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I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
You know, some guests barely need an introduction, and Jamie Oliver, I think, is definitely one of them.
One of the most recognizable food personalities in the entire English-speaking world.
He's written nearly 30 cookbooks, selling over 50 million copies of them, the latest of which is called Eat Yourself Healthy.
He's made dozens of TV shows, opened restaurants around the world and channeled millions of dollars into childhood nutrition programs and job skills training programs for underserved communities.
But before all that, Jamie Oliver was just a kid, a cook in a neighborhood pub.
It's a great pleasure to have him in the studio with me today, to spend the hour together and to get his story.
Jamie Oliver, it is great to meet you.
Thanks for coming by.
Thank you so much for having me.
I am super excited to talk with you.
I've obviously known of you for a long time.
And actually, I was thinking about this the other day and it just occurred to me.
You are 50 years old.
50 is the new 30.
You look terrific.
But I was thinking about it because you were one of the chefs featured on this show, Chef's Table Legends, right?
And the other chefs were, you know, you're senior by 20 years.
How does it feel to be called a legend?
You know what?
It was lovely.
It was really, really nice.
I hadn't really.
In my 30-year career I've only just started being retrospective and looking back.
And in some regards, to do that because I've always made like part of my creative process is I've always made my own programs.
So it's sort of like, editorially as you would understand wrong for me to make my own show about me.
It would be pretty self-indulgent.
So it was just really nice to be asked and, of course, to be not running the production and to sort of be in their hands.
And then just have the time to be retrospective and look back and thoughts and memories and feelings was a really nice process.
And I think the show came out really good.
So, yeah, I was super chuffed.
And I love the three chefs that I was also with.
You know, it was such an honour to be with them.
So, yeah, massive.
And the only Brit.
So, you know, my mom and dad were proud.
They've just worked out what Netflix is.
So, you know, it's all good.
So, OK, so let's go back to the beginning.
If you're talking about the retrospective, how how did you get into cooking?
I started cooking, you know, earliest memories, sort of eight years old.
And I lived in a pub restaurant in a little village.
You lived in?
Yeah, I lived above a pub restaurant and what we would call a pub.
So you don't have pubs in the US, but it's not a bar, and it's not a restaurant, and it's not a club and it's not a diner.
It's probably closer to a diner than anything.
Oh, interesting.
Everyone's welcomed.
Everyone goes.
It's the heart of a village or a part of a town.
It's a real source of community.
And traditionally, they're drinking holes with a little bit of like nibbles.
And I'm talking like three, four, five hundred years ago.
And my dad, unknowingly to me until I left home, was one of the probably five or six people in the country that was a pioneer of what we now call gastropubs.
So what does that mean?
It means a pub, 16th century low ceilings, like you know, crooked and wonky and beautiful, like you would imagine in the cliche.
But in the back was a French regimental kitchen.
All the departments, a veg section, a fish section, you know a pass, a pastry department, nothing bought in, nothing frozen.
Mostly everything local.
But that was always inquisitive.
So there were sort of Spanish and Italian and sort of like Asian elements that would come in and us country bumpkins would have no idea what to do with it.
I was making, genuinely making gnocchi for the line. from the age of 10.
But, more importantly, the chefs that were really doing it were making all kinds of gnocchis.
You know potato gnocchis, you know the kind of choux pastry gnocchi, the semolina gnocchis.
And it's like, we're in a pub in Essex in the middle of nowhere.
In the 1980s?
Yeah, big time.
Why?
Because dad loved food and he wanted to turn this little pub into something that was like a culinary mecca.
For me, it was just home.
So I had no judgment.
It was just home.
I thought having seven chefs in a kitchen as a brigade was normal.
They were just my dudes.
I knew them from zero.
And I started in the wash up just peeling veg.
But I really wanted to get into the kitchen where all the fun and the banter and the naughty jokes were.
All the big equipment, all the blades.
So my early memories were sort of like 10 years, you know, standing on a lager crate because I was so short, like just chipping potatoes, like you know, tons and tons of potatoes and everything from pies, fish and chips, you know, and the classic things you know, roasts at the weekend to quite
French fine dining schnitzels and gnocchis and fresh tagliatelle, and Italian desserts and French desserts.
So it was kind of, that was the vibe.
That was my normal.
And yeah, it was just it was fun.
It was never deeper than that.
But I think as my journey progressed into school and I struggled at school with dyslexia and school wasn't really a place for me, I pretty much failed everything.
I had this sort of paradox of like I was working at the weekends. from a very, as I said, from 10.
So for pocket money, £1.20 an hour.
So I'd put in 10, 20 hours.
So I'd always have cash.
First of all, I always had cash in my pocket as a baby.
And it was mine.
And I earned it.
And then at school, it was just like, I loved school.
I had good friends there.
