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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The people's chef
  • Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:26:34 -0700




The people's chef
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/26/jamie-oliver-food

When Jamie Oliver burst on to our TV screens a decade ago, he was
enthusiastic, but a tad annoying. Who'd have guessed he would grow up to
become Britain's bestselling author - and a national treasure?

In pictures: from pukka tukka chucker to political activist

* Laura Barton
* The Guardian, Thursday 26 March 2009


There was a time when people hated Jamie Oliver. In truth, there have been
several times when people hated Jamie Oliver - it was an example not only
of the nation's ebbing and flowing relationship with its public figures,
but also evidence of our national desire to prod with a stick anything we
suspect of being worthy or successful. But this week came news that seemed
to confirm the Naked Chef's redemption: sales of Oliver's latest cookbook,
Ministry of Food, reached £11.5m last year, making him officially
Britain's bestselling author. In so doing he defeated the literary efforts
of Khaled Hosseini (£10.7m), James Patterson (£9.8m) and JK Rowling
(£8.1m), and certainly trumped those of his fellow celebrity chefs Delia
Smith (£7.6m) and Nigella Lawson (£6.5m).

Oliver is now, without doubt, the country's leading foodie. More than a
mere celebrity chef he is also the Chosen One, the cook who holds meetings
with the prime minister, who changes supermarket policy, who is asked to
cook for the heads of state at next week's G20, who was once memorably
flown to the United States to whip up a little something for Brad Pitt and
Jennifer Aniston. Today his influence extends further than a range of pans
and a television series; he has a magazine, a website, a blog, his shows
are broadcast in the US and Australia, and he appeared as a judge on Oprah
Winfrey's charity series, Oprah's Big Give.

Oliver has now been part of British food culture for a decade, arriving on
our screens in 1998 with a show provocatively titled The Naked Chef (though
it purported to be a reference to the food, the name certainly winked in
the direction of Oliver's aesthetic appeal). He was young and laddish and
good-looking. He played in a rock band and rode a scooter, and he came
armed with an endless supply of catchphrases - cheeky, chirpy confections
such as "pukka tukka" and "lovely jubbly". He was, in short, terribly easy
to parody. And soon for every amateur chef who worshipped the mockney
barrow-boy heart-throb, there came a detractor who poked fun at his lisp
and his obsession with risotto.

It didn't help that there was always a whiff of the do-gooder about Oliver,
the ruffle-haired golden boy who liked to visit his Nan and spoke readily
of his love for his "missus", a former model named Jools. And then there
was the Sainsbury's campaign; for the last decade, Oliver has enjoyed a
lucrative sponsorship deal with the supermarket chain, one that has
persisted despite a minor skuffle two years ago when he declared that "For
any chef, supermarkets are like a factory. I buy from specialist growers,
organic suppliers and farmers." It was a statement that not only vexed
Sainsbury's chief executive, Justin King, but also seemed to confirm what
some had already suspected: that, for all his matey-boy antics, on the sly
Oliver was a bit of a food snob.

In truth, Oliver is anything but. And in this regard, his achievements are
two-fold. First, he succeeded in introducing a messy passion to cooking, a
broad new understanding of how making dinner did not have to be a precise
art, that it could be about handfuls and sploshes and glugs, that it could
be served straight from the pan, or in great sprawly mounds on the plate.
In so doing he showed an understanding of how most of us want to cook for
our families, and encouraged men to try their hand at a few recipes to
boot, egging them on, it seemed, with the idea that you can make a decent
meal in a manner that had more in common with plastering a wall than haute
cuisine. His television shows, for all the sliding down bannisters and
juggling of vegetables, have been informative, easy to follow and,
crucially, contagious. They have shown an appreciation for flavour,
freshness and simplicity, an unabashed love for how things taste.

Take, for instance, Oliver's recipe for spicy pangrattato risotto,
currently one of many posted on his website. Alongside his list of
ingredients (anchovies, stale ciabatta, parmesan) sits his explanation for
just why you should consider making this particular meal: "I love this
dish," he writes with his trademark gusto, "the rice is cooked so simply
that the flavours come out beautifully, and then you get these amazing
crispy breadcrumbs on top which are a real shake-up of the senses with
their crunch against the incredibly soft rice. It's a recipe that can be
made really cheaply, but when you're eating it you'd never believe that was
the case. It just works." It's precisely that frankness, that simple
explanation of how a dish works, that works to make food tangible again at
a time when it had become something vaguely removed from our day-to-day
lives - either bought in microwaveable portions, tubs or jars at the
supermarket, or something surrounded by a flurry of daunting
restaurant-ese: coulis and confits and panna cotta.

Second, Oliver has helped to reconnect us to the idea that food is too
fundamental a part of our lives to be messed about with. Having kindled an
interest in cooking, he then set about tethering the idea of the food we
eat to society at large. It began with Fifteen, his east-London restaurant
that took 15 young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and trained them
to work in the hospitality business. It made for riveting television of
course, but in all the cussing and spitting and hair-tearing, more than
anything it illustrated that Oliver genuinely cared about this project,
about more than just being a celebrity chef.

Since then, he has embarked upon a high-profile campaign to change school
dinners from the lumpen, junky stodge they had become, to food that is
vibrant and nutritious and beneficial to the nation's students. Along the
way he promoted the eating of free-range chickens (as evidence of his
victory, Sainsbury's now only stocks free-range eggs) and investigated the
shocking world of pig farming. Last year he began his Ministry of Food
project in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Oliver's ambition was to teach this
town's residents how to cook fresh, cheap, wholesome food every day, to
share recipes among the community and instil the idea that eating healthily
need not be a considered a luxury.

And while Oliver still has his detractors, it appears they are seriously
outnumbered these days. He has enough boy-done-good charm for women to
still smile upon him, and, now that he has aged a little, filled out a bit
and softened round the edges, men have warmed to him too. But more than
anything it seems we have come to recognise that he is one of the good
guys, a chef who is on our side, who has used his position of power to
expose injustices and to educate, a man who surely has the makings of a
proper national treasure.








  • [Livingontheland] The people's chef, Tradingpost, 03/27/2009

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