Jamie Oliver: Obesity and Debt are Killing Britain

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Jamie Oliver cares deeply about Britain. He is fiercely patriotic and has been publicly for over 30 years. But he thinks two things are killing us as a country. Obesity, or more specifically diet-related disease, and... debt. When he came into the radical studio he was in a pretty reflective mood. He clearly wants to renew his campaigning and focus on those two huge issues of diet and debt but he's also just turned 50.

and he's starting to see people he grew up with encounter ill health which is why he's written a new book called eat yourself healthy We talked about all of the good stuff, about how he thinks we can help people with dyslexia, how he wants to reform schools, save our pubs, why he's opening a new restaurant after a very public failure in business, and also all the campaigns that he is yet to win.

but still wants to fight. We talk about the state of Britain today compared to when he found fame in the 1990s and what he thinks now needs to be done to improve our health and our finances.

you're younger than how old are you guess i would say 41 beautiful man i take that i'm 42 yeah you look super young yeah an incredible just general you're a decade you're a decade behind me so yeah it's interesting i found each decade quite fascinating actually have you found as a young man you know because in your 20s like

no one trusts or believes you so all your energy is like fight or flight prove prove prove and then i remember like on my 30th birthday i don't think i'm exaggerating like everyone just started to believe me and then sort of Two months into that, which was wicked because everyone believed me, you know, believed the things I was saying, I was kind of working out that half of what I say is not great. So like, you know.

please don't believe me like please interrogate me so that energy of like proving to them being believed and then in your 40s you're just trying to like get your groove and get that balance and then now in my 50s um it's kind of like well what does that what does good look like um you had an unusual you can't necessarily i mean i'm sure there's some things that you've experienced which is kind of universal obviously but you had a very unusual 20s because you were what 22 when you went from being

you know, sous chef to Antonio Carluccio to the naked chef selling 10 trillion copies. And also you've got this unusual thing, which is that you've been famous for a very long time. I think I've been famous for more years than I haven't now. Do you look back at the footage of yourself back then, ever? I mean, even if you don't search it out. I have recently, yeah.

How did you find that? The 50s bring on the nostalgia and the kind of retrospective. Yeah, it's mad. I mean, I'm just like a set of lips going around on a little scrawny body. Like, oh, my voice is different. It's higher.

you're even more essex i'm more cockney yeah and um and uh yeah i could just hear the kind of the youth in me energy um yeah i mean it's sort of beautiful in a way because i i was very blessed because um you know uh whilst things didn't go so well at school like in the kitchen at the weekends for pocket money i was able to sort of like gather um a lot of

professional skills from a very unusual age i started cooking really at 10 for pocket money and by the time i was sort of like 16 i'd been on rotation around the kitchen multiple times so like these little you know they always sort of said when

they sort of commissioned the naked chef at the bbc they're like you know there were these old hands in this sort of young body if you look back at the old tear sheets of the naked chef and how it broke how i broke to fame i mean it was largely driven by quite you know high profile female journalists in female press typically i'm generalizing a little bit yeah yeah but it was but it was all about getting men in the kitchen

because men and women around the country were putting in a shift and as they got home at six seven o'clock at night men all around the country said what's for dinner darling and then i'm on telly chirping about you know spinning down a spiral staircase going around town on a scooter sort of knocking up a little meal here and there and what blatantly happened was women said well why don't you ever go like him do you know what i mean never

thought about that but so it was partly a social phenomenon to get men to stop thinking i'm going to come home and demand what's on my plate for dinner but actually get if you want to if you want it why don't you get in the kitchen because this guy yes that was definitely the energy and and certainly if you spoke to people like

You know, Zoe Ball, Joe Wiley, you know, that's when I was going on their shows back in the early days. And that was definitely the energy. And it was about getting men in the kitchen. I mean, it wasn't as, I guess, politicised as I'm saying. But essentially... without trying to be there was a kind of presumption that women would put a shift in they would go to work and they would be great wives or partners and they would also do the house cleaning and chores and cooking and of course

Naked Chef happened around the time where kind of mutuality started to be the norm. And it's funny you mentioned 1997 because although you say you've got the back end of it and you have... very young, you were a late teenager or maybe early 20s. It was an optimistic time in Britain. The millennium was coming. I've actually chatted quite a lot to Tony Blair about this and Tony Blair got you in to cook lunch in number 10. But...

It was a time of economic growth. It was a time of relative peace. It was a time of a new government after 18 years of conservatives. And the zeitgeist was kind of optimistic. How would you describe, and I know you're a big patriot, how would you describe the kind of zeitgeist right now?

a bit more anxious maybe listen i think we've had um we've had nearly a decade of of divisive activities that make people neighbors families look at each other uh in exaggerated judgmental ways brexit was the first you know i think that split families across the country and then we have covid um which again very unusual moment for humans weird um and um and the generation of kids that you know companies like tick tock and zoom were were born in in lockdown and if you you know my

One of my passions, whether you see it as a public profile or not, is I'm obsessed by quite nerdy data around public health, child health, human health, of course, mainly British, but absolutely global as well. And, you know.

covid was terrible for for for child health in britain and we got iller more unhealthy more fat you know more eating disorders i mean it's just a plethora of problems so um lots of people don't know or wouldn't believe but in the the nuclei of my business is a if you come to my office there's there's a

a graph that i printed and i did it in gold foil to make it look graphically more beautiful because it's just hard data but it's from the national child measurement program and it just shows you how rich kids more than two times less likely to be overweight or obese than poor kids and for me that defines exactly why i get up in the morning