I was happy and safe.
But educationally, I was really struggling until I was 16.
But by the time I was 16, I was pretty well versed.
I'm not bigging myself up.
I'm just sort of saying like I'd gone through all the departments like several times.
You'd spent a third of your life in the kitchen already.
I could fillet round fish, flat fish.
You know, I could like French trim a rack of lamb.
You know, it was sort of like break down a whole lamb and chine the bones and use a cleaver.
So, yeah, then I just wanted to get out of school and go to college.
And I just wanted to get in the kitchen and work.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Get to London.
Yeah.
I felt like I was a country boy and I needed to escape.
And I did at 18.
Yeah, yeah.
Straight down the motorway.
25 years I stayed there.
Well then, not long after that right, you found yourself in this iconic restaurant, really one of the most influential restaurants, I think you can say, in the world the River Cafe.
Tell us about this place because I think for a lot of Americans maybe we've heard of it, maybe we haven't, but there are sometimes those single places that birth generations of chefs.
The River Cafe itself is still vibrant, still going, but you came out of there.
Hugh Fernley-Whittingslaw came out of there.
April Bloomfield came out of there.
Many of the UK's most accomplished chefs came out of this one restaurant.
What was that like when you were a young cook?
Oh, it's amazing.
I mean, I think, like you know a lot of the history and the protocols and hierarchies and set up of cooking and catering is French.
Right.
And that's pretty much is still pretty much that way today.
And then they kind of look at other countries.
Of course, but it's pretty much based around the French kitchen.
So here you had an incredible restaurant, and it was the head office of Richard Rogers, the architect who designed the Louvre and many other incredible iconic buildings around the world.
His wife was Ruthie Rogers, an American extraordinary woman, and Rose Gray, an English lady, extraordinary.
But Rose and Ruthie together was like an extraordinary marriage and yin and yang.
But they both had an amazing sense of style.
They were both untrained.
And they didn't care for hierarchy or protocol.
They just cared about excellence and quality.
And it's easy to say.
And some people say it, but they still do a bit of both.
They just were interested.
They would pay whatever was required for the best.
So to actually work in a place like that was crazy.
The menu changed every day twice a day.
Twice a day yeah, lunch and dinner.
What we got this morning is good enough for lunch yeah yeah, you write a menu at like uh nine in the morning, and you'd be in service at 12 and then, and then at about 2 30, when they're sort of finishing up lunch, like you'd write the menu for dinner, which would start about six um so, and the refrigerator is constantly churning and changing and it's literally just a reflection of what's in season.
Not that month, not that season that day Yeah,
So I've literally, and it was so wild and sort of almost certainly in the early days it was like we would just be signing off a menu and we'd have jobs lists and jobs to do and delegation happening and we'd have to get on it because you have to move fast to have all that stuff prepped for six o'clock or for lunchtime.
And you'd see a supplier walk in with some sardines.
And of course you know, everyone knows, that those oilier fish, like mackerels sardines like yes, of course they're immaculately fresh.
But every five hours, they're sort of depleting and becoming a bit more what we would call oily.
And it's like they'll just look at the menu.
They'll cross something that could wait until tonight and the sardines would be on that lunch.
And the same would happen with like, you know, porcini or whatever was coming.
So in that respect, it was wild.
Yeah.
But more importantly, I think it was a masterclass in the sort of the feminine and the kind of what comes, in my opinion, naturally to women as an advantage in the kitchen.
Because obviously the fallacy is that men are better cooks and stronger cooks, and they're the famous cooks.
And maybe in the last hundred years, maybe that's true.
But of course, the heritage has always been with women.
And I think that there's something extra in there.
And I think it's a more maternal nourishing, loving relationship.
They're just.
They're just as men and women always do.
We see things differently.
Right.
So I'm not saying one's better than the other.
I'm just saying like there's a different perspective.
Yeah.
I mean, I think I learned so much from Rose and Ruthie.
But I also realized and as a dyslexic that struggles to read, you know my loved reading list was also women.
You know Alice Waters, Stephanie Alexander, Patricia Wells.
You know Marcella Hussain.
You know Rose Ruthie.
You know there's like, Like their words can capture your attention.
Yeah, because they were just... They were just like...
What tends to happen with men, particularly young men, is it becomes quite alpha and quite, and it's quite hard to express, but it's it's process driven, craft driven, excellence driven.
But it's you know, you just be like it will be about control and efficiency and like you'd be on the phone ordering like
50 racks of lamb and, like rose and ruthie, be like no way you're gonna buy a whole lamb and you'll use the whole thing, and you know what i mean.
Like 50, you know so.
So i think it was.
It was a beautiful master class for me and and it was my and it felt like my home, it felt like i found my music, felt like i found my vibe and i i to this day i love them both.
If Ruthie phoned up and said jump, I'd jump.
