Jamie Oliver: ‘Lots of my heroes were so horrible to me’
In a brutally frank interview, Naked Chef Jamie Oliver opens up on 25 years in the public eye and all the people who tried to destroy him on his journey to fame and success.
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Sydney is Jamie Oliver’s second home. He loves it here, he’s got family here and he says our food is among the best in the world.
His family loves it too – his eldest of five children, Poppy, is just back from 10 months backpacking around Australia – in fact, she may have served you cocktails at Bondi’s famed Totti’s, or delivered your Sunday roast at The Farm’s Three Blue Ducks in Byron on her travels.
The 22-year-old loved every minute – although her famous dad didn’t readily prepare her for the world of hospitality. Because being Jamie Oliver’s kid doesn’t give you any special privileges – or training, he laughs – and on a more serious note, being the child of a celebrity doesn’t do you any favours at all, actually.
“I don’t think it’s very healthy being a celebrity’s child,” Oliver tells Sydney Weekend from his London home ahead of his upcoming trip Down Under.
“You definitely wouldn’t recommend it to anyone,” he jokes. “And I know I’ve done a really good job of it, and it’s still like, we’re just skimming on the right side of good.
“The public are brutal, for better or for worse. And kids just want to do their own (thing) and not be spotlighted.
“But no regrets, man.
“We’re not here for long, man, we’ve just got to do our best, and for the love of God, while we’re here – eat some tasty food,” he laughs.
Oliver and his wife Juliette – or Jools as the world knows her – have five kids aged 22 to eight. Like any other busy working parents they’re doing their best – and while it may not get easier with each child – they’re very different, you see – you learn to navigate their needs as you may a recipe, adjusting ingredients to taste.
“I feel the same pain as you – your kids are programmed not to listen to you as much,” he says of the “teenage stage” that haunts all parents.
“You’ve got other roles at different stages in your life, and I’m as frustrated with mine as I’m sure you are with yours – but really, our job is to make them unconditionally loved – and our job is also let them fail and feel the pain of failure, because it’s not great.
“And then they start coming back.
“But I think it’s really important – and I have to think about it every day because I’m quite known, of course, my kids benefit from the success their father’s had – but it’s very superficial and actually, if they get things they haven’t earned because of it, that’s not healthy.
“And if they get a lot of shit because of it, that’s not healthy either.”
Poppy “went in cold” into her year abroad. She was in Cairns during the floods, loved her time in Byron Bay and waited tables in Bondi – and now dad is just happy she’s home and ready for a taste of adulthood.
“She did four months of good old-fashioned backpacking in dormitories, and went up the East Coast – she was up in Cairns when those big floods are on and got to see some amazing things – she loved it,” he says proudly.
“I didn’t see her for a year, so I was getting a little bit (anxious) but I love to know she’s good and she’s fired up now to be an adult and get a job … reality bites,” he laughs.
“She’s like: ‘Dad, I’ve done the maths – my wages and my rent, oh my god, there’s gonna be nothing left’ – I’m like, welcome to being (an adult) – you’re gonna be skint and it’s gonna be hard, and if you want extra money, you gotta get a second job.
“She said, ‘I’m not very good at waitressing, it didn’t come naturally to me’, because I didn’t train her up before she started doing it, so she kind of went in cold.”
But as he told her – and as he reminds himself every day of the past 25 years since he first catapulted on to our screens as the Naked Chef – serving people is a privilege.
“I was always saying to her it’s such a privilege to serve people,” he says.
“Like, hey, this is not a job – this is a privilege.
“To learn that is themost amazing psychological look at people and patterns. You see the people that are in love, the people that are in love that have fallen out, the people that are having a business meal, the first dates, the people that are having a shit day – you pick it all up within seconds. And your job is to try and turn that around and turn a negative into a positive, or a positive into a bigger positive.
“I think it gives you skills for life.”
They’re skills he learnt early himself. Oliver started cooking at his parents’ pub, The Cricketers, in Clavering, Essex, at the age of eight. After leaving school he began a career as a chef that took him to London’s River Cafe, where he was famously spotted by a television production company and his TV and publishing career began in 1999 with The Naked Chef series. Then he set up Fifteen restaurant in London, a not-for-profit restaurant designed to train 15 disadvantaged young people and put them on a good path. He’s also changed school dinners in the UK and revolutionised home cooking. His charity, The Jamie Oliver Foundation, seeks to improve people’s lives through food, and his “One Pound Wonders” cooks on a budget. He lives in London and Essex with Jools and the kids, and this year, is doing a lot of reflecting.