So you can tell, yeah, but you sell pots and pans. It's like, yeah, but like with purpose. You did it with content. And that's that actual frame. I also gave to Mr. I've taken to prime ministers. So Cameron, I gave that exact. graph to and put it in a little

That's secondhand vintage frame to go with number 10. And actually, I came back several times thereafter. I was the only civilian in a room with ministers trying to build the beginnings of a childhood obesity strategy. I'm sure you know this, but... George Osborne, former chancellor, who has a very good podcast with Ed Balls called Political Currency, has talked a lot about how the sugar tax is one of his proudest achievements, partly because it...

came up against a lot of opposition. And he's actually told the story a few times on that podcast, which I didn't know beforehand, of how basically to get the sugar tax over the line, I'm not saying it wouldn't have happened with you and did with you and you were the decisive difference, but he said basically the big thing was... I, George Osborne, rang up Jamie Oliver and said, look, mate, I need some support here. And he's always been very gushing about how you came out to bat.

And you took a lot of flack for that, didn't you? Yeah, for sure. At the time, people said the sugar tax was completely, unlikely bonkers. What's so interesting now is we're talking shortly after a budget where, in effect, that sugar tax has not just been accepted, but extended. Yeah. And a lot of people, I mean, there's basically a consensus around the fact that you...

need a sugar tax yeah i mean i think when whenever you're talking to the public about the concept of tax it's never going to bring out like warm emotions so the hard job that we landed there was it was a tax for good well what does that look like so so what we had but but legislation and taxes along with many other things that you can do

in government and in my opinion the point of government is to kind of create rules or a fair playing field right in the world of business and home and britain right so um what's happened in food for many many years is it's just the wild west so just the concept of truth on front of pack we haven't even nailed that yet we're that behind we haven't even agreed like a nutritional profile color coding on the front of pack we're allowed to say that something really is high and

iron and zinc but yet is like like super unhealthy and got more than a day's amount of sugar in something so if you like the most honest thing in your life is a piece of cake

because it's never lied to you. And when you go for the second slice, you know exactly the score. Have one, don't have one, but it's never lied to you. You go down the breakfast aisle and it's just a pack of lies. It's cake. But are you saying that food packaging in the UK is... Yeah, it's rubbish. It's dishonest. If you're looking at British kids... being some of the most unhealthy kids in Europe.

Right. And if you if you put a value to that from a mental health point of view and from a productivity of young adults going into their first jobs and the social justice point of view, because it affects poor people more than rich. And of course, social mobility. And of course.

Poor kids are massively marketed to more junk food than rich kids. So definitely postcode wars for sure. But yeah, I mean, there's the whole point of legislation and the concepts of tax. to create a fair playing field and rules. Like, come sell your stuff, bless, do your thing, but there are rules. It's not the wild west. I thought there were rules.

There are rules, but you need the right rules. And it's not like a kind of standstill binary thing. It's like rules are a moving target. So obviously, if you've got some of the most unhealthy kids in Europe, then you would say in a kind of fatherly, motherly, government-like way.

you know public health uh hat on you'd say well maybe we need some regulations on advertising to big family shows right isn't there an advertising standards authority yeah so we've been campaigning for 10 years so we're just about to get it over the line but that's 10 years later and even that was 10 years late so um and of course everyone

could say well no one watches tv anymore because it's all gaming and it's all tv and it's all youtube and this and the other but also sometimes in campaigning you have to do things that are symbolic because really if you do it if you legislate that for say tv which is fair, right, and righteous. Also, naturally, the conversation about other means of sharing broadcasting content will follow, which I agree in.

I mean, ultimately, what's interesting is every time I've done something contrary to people's initial unscientific belief is they think it's uncommercial. So when...

When we worked with the mayor to put junk food regulation around advertising in TfL, which is the second biggest advertising in the world, no one really realises that. Transport for London? Yeah, yeah. TfL is the biggest, second biggest... advertising real estate on the planet um because most of it's broken up into little bits right and it's a big old deal um they what they they created regulations that stimulates

but more R&D in these big multiples that advertise their junk food. Then they have more choice. Then you have more healthy options. You can still buy the thing that you love, but you've got more choice. But more importantly, they made more money that year. and the year after. So they keep saying that doing good is bad business, but doing good, I believe, is good.

business and the sugary drinks tax also did that they made more money that year and every year after because what it did is it stimulated more choice in the portfolio of drinks more milk more water, more fruit juice. So people buying different things, just not buying the sugar stuff. I was never saying you can't have something. What I was saying was...

But we've got 28,000 kids going into general, you know, under general anesthetic to have multiple teeth extractions, which is like six, seven, eight, nine, 10 teeth out, you know, and these departments that are dealing with this. typically do facial rebuilding and cancer and trauma. And they're doing multiple teeth extractions. And it's only, only because of sugar. When it comes to the nation's health and kids.

particularly on the issue of food and obesity what is the problem just spell out what what are we getting wrong as a country and as a society um well Obesity is a kind of... I don't really like the word, but it's really a load of disorders and diseases, really. But if we're saying ill health...

Diet-related ill health in Britain for everyone, but let's just focus on kids because that, I believe, sort of matters because that's the future and that's hope. Obesity is a normal reaction to an abnormal environment. End of story. Mic drop. So what does that mean? It means that your children aren't genetically born to only crave and want nuggets and burgers. It's called marketing. Marketing works. It's not charity.