If she said come, I need you for this, I'd be there.
We'll be back in a minute with more from Jamie Oliver, whose latest book is Eat Yourself Healthy Food to Change Your Life.
And, by the way, if you want to actually see us doing this interview in the studio, check it out on our YouTube channel.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM American Public Media.
Thank you so much for having me.
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I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table, the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're spending the hour today with chef Jamie Oliver, whose latest book is Eat Yourself Healthy Food to Change Your Life.
We've been talking about how he started in food as a kid kicking around in his dad's small town pub, and how that led to his life-changing job working at the legendary River Cafe in London with its founders Ruthie Rogers and Rose Gray.
We're rejoining our conversation as Jamie reflects on what he's learned from the women he's cooked with over the years.
Let's get back to it.
As you'll see, in the Mediterranean and Italy, like as a chef, if I look at a woman prepping some stuff in the market, she's doing it wrong.
Right.
Sure.
But if it tastes better than anything you've had in your life, how can it be wrong?
Right.
Right.
So you know, if you think about, like when we're getting trained, it's like brunoise Macedon Julian, you know Paisan, you know you're all these specific cuts of of of fruit and vegetables.
Yeah.
In Italy, like they're cutting towards their thumb.
Yeah.
They're kind of they're kind of like they're big and small bits.
And of course, as opposed to everything cooking evenly, which has a logic, I understand it.
Everything cooks unevenly, which gives you structure and shape and mush.
Of course, with structure and shape and mush, you get an amplification of flavor.
So you know, and as I'm sure you've worked out by now that you know, Often there's no right or wrong.
It's just, is it good or is it not good?
Because if it's really good and wrong, it's not wrong, is it?
This actually reminds me of an interview I did many years ago.
Funny enough, with also an English writer.
But he was writing about the tools of cooking.
And he said the idea that the proper knife to use is a chef's knife that you hold in your hand...
The thing you forget about that is not about the knife.
It's about the shape of the knife, the size of that knife requires you to stand.
And so it was bringing the kitchen into this idea of the studio and the laboratory and the workplace right.
Like it was a very male sort of perspective on what work is.
You stand there and you do that thing.
In the home, like you said, oh many home cooks and you know obviously, culturally speaking, many of the home cooks were women.
Most of the home cooks were women.
They might be sitting because they're also dealing with the child and doing other things and they have a small knife in their hand and they're cutting things in their hand.
And so this idea that there became this bifurcation of home cooking and professional cooking, and one thing is proper and the other thing is just.
When we talk to Philip Fish, you have a short bendy blade to get around all the cracks and crannies of the fish.
If you go to Spain and go to a fish market, you're going to see mainly women with knives so big that samurai right.
And they're wearing cashmere jumper, loads of bling, and they're using the tip to get in all the cracks and crannies, and then the heel, and then the mid part and they're smashed.
So, again, they've got their thing going on.
But, I mean, ultimately, I think this is the beauty of life.
This is the beauty of culture.
This is the beauty of travel.
When you think you've got something covered.
You know I'll never forget like, as a chef, you're always doing.
I don't use a lot of truffles, for various reasons, but I think they're great but.
Finely shaved black truffles.
You see that around fancy restaurants.
If you go to the Midi Peronese, it's a little pocket knife and little coin-sized pieces.
And you go, why?
And they're like, because you have to chew.
And you're like, yeah, because black truffles are kind of crap.
They're not great.
And chefs all around the world black it with truffle oil, which is fake.
So in the Midi Peronese, they're not interested in truffle oil.
They want you to get that earthy, more humble truffle flavor, which is what it's always supposed to be without truffle oil.
And to get that, you need to chew and have fat somewhere within the story.
And that's a totally different gastronomic experience.
And of course, the fine stuff just looks fancy at the table, which is more like show and tell and marketing.
And of course, I'm sure it's got its...
Fine is delicate also.
Sure, sure, sure.
Accountants don't like white truffles.
£7,000 a kilo.
And they're going to trust chefs to divvy it out on portions in a busy service.
It's not fair.
But yeah, I mean equipment's.
You know mezzalunas a sharp knife, but there's even relevance for a blunt knife for the right job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So if you want to chop and bruise, you know, then there's a logic to it.
So, I think, everything having its place and its purpose and you know, I was lucky enough to work in Japan and, of course, their knife game.
I mean, no one makes more tools than them specific tools for specific jobs, specific metals, specific folds, and the quality of the metal and the sharpness of it and how you take care of it at a different level,
It is amazing.
The world of food is such that the more you figure out, the more you learn, the more you look around and be like oh, someone else is doing it a different way.
And you know what?
Actually, if you understand the logic behind it, it's like oh, they just have it figured out in a different way than you do.
Totally.
It's not that they don't know what they're doing.
