing his focus. Once he starts talking, all the familiar Essex energy kicks in, and after a rare month away from it, he is back doing what he does best: evangelising compulsively about good food.
I spent some time with Oliver for OFM four years ago, and got a sense of the full, plate-spinning frenzy of the life he had so cheerfully made for himself: the spread of his school-dinner initiatives to 80 countries, his plans for a global restaurant empire to fund his food standards work, his stand-offs with processing factories and governments on four continents, his initiative to bring cooking skills into the classroom and into impoverished adult lives – not to mention his inevitable latest book and TV show. Back then, I was impressed by his ambition and heart, but also feared a little that he would never be able to keep it all going.
Talking to him now, it seems Oliver has responded to those spread-himself-too-thinly challenges in two ways. Firstly, by becoming a bit smarter in how he manages his time. And secondly, by trying to learn from every scrap of campaigning experience he has picked up since he first stopped being the cheeky chappie Naked Chef and opened Fifteen, his social enterprise restaurant, in 2002.
It doesn’t mean he is doing any less, though. The last year has seen Jamie’s Italian grow to 64 restaurants across the world. He has been to South Korea and Greece and Costa Rica in search of the secrets of longevity for his Super Food series, and he has almost singlehandedly put the problems associated with sugar at the top of the UK public-health agenda, culminating in former chancellor George Osborne including a revolutionary sugar tax in his final budget. Oliver is proud of all of these things, he tells me, in the morning sunshine, but at the moment he is proudest of all of improving the lives of 46 million Brazilian chickens.
If there has been a change in his approach, he says, it is a focus on measurable outcomes rather than the uncertainties of protest. His work with the Brazilian poultry producer Sadia, which farms a staggering 18% of all the world’s chickens, is a case in point. Oliver has a strong profile in Brazil from his TV shows and he was approached by the food processing giant to see if he would do a marketing campaign. Sadia may have thought they were signing up to a brand endorsement, a bit of culture change and some warm words; in fact, Oliver insists, it’s never that simple.
He has become expert in knowing how this corporate dance works. “We paint them this beautiful picture of what good could look like,” he says, of his methods. “And then we make it clear that if you want to do business with us, it is going to be extremely awkward for you.”
Sadia, like all the companies Oliver works with – including big supermarket chains in Canada and Australia – had to sign up to a complex programme his team has developed over 10 years called Josie; the Jamie Oliver Supplier Information Exchange. It effectively monitors the supply chain from e-numbers to additives to mechanically reclaimed meat and animal welfare. “Sadia had to hit all of the welfare points before we put our name to it,” he says, “and we monitor their promises closely.”
The contract is worth a reported £11.5m, though Oliver doesn’t expect to see any of the money personally. “Beyond keeping our commercial cogs moving, the money doesn’t matter to me any more. What does is that this is the best bit of agricultural work I have done.”
What does it mean for the Brazilian chickens?
“When we started to look, the standards were lower than Red Tractor standards in the UK,” he says, “but still safe and legal. Now they have natural light, we have changed stocking density so there is much less cannibalism, much less disease, all these things. The chickens are at RSPCA Freedom Food standards, which is the best scalable model. But, above all, it creates a welfare story in a country that doesn’t have one.”
Oliver has learned to love the simple magic of making small changes at scale. “You can do the street food and farmers’ markets and Feastivals,” he says, “and that’s beautiful. The question for me now, though, is about how many of these standards can you get into all food production – then that becomes an incredible story.”
His gift for telling those kinds of stories has long been amplified across multiple platforms. Instagram is his favourite – “it’s a nicer space than Twitter – it’s much harder to be mean-spirited and angry in pictures than words”. And the sheer immediacy of the message doesn’t cease to amaze him. As a case in point, the previous week he’d come up with a neat little invention, a one-egg omelette for his daughter Petal’s breakfast, cooked quite fiercely in a large pan and with just a few crumbs of cheddar and a pinch of pepper and then rolled like a little scarf and added to a piece of toast. He thought it a thing of beauty – “the proteins were so blond” – called it a “silky omelette” and posted the “recipe” on Instagram. A day later it had received 2.5 million views and counting. He has become an instinctive connoisseur of media and messages. “I know now if I write something slightly wrong it doesn’t go viral but if I spend a bit of time getting it right, it goes nuts.” (That power, for better and worse, is demonstrated a couple of weeks after we meet when Oliver succeeds in “uniting the Spanish nation against him” in so-called “Paellagate”)
In the early Channel 4 days when journalists used to sit Oliver down and ask what he was up to, he’d say, “I’m the British food ambassador.” If that sounded bolshie, what he meant was he’d be on all these talk shows around the world, Jay Leno, Letterman, and every single time they would start with a gag about how bad British food was.
“I would spend the first third of the interview arguing it was really not shit,” he says, “and then try to cook something great to prove the point.” These days, the ambassadorial boast is not an idle one. For the sugar tax announcement, he was at the World Health Assembly in Geneva and the health ministers from 156 countries were there listening.
“Without sounding too pompous, I gave George [Osborne], bless him, the narrative,” he says, “the whole medical story, the health data. But still, George was brave enough to do it. And he won himself the ovations for it.”
Oliver is less hopeful about the new government – one of Theresa May’s first acts as prime minister was to dilute the “obesity strategy” that had been all but signed off by the Cameron government. “I want her to succeed,” Oliver says. “But it was a terrible start. I will probably see her in a month and she will tell me the reasons why she compromised so much she turned something of value for the nation’s health into something of no value whatsoever.” And then his fight will start again.
I have a sense that he is more accepting of his vocation these days, having passed 40. Would it be fair to say that what seemed a bit like a burden now weighs less heavily since he has realised it is a lifelong commitment?
“Absolutely. You can guarantee that. I am not going anywhere. When I did the sugar campaign I never thought I would get the tax so quickly. But I thought I could get it eventually. We are always trying to plan further ahead. We really want to think more strategically, but to be honest we haven’t yet got beyond kick, bollock, scramble.”
He’s been spending a bit of time in the past couple of years with people over 100 years old, trying to learn their diet secrets. The thing that he has taken away is a very clear sense that it is not how long you live but how well you live that counts.
“I hung out in Korea with a 117-year-old woman,” he says, with a laugh. “I remember very clearly the first time I touched a 100-year-old, if that doesn’t sound weird. It’s hard not to respect all that life. And I’d be asking my questions … Two eggs every day? What oils do you use? All that.”
Has he been struck by a sense of his own mortality, turning 40?
“To be honest, I have always been quite sentimental about that stuff,” he says. “It goes back to family, to Essex. Despite all that I’ve learned, my general litmus is, if I am honest with myself, gut feeling. I have always known the things that we have tried that would go pear. They never felt right.”
Where does he think that gut feeling for what will work, what will seduce and engage people, comes from?
“Somewhere in there is the experience of growing up in a pub,” he says. “I still think a good pub is the most democratic place in the world. We had businessmen, Gypsies, farmers, pensioners, teenagers, whatever, all talking.”
He can’t help thinking the gift of understanding that dynamic is in his blood.
“When I set up Fifteen,” he says, “which is one of the best things I have done, it was like I felt I had to. My dad only ever earned a hard quid, and then, at 20-odd, his son lucks out and sells all these books. I spent it all on Fifteen and I was really close to bankruptcy. In the back of my mind was my great-great grandfather who kept the Ten Bells on Spitalfields market – and did a soup kitchen on the side for recent immigrants, Portuguese Jews and whatever. In my romantic way I like to think that is deep within me. You can’t run a good pub without caring about the whole community, the whole village …”
And, he might add, the whole wide world.