It's called familiarity and trust. That's the essence of marketing and frequency, obviously. So what's happening is... our world has changed you know we were we were at our most healthiest i don't know like three years after rationing and and now we're at our most unhealthy um but like my sort of my obsession and love for my job and the bits that you don't see, which are the most exciting bits, which are the kind of social campaigning elements, which is about general health of British families.

It's not just about we keep we always focus on weight and that that is a marker of obesity. And then you can look at diet related. disease and health and a huge proportion of who goes through the nhs is there for diet related reasons but but but it gets even more interesting when you start looking at mental health suicide um um just um absenteeism from school work bigger more clever concepts of like um the economy and productivity for britain you know i spend my life traveling

You know, I publish and broadcast in like 80 to 120 countries around the world. I'm blessed to have learned and seen from people and cultures and all this sort of stuff. We are a tiny little country. we are a tiny little country like punching pretty hard you know and of all the countries in the world like i think we're number 14 for tourism it's like really and it's like like we do amazingly well but it does require our little island to have ähm

That energy that we referred to earlier of Paul Britannia, like hope, excitement, collaboration. Positivity and drive and energy. It's really important because a lot of what we do is about innovation, media, services. And although some of those services are like... banking technical services but i still believe like innovations at the heart of that so we're i i

I'm always proud to come home. Like I love Britain. I really love it. I'm always really, and for everything bad that's said about it, whenever I come home, I genuinely have like reference points to go, but we do. We're not perfect, but we do an amazing job of that. So whether it's kind of racism or whether it's the way we treat people, laws that protect people, you know, like there's so much to be proud of. But I think all we've heard for about six years is.

how rubbish is the negativity exactly like when you're told you're rubbish all the time you start to believe it you start to believe i want to talk about that in two contexts one is about young people and just on this thing about health is one of the problems that there's been such a sharp decline in cooking

So it's really interesting what you say about how I never thought that one of the reasons The Naked Chef was a kind of, dare I say, radical idea was what about if men did the cooking? But I read somewhere that when you did that program, a survey suggested that... in most houses in Britain, the average amount of time people would do cooking was something like 45 or 46 minutes. Correct.

a few years ago round about the pandemic they did the same sort of survey survey and it basically halved yeah 20 21 so the long to 21 minutes so the trend in cooking yeah is for us within our family environments to cook less. Why is that? Confidence. See, the thing is like, again, and I...

I'm the most feminist person you're going to meet. I've got three daughters. I'm all over it. But if you can just stand back and be more galactic about what's happened in the last 40 years, the truths in empowering women have to be really debated. And so we've happily encouraged them to work rightfully, given them more choices and there's work to be done rightfully. And they're taxed exactly the same as men. So the coffers have got bigger.

because of our girls so i think for all of us but particularly the mothers like what has been strategically invested knowing what has been left behind right so like you don't cook if you haven't got confidence and the confidence always came from home grandmas like families that lived closer together which is less common now for various reasons um

mum um so if you're not learning to cook we're like four generations into not learning to cook at home or at school so what would be honorable to ladies there's a long list but you know so maternity paternity like it's such a mess in this country it's disgusting how we treat our girls and men actually but also like things like having

The poorest kids having like a safe and decent breakfast and lunch 190 days of the year from the age of four to 16, which is half a kid's nutrition for the whole of their childhood that the state is in charge of. You know what I mean? Lots of debate in bad health in the world.

are because you have personal choice and the word you have personal choice is so empowering and right and yeah hell yeah right but when you're going somewhere 190 days of the year and the state is in charge of it it best be all right It can't be bad. It can't make people sicker. So Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary who grew up in poverty in a place called Washington near Sunderland in the northeast of England, has made a big...

big deal of school breakfast clubs, and they've put a lot of money into it, and they've invested hard. And I interview her a lot on the Today programme, and I could always see, she can't see me, but I can see her. And she sort of has this... beaming smile when she talks about it she's enormously proud of it yeah she should be don't you think that's made a big difference no it's good it's good look um bridget and this lot um for anything around

I'm apolitical, so don't think I'm one or the other. No, no, I've been apolitical since I've started campaigning. And my job is to sort of listen to all and try and make whoever's in power do better. But...

Look, this lot have done a better job on joining the dots, but we're still trying to get packaging over the line. We're still trying to get like the banning of sale of energy drinks to under 16 year olds, which is a huge story that no one talks about because it affects the classroom so much in secondary schools. So what are the things you're campaigning for you've not gotten yet? So you're trying to do what? You're trying to get 60 certain drinks. Let me just rewind. Go on.

bridget well done met her quite a few times she's great but we need to do more but and and she should be proud but and having breakfast clubs is really important for kids particularly the 1.2 million kids that are on free school lunches, not including others that are in sort of universal credit. But there's no standards for breakfast.

so we now provide the breakfast right but i can guarantee you if you nine out of ten will be an unhealthy breakfast so there's no standards for it nine out of ten so i i can get there are no standards for for these free breakfasts in london in britain right so my point is is thank you for making thank you for thank you for giving our kids access our most vulnerable kids access to a breakfast thank you and and contextually anything is better than nothing but if you've got

some of the most unhealthy kids in Europe and if you can associate that with productivity and mental health then All you have to do is let the talented people within your orbit have standards, then procurement changes. And when you're ordering at a civic level, like our 24,000 schools or 33,000 schools, if you want to talk about secondary schools as well and special schools, like...