And whether your listeners are chefs or home cooks, I think a true thing to say to all is like we're all on a journey and we all have an inner voice and we all have versions of egos that we need to, sort of like, just grab onto and manage.
But ultimately...
It's about finding your true expression of cooking and being confident in that.
And, you know, it doesn't have to be fancy.
It doesn't have to be expensive, but it could be.
And it could be something super humble.
But just finding your way of doing it and having your logic for it being delicious in your opinion.
I think just having the understanding, something so much with your unique personality, is important to sort of having that perfect thing.
And we're all chasing that.
And back to the River Cafe, what was interesting was if...
If you look at a lot of high-level Michelin star cooks and see them get headhunted and then do their own restaurants, you're going to see quite a lot of the same dishes coming up from that.
And the echoes chime very purely.
And then, you know, they find their way.
I think with the River Cafe, it created thinkers.
We were rattling out a menu every day.
If you've been there for three years, five years, you've seen a lot of menus and you've seen a lot of seasons.
So they always.
Wherever the kind of alumni of River Cafe went, whether it was high-end or low-end or Moroccan or whatever cultural food it had a heart of, I can always see the DNA of the River Cafe.
But
They created thinkers so you can see their process.
I mean, you know, even when April Bloomfield came to New York, to the spotted pig, like you know, it wasn't the River Cafe food.
It was her food.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And she did it very true.
And then, you know, she kind of translated it as a diplomat for the American audience.
And they lapped it up and they loved it.
And I think they got a Michelin star for a pub.
Yeah.
In the East Village, right?
I mean, it's like amazing.
So...
So your time at the River Cafe?
Obviously I mean to this day.
This is 25 years later and you're still talking about it in this very sort of crystal clear way.
There was also famously, a day where you subbed in for a sick co-worker and that, you know, arguably was the day that your life changed in a significant way, because there were camera crews in filming a show and you know you were.
In the show and the next day, a TV producer, I think called you and said hey, we want to do something with you.
And that's how I believe The Naked Chef was born.
Yeah.
So when I first heard of you, you know, this time it was probably the mid 90s, right?
Like.
And I remember hearing, oh, this young English chef has this cool show.
He's called The Naked Chef.
And we're kind of like, he's the what?
What's wrong with clothes?
There's a cool haircut.
Like, oh, he could be, you know, you could tell me he played drums in Blur.
But he's a cook on TV.
Tell us about That sort of persona and that moment in your life and how, all of a sudden, like you know, you grew up in your parents' pub and you were working in kitchens and all of a sudden, you're a TV star.
I mean, that was pretty much what happened, you know, with some bigger gaps in between.
But yeah, I had a sliding doors moment.
I was covering a shift.
I didn't really want to do TV, but they kept pestering me for it.
And I just wrote what you would call like a kind of pitch document.
It was just a couple of paragraphs.
But in there was like stripping down restaurant food to its bare essentials.
And from stripping a bear was what, you know, the developer was like naked.
So that's kind of where the naked chef was born.
It was very provocative.
And yeah, I think, a couple of things in the kind of psyche and pop culture of Britain and many other countries, for sure, America as well.
Two things.
Young people weren't really represented on TV cooking ever.
A lot of people that were represented were older, had versions of Michelin stars and Chef Whites and were in studios and it all felt very.
Whereas you know, just having someone that was like 23 when I filmed, 24 when it came out bouncing around on a scooter,
The persona was just me, which was a cocky young, excited to be alive Essex boy, with my Essex boy twang.
You know, it was like I was naive and excited and open minded, a hard worker.
I'd already I'd already kind of done like years in the kitchen.
So, even though I look like a kind of fetus like I, was basically like a fetus with a big set of lips and some bonkers hair.
Like, you know, they were just following my life.
And instead of filming in a studio, they filmed in the flat that I rented, and I actually lived there.
And, for the first season, the kind of middle-aged BBC executives I think it's polite to say it's not rude to say that didn't want me to have a girlfriend.
Jaws didn't exist in the first series.
So obviously, you know, that was interesting.
But then as The Naked Chef went out and it was huge, a little bit more permission came my way.
Sure.
And I was slightly less naive and like, well... the whole series like Jules was in my bedroom downstairs kind of waiting for production to finish and get out of the house so we could just have a house again um so look it was amazing and I was grateful and I was excited to be living in London as a country boy um I was excited to be in love and be with my my missus and um I loved working at the River Cafe and when we filmed I
All the series of The Naked Chef, I was still working at the River Cafe.
Oh, really?
I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah.
So up to it.
And I think possibly by the time I did the third series, me and Rose were on the pass in service.
And a customer came up and asked me to sign the River Cafe book.
That's a crazy moment.
And kind of, And not Rose, that's a uh, obviously I, you know I love her to bits and very respectful of her.