Just having standards starts to completely change commercial companies that have to deliver product that fits in. So it's not, nothing's binary. When you have standards, laws or taxes, the ripples of good. are far and wide. But forgive my ignorance, why have they not done that already? It sounds like an obvious spin. Because the level of ninja granular obsession for getting a good job done and spending taxpayers' money with a real... It's not just doing good, it's being... like proficient.

efficient and making kids optimal so so so i so all the work that we have standards so we've had standards since i did the documentary for school lunches and the standards need updating but they're good but they need updating and they're being updated as we speak but no one checks on them so because there's no compliance checks i don't i can't promise you how much better we are than we were now i know that we are and i can give you some guesses right but what i can't

If we don't know who's not complying, then we can't deploy love, care, attention, technology, equipment or training. So it's just the granular obsession for... Just feeding our kids. It's like 7 million kids. We're knocking out around about an average of 640,000 students a year are coming out of education. And the question are...

The question is, are they coming out in better nick than when they went in? And the data says no. But if you're talking about, obviously, I know the story of the kids that are out of education. And you mentioned ill health. But also a lot of neurodiverse kids that get expelled.

will be in this category as well. So I have permission to talk about some of this. But all I can say is... Do you mean that because of your dyslexia? Yeah. And I think, you know, if you're looking at 25% of the average class is neurodiverse, you know, in some way, shape or form. We know for a fact, you know, it's not luck that an average of five to 15 percent of kids are dyslexic in your average class and 65 percent in jail. Like it's not luck. I look this up. This is true to say. So this.

6.3 million people in the UK have dyslexia, around about 10% of the population. And estimates vary. Lots of different people have got different numbers on it. But it could be up to 50% or 60%, as you say, of people in jail are dyslexic. I found that absolutely astonishing to discover. And I've been in, I've got a big interest in youth justice. I actually co-founded a charity that tried to help kids from screwed up backgrounds a bit like you did.

The crossover between young people in the criminal justice system and often undiagnosed or unrecognized neurodiversity is absolutely astonishing. I went to this young offenders home in Kent for the Today program a few months ago. These guys in there for...

I think I can say this. Yeah, I can say this. Let's put it this way. They're in there for the worst crime a human can commit. Sometimes they've done it twice. They all had ADHD and they hadn't been told about it. And I'm not saying that ADHD causes you to kill someone, but... These were huge issues. And it feels to me like we've made some progress on this. Bridget Phillips would say she's putting a lot of money behind Send.

in the budget recently there was actually this whole thing about um transferring responsibility for special educational needs from local councils to central government and i actually interviewed bridget phillipson I asked her whether or not this £6 billion funding black hole would come from the school's budget. She said definitely not. So it feels like it's progress. But the fact is there is an extraordinary crossover.

or correlation, not necessarily causation, but correlation between neurodiversity and people, especially young people, ending up in bad situations. Yeah. 100%. There's so much to say about this. When I said obesity and diet-related disease is a normal response to an abnormal environment, like dyslexia and neurodiversity, like over-indexing in jail. suicide, mental health, underachieving in school, earning less than average wage, you know, obviously conversely.

Ironically, 30% of those happen to be entrepreneurs and do incredible things, but they're the kind of ones that escape. When you talk to neuroscientists about neurodiversity, because people get wound up about this because they think it's a load of old rubbish. In my day, they didn't really do it. It's very generational how we...

talk and accept this whole conversation but ultimately it's quite satisfying to hear someone that does this for a living going no look these are not disabled brains right these are different brains they've always been different Any of us are only standing here because of different brains, right?

Nature requires different thinkers, problem solvers. And in the old world, what about in the old days? In the old days, those kids would find jobs that they were brilliant at. The institution of school... has only been this specific for a very, very tiny moment in time. So this 25% of kids that are slipping through the cracks is a man-made problem. The percentage of these kids in jail is a man-made problem.

disease is a normal response to an abnormal environment these statistics on neurodiverse kids with connotations of jail suicide this and the other is a normal response to an uninclusive education system I can promise you that the anger, frustration, behavior, self-loathing, hatred, this, that and the other that is defined in this subject. Is created around the age of eight to 11. Is that a personal experience? Yeah, of course. Little, beautiful kids. Beautiful kids.

feeling or being told that they're thick stupid or dumb so it's like you know it's like there's not one or two it's like you just did the numbers right six million in britain right now right so so so like that kid was that kid and um the reason they get expelled more is because they have to defend themselves more physically right uh picked on stupid dumb thick oh you know i was like do you want to go to special needs now

Like, you know, and I was fine. Listen, my story isn't, I was confident enough and robust enough to not get bullied. And it wasn't a problem, but I can see and I saw how it was terrible for others. So in actual fact, my story obviously is not a sad story, but I get it. I get it. You don't even have to caveat it, but I want to know, how did that experience of being dyslexic, and by the way, this is a time, what, 40...