And I just said, Oh Rose, I think probably it's, it's probably time for me to go now.
Um, like this is a bit weird and cause, you know, TV and fame is, you know, is uh extraordinary, but kind of bullshit as well.
And, and, uh, and it's Rose's home.
It's Ruthie's home.
And I know that they're proud of me.
Um, and, um, But it's theirs, not mine.
There's no place for me to sign the book.
So then I moved on and I was able to start my first restaurant.
Yeah, I'll always be grateful for that.
And it was also a beautiful time in Britain and in London.
Cool Britannia, like the music scene was kicking off.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like there was like this sort of mad not that I was into it, but like there's this kind of supermodel, like craziness going on and, you know, artists like Damien Hirst and Banksy sort of blowing up.
Yeah, yeah.
So just like creatively.
It was just one of those moments.
Like the club scene was wicked, you know.
Every city has moments.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was just like... It felt like there was real hope in the air.
And I kind of... And, like, food had never been part of those famous creative arts.
So The Naked Chef kind of brought that into the fray.
And, like, also, it was getting men in the kitchen, which had never happened before.
So...
There was a.
If you look back at all the tear sheets of the magazines that made me famous, they were largely women's magazines and female journalists.
And if you sort of code, you do it in a second.
You code what they're saying.
You know, basically what was happening is like high proportions of women were going to work you know empowerment of women and all the other things that we've been working on in society for many years but the men of britain still expected them, at the end of a hard day's work, to come home, to come home and cook and do the cleaning, and rightly so.
The girls were like no no there's, this new world that we're going into is one of mutuality and, um and like, we're going to share these roles and and so, um it this like young kid on tv, you probably provided a kind of model yeah like oh, i could be like that guy.
Yeah, whereas before they could never imagine i didn't do it intentionally, i was just expressing food and fun.
Yeah yeah, but they saw you and saw yeah no, but that's how it became.
And then.
So there was a kind of natural.
The first year, men were like really anti me and couldn't stand me because i was basically making them work.
Um, and then, and I and I had a few scenarios where I was chased and roughed up a bit and abused and and uh wait, really.
Yeah.
Like on the street guys.
Yeah.
Um, um, but then after a year, my wife likes you more than me.
Well, maybe.
But they were using me as a reference point, and that was pissing them off.
But then after about a year they started to realize that actually a beautiful way to love someone is to cook.
Sure, sure.
And I'm not saying it for fun or for glamour.
It's blatantly true.
Your odds of having...
A relationship in any way, shape or form is going to be hugely heightened if you provide and cook these moments.
And it's not just slapping the food down and saying it's tasty.
It's like you know, like what you cook and when and if it's interactive and just like the fact that my you know the idea that my boy is a bit more thoughtful.
You know this idea of like being like tough guy, alpha male right.
You know the fact that you can be that if that's your vibe, but also you can be delicate and soft and like notice things and like prepare things and plan things, like that hadn't really happened before.
And the truth was that men did love it and they resonated with it.
And I knew it was a reality because I'd be I'd already blown up by then.
So I do like cooking demonstrations, like like crazy shows for like an hour and a half in front of like 2800 people, four times a day for a week.
And for the first year or two, it was all women.
And then year three, it was 50-50.
And then if I look at YouTube now for me, it skews men sort of like, you know, 65%.
And like Instagram will skew women.
But like, you know, so you kind of, I think I'm really proud of that.
You know, I'm really proud.
I mean, you know, obviously men were always in the commercial kitchen.
But to be in a home kitchen.
Yeah.
And I think not only did the men do it, they loved it and they were good at it.
And it's lovely to have been part of their journey, you know.
And it's been a while now.
Well, 30 books into your book writing career.
And before the mics turned on, we were talking about how much the book writing, being a cookbook author really matters to you.
I think you said it was even really the core of who you are, really.
You know, you've written over 30 cookbooks.
I've read somewhere that you've sold 50 million copies in the UK alone which globally, the entire population.
I wish it was the uk alone globally.
Well still well, the entire population of the uk is 70 million.
So, like you're, you're getting there um, and your latest one is eat yourself healthy.
I was surprised to see in the introduction in the book that you wrote a few years ago you actually formally studied nutrition.
Okay, so so you know, those of us who have known your career seen it at least from, even from the us um, Pretty early on in your celebrity status and your fame, you have been talking about nutrition.
You had a series here famously, or maybe infamously where you were working with public schools here in the US to help them improve their feeding of children.
You have nonprofits.
You started nonprofits again probably five years into your career as a TV celebrity in the UK talking about nutrition, childhood nutrition.
Also other nonprofits for underserved communities.
So you've clearly always wanted to use your platform to talk about things more than just deliciousness.
But what made you at you know, whatever if it was 10 years ago.
40 years old, you've had this 20-year career of being this superstar.
Want to formally study nutrition, right?
Well, I think it's a really interesting one.
I think you can sell a few million books on luck.
But the way I see it is, when you've had this outrageous career with the global public, you don't get to do it.
Selling cookbooks is really hard.
And I might fictitiously make it look easy, but it's really hard.
So clearly what's happening to me is unusual.
And the way I look at it is it's like a vote.
Every year that I write a book, it's a vote.
And now with social media, it kind of makes it easier.
Most of my effort is spent on listening hard globally to what people are excited about, what they're pissed off about, what they're worried about in the world of food and farming and nutrition and kids, and this and that and the other.
So my job is to listen hard and then react and kind of conjure it into a book and a documentary or a program that helps answer some of those worries.
And when it started getting towards more nutritionist stuff, Everyone in the early days of social, and everyone in the press as well, were getting caught out saying half right things that were kind of wrong and out of context.
And it's like it's really a look at idiot when you get corrected and be it's not useful.
So I felt vulnerable.
And at the time, the reason I did it was because we were.
We were doing a documentary called Sugar Rush, which was a documentary that had a campaign that changed law in Britain to do a sugary drinks tax, which was the biggest reformulation of sugar and sugary sweetened drinks, the biggest source of sugar in our children's lives in the world.
Right.
And the thing is, is these companies that make junk food and a lot of the kind of naughty beverages that we love?
And of course, these foods have a place in our world.
I don't deny that.
I'm not anti anything with only a few exceptions.
The people that work for them, from a nutrition science point of view, are ninja, because they can afford the best of the best of the best.
So if you dare mess with those guys and you're one dime out, they will brutalize you.
So part of it was also defense mechanism.
So I gave up every Friday for a year, went to uni, and it sucked me.
And I would say to any chef listening or any good cook listening, Have a go.
Lots of people train in nutrition who are really, really bright and they're amazing, but they don't really cook.
Sure.
When you can cook and when you're a chef and you learn the language of nutrition.
It's like all the problems you have answers to.
Right.
Interesting.
Because you can cook your way out of it.
And actually, this book is a really good expression of that.
Jamie Oliver's latest book is Eat Yourself Healthy, Food to Change Your Life.
We'll be back with more with him in just a minute.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media.
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I'm Francis Lam and this is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media.
We're spending the hour with Chef Jamie Oliver.
Let's get back to it with him.
So you know if I can wind you back, and it's a slightly different side of Jamie that you may or may not know, but I'm obsessed and interested in loads of data and science and patterns of public health, child health nationally, globally.
So when you start seeing...
The health service and why it's being crippled.
And if you see the prevalence of diet related disease and how that's so catastrophic and the proportions of people that are there because of a diet related disease.
And then you start saying, well, why?
And then you start bringing back to things like most Americans, like 95 percent, don't get enough fiber every day.
Right.
Right.
So which sounds really boring.
But although we're really happy to pop loads of pills and actually the answer is veggies and beans.
Right.
So I can easily take anyone that's the kind of cynic and go, but do like you know.
I can go to Mexico and go to Asia.
We can go to Italy and find these dishes that are pro veg and pro beans and delicious and delicious.
So it's cool.
Like, so you like that vibe.
So maybe you'll like this vibe and that vibe.
So basically, when I look at ingredients, you know, when I'm fantasizing about dishes, when I'm dreaming up a recipe which I can, I can dream a recipe about.
92% correct just from a thought.
And my first cook will be quite close most of the time.
So when I'm fantasizing that, when I'm seeing ingredients floating around my head, I'm also seeing equations and chemistry.
And look, the broad strokes, the cliché broad strokes are eat the rainbow.
And it's a really good cliché.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Like you know, if you flick through this book, you know you're going to see loads of colour, right?
And when you shop, colour.
So I'm always trying to transpose hard data that's boring to usable daily hacks or changes.
And I still think that your dollar... is the most powerful vote that you have.
Yeah.
It really is.
Yeah, for sure.
You can vote other stuff, but it's where your dollar goes.
That truly will shape the world that you live in.
That's what will cause companies to produce their things a different way.
You keep showing them that you'll spend money in that direction.
Yeah.
Make things in that direction.
But it's never too late to change.
The data and science that is pretty robust now will say it's never too late to change.
If you start making diet changes now at 40, you can add 10 years, a decade onto your life.
And again, these are broad strokes, but these are good.
They're backed by good science.
And when we're looking at cost of food.
So what's interesting is what your wallet wants and what your body wants, and what the planet wants are all the same things.
They're actually the same.
Those little things are all the same, which are veggies and beans, and finding ways to disguise it in things that you love.
Actually, so let's go to some of the recipes in the book.
One that really stood out to me because I felt like reading through the book.
There was one recipe.