40 odd years ago when it wasn't understood like it is now sometimes it was dismissed there wasn't the same provision for special educational needs how did your dyslexia shape your character as a boy well i think luckily for me i had two things that i adored one was music so i spent

all of my youth just playing drums and in a band and that was beautiful um and working a lot probably illegally um in my mum and dad's amazing pub restaurant that was a legitimate sort of almost french structured kitchen with like six seven chefs on a shift so um

I kind of, I wrote myself off in education early and just really turned up to youth club, right? I didn't really get into trouble. No one really caught me. But school... couldn't do what it needed to do it didn't fill me up right but what did fill me up and what was my school was the kitchen um so i was able and if you talk to a lot of people that have

like struggles in school or particularly neurodiversity it's often like a hobby or a job or a little something that they were brilliant at that sort of saved them but most don't find that until they're in their 20s or 30s and the damage might have been done by then. Hence the 30% entrepreneurs versus 70% that are earning less than the average wage. Did it affect your confidence with maths? Yes and no. Like, yes.

in the sense of like oh my goodness um so like like maths as it's taught i mean my my brain on maths is unusual like statistics and sort of like top line i'm quite ninja at but what's taught in school i'm rubbish at so like in in a slightly like i i had um i had like a a parent message me and just say look my kids really not done very well in GCSEs and absolutely beside herself.

I said, right, I'll do a little video. So I just did a little video around my office and just said, look, this is my office. Like these people are all really good at things I'm bad at. Like, like, so this person does this. I'm bad at that. This person does that, but I'm bad at that. And then I just tried to talk to her about, well,

I'm good at is this and all these people like we all believe in something together and they will help me so really you just got to find it's really fine to be bad at something why I'm interested in why you're there's two reasons I ask it one because I know you've got a passion for teaching financial literacy to kids I think you sort of you feel the kids don't really get told enough about how to deal with money and a lot of frankly richer people

like me and you uh people in the media don't realize the extent to which a lot of britain is drowning in debt yeah i've got some numbers here so just just just before you do that like so the two things that i think are like killing us from our core is diet related disease and debt right and that's why I asked who's the

Martin Lewis? Yeah, I got Martin Lewis in the episode. How did I know you were thinking of Martin Lewis? Because there's only one, right? And he's a machine. But we were talking about what would a modern day expression of home economics look like that was cool and contemporary. And I'm like, dude, what?

Why couldn't you give a kid a grand at the beginning of school? And they learn about compound investment and debt and how to manage money and the idea of growing that. I'm obsessed with this subject. That is a radical idea. Can I tell you something? He said it wasn't because...

It was only just a couple of years ago that there was 700 quid that every child was owed through some other system. Didn't Gordon Brown have a scheme a bit like that? The child trust fund or something like that? That's it. And it's only just stopped. So he goes, you're not too far away from the truth. Imagine starting in first year and graduating at 50.

and you've you've learned about investments your your your your pension fund and that's why when i was talking to martin i'm like dude like we don't have to teach him loads of cooking like just 10 recipes to save your life right and that that expression of that

voluntarily has been accepted into nearly a quarter of secondary schools but we want the government to push it so every child every child teaching about investment and then imagine can we save a life but for actual investment yeah compound interest because we're not taught about it you know

I've spent 20 years in journalism. I know about it. But the idea that you could teach an 18-year-old, say, first of all, look, you've got to have your living expenses. You've got to make sure you've got enough to last for three or six months. You never want to be hungry. You've got to look after people that you love and all the rest of it. But if you've got a spare bit of money, 20 quid a week, 30 quid a week, whatever.

you put it away and compound you've got this huge advantage if you're young which is you've got something that old people don't have which is time and we've compound interest exactly they're young they've got time Learn the basics. If you look, it's very fascinating. If you look at how the poorest people, because one of the things that's fundamental to just, as far as fairness is concerned.

and and in my expression like the concept of britain right the concept not the reality um if you put your head down anything's possible no matter where you come from anything's possible i've been around hundreds of primary schools in britain and i'm glad to say that the energy i get from the head teachers is the sky is the limit now so i love that and it should be that but but the reality is there is invisible things that block that

And some of it's not luck, and it's nearly always not luck. The poorest people... often consume, buy things that are the most expensive expression of a product. Yeah, or they borrow money at very high interests, and they're the people who can't afford the interest rate. But what I'm saying is they're not buying raw ingredients, they're buying brands.

Just like they're buying, like putting money in the meter. So if you're looking at how they're consuming carbohydrates and veg, it's the most expensive way to do it. So this we can teach, this we can empower. When I've learned the best recipes in the world, they've never been from posh rich people.

been from working class people that struggle with money generally but live like kings because why because they can shop so this idea of nutritional and financial literacy equivalence of 10 recipes to save your life You can retrain a generation. Imagine that. That's why I believe that there's so much more opportunity with education. 190 days of the year, we've got these kids.

It's technically a safe environment. Let's have a radical idea. What are you going to do about this? So you think that you've just said that you think dietary health and debt are the two things killing this country. A hundred percent. Right.

Let's have some ideas on both ends. What can you do? What are you suggesting? So on dietary health, you're talking about bans for under 16s to have certain sugars. I've got a long shopping list. Let's hear a bit. For those who don't know your campaigns, what are you shopping for? My memory's bad, so forgive me. Maybe I'll voice over the stuff that I forget. But, I mean, look, none of this is impressive because this is, like, bog standard. I think it's honest and true front of pack.

like labeling so you can help busy hard-working consumers make good quick decisions right the data's around the back hidden in small small text right so we need to agree that we need a junk food advertising controls on what's advertised on our biggest most successful shows so and of course gaming tablets and where

these big junk food brands get to your kids through their phones and their tablets. You know, actually banning the sale of energy drinks to under 16 year olds. If you've got three kids in a class on energy drinks for breakfast, which is a... normal breakfast for a proportion of Britain, unbelievably, right? Talk to a teacher and they'll say, I'll go from a plan A class to a plan B to a plan C. So if you look like passive smoking at a class over a year, is that class going to be cleverer?