I felt like a lot of what I'm seeing sort of reiterated over and over again kind of comes together in many of the recipes.
But the one that really caught my eye is the harissa tuna bean parcels recipe.
Simple as anything, a can of beans, a can of tuna.
You mash them together with some dried apricots and some spicy harissa paste.
Great flavor, lots of spices.
That becomes a savory filling.
You take some store-bought phyllo dough, put it in, wrap it up, bake it.
It's crispy.
It's beautiful.
You have that sort of like... creamy tuna, spicy filling.
So I feel like a subtext in this book is like beans and fish of the future.
Well, I would say tinned fish is like genius.
And if you're able to navigate some good value sources, omega-3 fatty acids, like some amazing fish.
Again, people, if you go to the Mediterranean, they look at tinned fish very optimally.
Like, it's a delicacy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right?
So there's restaurants.
I mean, one of the nicest meals of last year was in Porto in a restaurant that only has tinned fish and tinned vegetables and jars, right.
So it's a real reframing of the idea that frozen is rubbish, jarred and tinned are rubbish.
But, yeah, tinned fish, amazing.
Beans, for sure.
The Mediterranean's.
One of the reasons that their diet, as everyone calls it, stacks up is because it's veg beans oily, fish centric.
It's just beautiful, vigorous food.
And obviously the dish that you just spoke about just came from a little memory of me being.
I've worked and cooked in Morocco a fair bit.
And they always have this kind of like, fight between sweet and savoury.
Yeah, the Bastille, yeah.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
That's where I am.
And yeah, we haven't got exactly the same dough, but phyllo is as good as we can get and it's very accessible.
And that harissa works hard to give perfume.
And I think the apricot is really important because it checked like the crunch of the pastry and then the lovely, delicate fish.
But then you get this little chew on the teeth of dried fruit.
So again, it's not just the ingredients and just the combination, but it's how your mouth is reacting to these textures.
And again, like latest science is proving that textures are healthier.
What do you mean?
Textures.
When you can take a burger with a soft bun and you can have a burger with a crunchy bun.
Right.
And you can measure exactly the same thing and how it's metabolized.
And the crunchy will allow you to metabolize the food better because you're getting texture.
You're sending different signals.
I mean, we don't know everything.
Right.
But I think the idea that when you chew and you crunch and the mechanics of the teeth and, if I dare can say anything like in Britain and America in the last 40 years, is we've created food to not use our teeth.
So there's a mechanical action of the teeth and the jaw, right?
But there's also the first stage of digestion with amylase where you're chemically digesting.
But there's also the chemical and who knows what, maybe vibrational code to your stomach.
You know, and like if it all just goes down fast, there's not really much communications.
Right.
And your gut's having to do all of it when work can happen up here.
So we know a lot, but there's also a lot we don't know.
But it's kind of down the hole.
Guys, we got a load of chicken and some chips coming down.
So we know that kind of like chewing, which is something that we've trained.
I mean I'm so boring that I study books on First Nation.
You know Aboriginal teeth and the structure of mouths and shapes of faces and what they ate.
Anyway, as you can see, there's a lot out there.
There's a lot we know, there's a lot we don't know.
Well, in a program and in a book, My job's really to give you your first taster of some solid science through deliciousness and demystify complexity.
Because actually, if you're interested in any of this, tomorrow you can go shopping and change your life.
And it doesn't have to be complete changes in a binary way.
Like little healthy swaps, getting some more variation in your rice and in your beans and use more spices.
And when you use more spices and herbs, you use less salt.
But I still want you to use salt, but just not an audacious use of salt.
I'm going to get back to one more recipe, actually.
I think you call it the super green orecchiette.
So it's a pasta and the sauce is simple as anything.
You boil water.
You put some garlic cloves in it.
You put some broccoli stems in it.
You use the florets of the broccoli later.
You just toss it with the pasta later.
And you put some spinach in this boiled water.
You take it out and put it into a blender, blend it and that becomes a sauce.
It's a way for you to get just a ton of vegetables into your meal by having this super green, vibrant sauce that you make.
You toss it with the pasta and then you shave a whole bunch of Parmesan cheese on it, so it has depth umami, saltiness and all that stuff.
I happen to love greens.
You've had experience feeding people for a long time.
Why is it a challenge to get people to eat green food?
It's a challenge for us, not everyone. that dish's roots are from a particular window of time.
In the mountains of Tuscany, where they would have the frostbitten cavolo nero, which is a black cabbage.
And when the frost bites it, it releases some of those fibrous elements and you gather sweetness.
And become super sweet.
To balance with the bitterness.
Yeah, yeah.
And then the new season's oil, which is picked in October.
And it's celebrated particularly up until Christmas.
So that's where the dish comes from.
And my translation is kind of like well, most people have.
I like to write recipes where I know you've got the ingredients in the fridge already.
And I know that from the basket data that says I know that people have got broccoli in the fridge.
So hence using that.
But in Tuscany, eating vegetables and having three, four, five-year-olds...
Pulling apart a spatchcocked pigeon grilled over charcoal on wet polenta with artichokes and greens, is normal.
Sure.
Right.
You're looking at grown men in America and England.
Oh, I'm doing that.
You know, I hate this.
I hate that.
Right.
And then you've got a bunch of kids throughout Spain Portugal Lebanon, Italy that are just smashing through beans and dipping and pulling apart and savoring all kinds of food.
So you have to realize that.
You know, Brits and Americans aren't born genetically to only like brown food and only eat nuggets and pizzas and burgers.
You know like it's called marketing, and marketing essentially is familiarity and safety and comfort.
And then if you look post Second World War like, this is where the trouble has really started and got to like.
If you look at the amount of marketing messages that a child will get on an average day, it's sort of like around 1800.
So so really it's.
It's obesity and diet related disease is a normal response to an abnormal environment and that's what you've created and that's what we've created and that's what we both live in, and we've had governments that are very slow to observe that.
And um, When you see hundreds or thousands or millions, if you like, of kids walking towards a breakfast that is pizza and a Danish pastry with icing sugar over it, which is very typical and very normal,
And you observed that in my TV show when I lived in Huntington, West Virginia.
That was breakfast.
And we were like pretty much wrong for the day at breakfast.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, the prognosis of what's going to happen to those kids is very clear.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's the reality that we live in.
So in a way, and FYI, this person that's talking right now, that's not me.
I became this.
That wasn't the Naked Chef.
I never ever, grew up political campaigning, stood up for something.
It's the only thing that's made me do it is because of my audience.
That vote with the books, really.
That's why i said, like the books are my nuclei, if i shortcut them, i'm just cutting off my nose to spite my face.
There's no, there's no people trust me, Yeah.
I mean, it's the core of it.
It's funny.
I listened to you on another podcast and you said you know like.
So you were kind of talking about yourself and the way you grew up.
And you said look, if you caught me at like 15 16 17, 18 years old, like I was a nice enough kid, but you would never have like a deep conversation with me.
And, you know, fast forward, here we are.
And, you know, you're a legend according to one TV show.
But you know, your thinking about food has changed, you know, led you to this incredibly thoughtful and generous and philosophical place.
And it's been fun talking with you.
Thank you so much.
Can I say one last thing?
Yeah, of course.
It's like we all live in a time where we're watching all of this play out.
We're spectators in this world of food, amongst the glamour and the glitz and the adverts but, like we know deep down that health is suffering.
Therefore creativity, mental health, all these things fall off of this.
And I guess, like when I say, like your dollar where you spend, it is the most powerful vote that you have.
I really mean that.
And what I would say about America, as we're in America, is if there's a country in the world that can, When they get on something.
Right.
They do it bigger, faster and better than anyone in the world.
Right.
So I do have hope for America.
I really, really do have hope.
But I have to hope that the where where we're going with AI and the democratization of sharing content, maybe instead of it.
I mean, I love TV channels and all that stuff, but I guess it has become more democratic.
Sure, sure.
I hope that in the future America realizes that they it's their country.
They get to shape it.
And really, they don't need politicians to to do too much.
They just have to support stuff with their dollar that, you know, helps them get to that place.
And and yeah, for sure.
Like somehow we need to get people to love a bigger variety of food.
But I really think I am hopeful.
I suppose, because some of this stuff sounds quite miserable.
But I don't want you to be miserable because you know, you know, when you flip through the book, hopefully you don't feel miserable.
You don't like.
If you had to eat that for a month, I'm kind of I'm hoping that you'd be quite invigorated and quite happy.
So, yeah, that's.
That's a feeling and a thought that I think is really important.
It's not the end of the world.
It's not out of your hands.
Right.
But we do all need to do better.
Yeah.
But we have control.
Thank you so much, Jamie.
It's been so fun talking to you.
Total pleasure.
Jamie Oliver's latest book is Eat Yourself Healthy, Food to Change Your Life.
And he left us with that recipe for those harissa tuna bean parcels.
Find them at splendidtable.org.
Thanks.
If you're interested, head on over to our YouTube channel to see our extended conversation and video.
Well, that is our show.
We hope you enjoyed our visit as much as we did.
We'll talk to you next week.
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The Splendid Table was created by Sally Swift and Lynn Rosito Casper.
It was made this week by technical producer Jennifer Lukey, producers Erica Romero and Maria Wartel and managing producer Sally Swift.
Jordan Turgeon is our digital producer with help from Delonix Gwynn.
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And Lauren Humpert is our senior podcast production manager.
Thank you for listening.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM, American Public Media.