and more productive or less and the answers are massive yet less so it's all these little tiny little things if you add them all together you can achieve and you can command a happier healthier more productive more opportunity more hopeful

healthier Britain and at the moment we're sort of dragging our feet with lethargic kind of flaccid behaviour around how we protect families and kids and empower better results. What would you do on financial literacy? You'd be chatting to Martin Lewis. Well Martin Lewis is the man. But our job as adults in Britain, and therefore our governments, should be to make sure that our kids are churned out at 16, or 18, but 16, streetwise.

and useful and and instead of this obsession with english and maths which is fine right but please get over yourselves Really, do you know what I mean? Like we have to think there needs to be a total overhaul of how we support and structure education, make it more inclusive and support the arts more. and make our kids streetwise to the realities of what's happening in the street.

I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Jamie Oliver. You can probably tell I'm enjoying it. I've always wanted to meet Jamie Oliver, but somehow... I mean, he's just an incredibly normal guy. I feel completely sort of like I'm in the presence of someone I've known for a very long time. Maybe because he's been in my life for a very long time, but he's a remarkably unintimidating guy, which I think is to his credit. Listen, I want to ask for a couple of quick favours.

One is, if you're enjoying this conversation and indeed any other episodes of Radical that you may have listened to, please do us a favour and subscribe. That way, if you subscribe and you make sure your push notifications are turned on, you will never miss a future episode. And another little thing, which is that if you happen to listen to this podcast on one of those lovely apps where you get the chance to review or rate us, why don't you do it? Hit that little five.

our button because if you do that then it will help other people discover our work and our club can expand and after all that is something that we want given how much hard work we're putting into this Thank you so much for listening so far, and that's enough from me. Enough of the old special pleading. Back to Jamie Oliver. Hello, it's Ray Winstone. I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4, Histories.

Toughest heroes. I've got stories about the pioneers, the rebels, the outcasts who define tough. And that was the first time anybody ever ran a car up that fast with no tires on. It almost feels like your eyeballs are going to come out of your head. Tough enough for you? Subscribe to History's Toughest Heroes wherever you get your podcast.

I want to ask you about the pub because you grew up in a pub and since the turn of the century, you know, in the time, you know, Naked Chef was 1999, since 2000, 15,000 pubs in the UK have shut. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, I was looking this up, 378 pubs were shut in England this year. That's 378 family businesses, maybe. That's 378 community.

That doesn't sound like many. That's in a single year. That's up from 350 last year. That's more than one a day. You know, just being realistic about these things, what can you actually do to save our pubs? you know you incentivize the sector our governments have been so hypocritical like every time the film industry film industry is a little bit down all of a sudden a wallet comes out and a load of tax breaks and the film industry is up again now do i care about

pinewood and elstery and all the talent and all the craftsmen and all the gaffers and of course i do amazing people world-class some of the best on the planet like but they do get special treatment so if you what of pubs because what pubs are dealing with is smoking bands Supermarkets, energy costs, food price inflation. They've had nothing. They've had nothing. And it's not just pubs. It's hospitality, one of the biggest employers in the country. The biggest employer on the planet is food.

Right. It's bigger than one of the biggest grossing industry. The biggest the mother of all industry beyond oil, arms, nuclear, you know, Bitcoin is food. And they've been hammered in the last few years. You have to allow me to beg for you to not think I'm biased because I'm in the industry. But the whole industry needs help.

to make them flourish and and to want to do things because it's like torture at the moment but also the government can't from a tax point of view or any kind of point of view see the difference between like the most famous multiple of pizza chain.

And a small mum and pups restaurant that trains young kids, does butchery, buys from local suppliers. They think they're the same industry. They're not. They're completely different. One makes money like clockwork and doesn't need to train to any kind of level. And nothing's really going to go off very quick because it comes in like the supply chain is quite safe. Right. And then you've got one over here that is really about culture. It's about culture. It's about like.

So it's not just the business. It's not just allowing. There's so many things you could do to make restaurants or pubs flourish. I mean, VAT, you know, national insurance. Do you think the NI rise and minimum wage rise have hurt? Of course. But like, but it.

If you want to have bustle, look, the thing that makes a high street bustle is the food industry, right? Not estate agents. With all due respect to estate agents, many of whom will be listening now, I'm sure. And there's room for small, big... um small medium and big but really what's important is you need a lot you need it to be entry to industry like our next generation our mum and pups restaurants right which is not me right um but but like

that they need or they're the spirit of Britain, right? And the craft, the level of technical craft, what happens when you get hit with more and more taxes costs and business is harder, right, is you just have less people working in it and you have to centralise procurement and you do less on site. So the technical craft of cooking and smoking and butchering and pickling and grilling, like, you know, like there's...

restaurants that you probably know of that don't even grill their own steaks anymore. They grill it centrally, put it in a bag. I don't even want to think about that. And they regen it on site. No chef ever invents that. That's an accountant. But having been through the ringer and having seen your incredible business, which at some point must have had, I think you had 46 restaurants or so, turnover of a billion, you lost it all.

And you've spoken very movingly in the past about that. It must be incredibly exciting to be coming back with a new Jamie's Italian. Yeah, well, you're probably the first, give or take, the first person I've told. Why are you doing it? Well, when I started... And people might listen to this and go, yeah, yeah, yeah. All I can do is tell you the truth. When I started J.I., Jamie's Italian, at its nuclei, it was like, how can I get high-level ingredients?

into mid-market dining because that would normally be edited out and i can assure you the answer is yes i proved that seven eight years of incredible business um training um like we didn't slosh that many staff our culture all the hard stuff i i did

effortlessly and then all the kind of basics i got wrong well like but essentially we i think long story short i think there was once we got going and it's not look it's not the bit that i did but we got arrogant about rents location we were going into sort of people

bidding on a rent and we just bid more than everyone else and basically um uh the geezer from weatherspoons called it out he goes that ain't gonna that's not gonna end well you can't just walk around basically blasting everyone and that's what i that wasn't i didn't sanction that that wasn't my culture was always humble but i think we got cocky we paid way too much for rent two bigger restaurants the rates that were then created by local government

almost became like 40 percent of rent and then we had high street decline and the uberization of food that we weren't really uh geared up for so it was like the perfect storm and then i lost everything and it was like one of the worst things in my life ever awful it's like literally getting rogered from every angle like prolifically and you got it and fully in the press So I think that incredibly hard very really really hard and also like like that the food industries and is in my blood

so i don't just care about myself i care about the whole industry um deeply and so um so there was a whole bunch of emotions from pride and but in the back of my mind all the hard stuff i got right So I kind of like, I think I've had like five years to heal. But I also think that, and I'm not trying to be philosophical for any righteous purpose, but I think in the last 10 years, I've... started to understand failure and get the power of getting things wrong and and the concepts of like well that

That's the point of school. The point of school is to make mistakes in a safe place and not make mistakes at work or in public while someone will smash you for doing that. Like this idea of like not making mistakes or like we want to have like young people. like inspired to have controlled mistakes and learn their boundaries and i'm like there i am as well like like all the hard stuff i got right and then the basics i got wrong and then i've got this opportunity now to to do it differently

and to go again so jamie's italian's coming back yeah um there's no rush like uh there's no ego um but i do feel there's unfinished business and yes possibly if we have a queue again it might make my pride fill back up again so i'm not going to lie about that of course but i do think it's i think it's really important to say and go again you said something on another brilliant podcast which um

jumped out at me as it did my wife. And I mean this completely seriously. And this is when you spoke to the great Kirsty Young for Young Again. And you said something so amazing, which is that if you had your time again... all this success, all this life, all these trials and tribulations, that if you could come back again, you wouldn't be famous. Yeah, for sure.

Definitely. Journalists always get really pissed off about this because they want to be famous. Well, they don't respond very well to this. It is the truth. I'm not a conventional journalist. Can I tell you what I think is beautiful about this? I think there's a lot of currency or want to be something in our culture. good or brilliant or excellent is held up in this world of celebrity and it's a funny old world and i don't believe it's a very healthy world

So getting favours for things you don't deserve isn't good and getting grief for things you don't deserve ain't good. It's not really healthy for your kids. You have to parent very hard to get balance.

and statistically you know kids of famous people it ain't looking good um so um but what i love about it is whatever normal is there's just enough room for beauty there's enough there's enough like like if i did it all again like 50 million books the big house in the country all of that like i i i would happily Like to be part of a village or a community or whatever that means, to grow up as I did in a little British village, a little house, most importantly, not to worry about debt.

I think that goes back to that other conversation. But just to be excellent at something and put the hours in, and whether you're a carpenter or a plumber, to have banter, to have enough time to go and have a bit of a longer lunch once in a while just to catch up with someone.

Fame and wealth allowed you to... It's allowed me loads of things. Fame and wealth... And you're not here complaining, just to be clear. No, I'm not complaining. I can look you in the eye in the way that people listen to this podcast. I'm not complaining. You're not complaining at all. No, no. But it's an amazing thing that someone who... you know, had the fame, the wealth, the adulation young. I feel like maybe what you're sort of saying, maybe it's implied rather than explicit is that...

I don't know if you're saying that your kids are paying the price for your ambition as well. If you're searching or craving for something that is maybe something up there, all I'm saying is if I did it all again, is it's right in front of you. Like the beauty, the simplicity. the capacity the the the happiness the joy the laughter like the what is luxury what is money right like

So is it a pair of Nikes? No, everyone's got them. Is it an iPhone? No, everyone's got them, right? Like, what is luxury? What is luxury? Knowledge. Connection. Even when I got on to the dyslexic documentary thing, there was never an intention. It came from me. slightly losing my shit on a BBC interview in Manchester and I really genuinely didn't expect this. I'd written a kid's book which was 15 minutes a day.

you know just 15 minutes a day consistently to write now you've got to remember that writing and words are my enemy i always hated hated words because i because they move and and it's just it's not but so i wrote a cookbook's come easy to me right obviously but i wrote a kid's narrative book and i was on the interview and they say so they used to apparently this is the hardest book you've ever written yeah it is

And they're like, why? I said, because it's a narrative book and I'm dyslexic. It's like a nightmare. And then I said, but I think it's the first time I've like shaken the chips off my shoulder and I started losing it, like got really upset. And I can even feel it now. So I don't know what that is. It's really peculiar, but I think it's like the feelings you get when you're really young and you can't get it.

and you're not fitting into what that lot are doing, you mask and you cover up that stuff. So I think, like, so I kind of slightly lost my... You're saying what's beautiful is connection and knowledge. But, so... So the ability to challenge yourself in a very doable way now, in your life now, by doing something for 15 minutes every day, it could be a language.

It could be like upping your skills. It could be like learning to pogo. I don't care. Right. But just this, this, this giving yourself a break and, and building some construct for progress, personal progress. um is the most beautiful thing in the world and you definitely don't I mean, I'm proud of the things I've done and I'm not complaining. It's very hard to explain, like, because we hold fame and celebrity and the concept of riches so highly in society.

I'm really proud that actually the prize is right there. And I think that's, you know, certainly growing up in a village, it's in the sense of community and more casual words to... friendly words that equal citizenship. Yeah, and belonging. Yeah, and I think, so for that is what, but it's very hard to explain, it's very hard to explain that.

because the obsession with fame and money. I'm just wondering why the two times in our... wonderful conversation that you've got emotional or upset yeah I don't know what that is about well they both have they've got one thing in common which is when you're talking about yourself as a boy and it's almost like there's some enormous it's so weird i don't even know myself but i but i try to work it out in the documentary and um

because i can't really complain too much i had the most beautiful childhood lovely parents like like my schoolmates were great but but i do i think when we're going back to sort of inclusive classrooms like remember that old concept of like right we're going to play a game right you pick someone you pick someone you pick someone and you know when you're always last so so the idea of school really should be um that everyone gets to not be last all the time

Do you know what I mean? Everyone does have a strength. And what you need at school is you need enough stuff where everyone gets their moments so they don't feel like that one. So I think that's clearly what the... issue is there's probably a lot of issues but I genuinely I can't say oh it's when I was like this or no no no I haven't got a good story but I but I think it's I think, look, some pain or problems come through abuse, physical, sexual, mental. Sometimes it's just a feeling.

And I think when I look, and I'm sure when you look at your kids, you don't want your kids. They should feel like anything's possible.

to a point and then logic kicks in and they they're at a different place and then they can start placing some of that inspiration and innovation but I mean I certainly know that the young Jamie Oliver that started 15 that wasn't logical that was you know everyone always said why do you do it and i said i could i wanted to and i did but but also the the curveball was i had the money in my bank account to do it

how old was i like 22 no 26 25 i started doing it so um so like but but it's the best thing i've ever done the most meaningful thing i've ever done and i think it's so it's interesting isn't it like As you get older you get more conservative, more pragmatic, more boring, but you become more measured.

But there is, I think there's a lot of, we're knocking a lot of kids at the moment about, you know, I don't know, Gen Z is this, that and the other. But I think like we do need and we do require their thoughts and innovation. like and their excitement for the undone or the impossible and i think like and that friction or it doesn't have to be friction i mean good friction um lubricated friction um like between the old generation and the new is

really powerful that's what this podcast is for yeah and hopefully i'm i'm representing the old now no no i mean one of the best things i do now is like mentor young people and and and train young people and and hopefully i get to do more of that into my 60s Well, now you've got Jamie's Italian comeback, you'll be able to do loads more of it. Jamie Oliver, it's been such a pleasure and a privilege. Thank you so much for coming on Radical. I've loved it. It's been an absolute honour.

There's no substitute for charisma and Jamie Oliver has got a lot of it. He is a very, very different person, understandably and inevitably, to the young, energetic, naked chef who burst onto our screens and into our lives nearly 30 years ago now. But he's still got absolutely... as he was saying, the huge energy of a campaigner and the determination to try to make life better for other people. I think it's very clear that he's...

He's quite openly opinionated on a number of issues where before he was very keen to emphasise he's apolitical, but before he might have kind of, I don't know, withheld a little bit. So on school dinners, something he became very, very famous for trying to reform, he was honest and he said that the...

Labour government has made really significant progress with these free breakfast school clubs, which Bridget Phillips and the Education Secretary has rolled out. But he's very, very concerned that no one is upholding the necessary standards on the hospitality industry.

and the pubs in this country, which are going out of business at the rate of one a day, he was pretty brutal in saying that successive governments completely failed in a series of ways to support our very, very precious hospitality trade. And he got emotional, didn't he? There were a couple of occasions when he got emotional. And both of those were when he was really reflecting on a younger Jamie, on an eight or 10 or 12 year old Jamie who struggled at school.

And my sense was that, I mean, you might have heard me say this. My sense was there was a sort of childhood trauma of sorts in there that was kind of struggling to get out a little bit. He clearly really, really didn't have a good time at school academically. He was dyslexic and I think he felt pretty small and inconsequential. And it's very interesting to me that he was at his most passionate and his most emotional when he was thinking about...

what could be done to help the future Jamie's or the Jamie's of today who are perhaps dyslexic and are perhaps struggling with the academic side of school to get more out of their education. And I think he clearly wants to do an awful lot there.

Remember, Jamie is back on Monday to answer your questions, your radical questions. We got a lot of questions and he's going to provide a lot of answers. Thank you so much to him for sticking around for that. That episode drops on Monday morning. And before then... you can of course watch Radical on iPlayer and get this, as of this week, as of this episode with Jamie Oliver, you can also watch us on YouTube.

Right, we're back next Monday. Thank you so much for your time and attention and for listening. See you soon. Hello, it's Ray Winstone. I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4, history's toughest heroes. I've got stories about the pioneers, the rebels, the outcasts who define tough.

And that was the first time that anybody ever ran a car up that fast with no tires on. It almost feels like your eyeballs are going to come out of your head. Tough enough for you? Subscribe to history's toughest heroes wherever. you get your podcast. ... ... ... ... ... ... We'll be right back.

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