It’s 25 years of fame. Twenty four years of marriage. And next year he turns 50. He says he’s been lucky along the way to land where he is now – and he may just know why.
“Honestly, truly, trust is the currency in shortest supply, and you really have to earn it,” he continues. “And in the early days, in the first five years of my career, lots of my heroes were so f--king horrible to me.
“Honestly, they were so jealous of my success, and I was only a young boy.
“It was the only thing that I struggled with for those first five years, because these people I looked up to were just destroying me on a regular basis, and they couldn’t work out how it was that I was selling more books than all of them put together.
“It’s quite emotional, to be fair,” he says of the last two and a half decades. “But I think, like lots of things, I had a lot of luck.
“Everyone gets luck – you’ve just always got to be ready to take advantage of it and say yes to as much as possible and be kind, and put goodness out there, and put stuff out and don’t expect anything back, because it will come.
“I really believe in that, and I’ve been very lucky. And honestly, I was in a basement flat working in a restaurant, straight to work out of school. And I never thought I’d get to Australia, genuinely. All my mates were there. And in those days, it was sending postcards – there was no text or email – they were living life, drinking, shagging, having the best time ever, and I was stuck in a f--king placement kitchen with a load of mushrooms.
“So I genuinely never thought (I’d get there) – it’s literally like a dream.”
Today, as he’s excited to tell Sydney Weekend, Australia is his second home. He will be here soon, to do an up close and personal Q&A style show to celebrate his new cookbook, Simply Jamie, at Rooty Hill’s Coliseum Theatre next month. He will also host the Food Hero Awards and a sold-out pop-up motor neurone disease fundraiser at Surry Hills staple, Bar Copains.
It’s always “mix work and pleasure when I’m in Aussie” – and that’s just how he likes it.
And his new cookbook?
Well it’s just what we all need.
“There’s a time and a place for all kinds of cookbooks, but I think the way that my career has been allowed to grow over 25 years – normally, people in my game get eaten up and spat out in about four years, right? So here I am, 25 years on, and going back to that genuine conversation about serving.
“Like being a public servant, my job is to listen, as is yours, as a writer,” he explains.
“And there’s no point in writing about just anything – it’s like what is going to touch people, what’s going to be useful.
“My job is to be useful first.
“And the only purely true thing in the world of food right now is basket data from supermarkets. And it’s not good.
“I would imagine that Australia is not far away, we’re so similar in so many ways, but certainly in the UK, we’ve never cooked less than now. And we can take a few views on it.
“You could say, well, Jamie, have you failed? Have you wasted your time for 25 years? And I think my answer is no.
“It would have been worse if I hadn’t built the campaigns, told the stories – I think we’d be much closer to America than Europe.
“Because these things have changed our life, they’re incredibly powerful.
“And I largely employ women.
“I think the pressures on women and what does a modern day mum look like, particularly, is very stressful, because you’ve got to be everything, and the expectations are high, and those normal maternal instincts – you can’t change those – so there’s a lot of guilt, I believe.
“I can’t answer that on behalf of women, but I see it as an employer of 130 women and three daughters and an incredible wife – and it’s when I look at the basket data, when I look at the likes of the ‘Uberisation’ of food– because it’s so easy to order stuff and it’s bloody expensive.
“But if you give me $12 or $15, I can cook a meal for a family – a good meal – I really can, and it’s not even that hard.
“So the things in this book are the things that I do every week to help me out. If you look at the book, there’s loads of vegies, loads of vegan, loads of fish, loads of meat, there’s like cupboard love, which is a chapter for when you look in your fridge with nothing (in it) … this is all about amping up and picking up the jars, the tins, (emptying) the freezer.
“Because particularly in our game, the truth is always hard to find, but the basket never, ever lies. So that’s why you’ve got like 10 things to do with chicken breast, 10 things to do with salmon fillets – because I know that that’s what you’re buying every week.
“So I’m trying to write recipes for things that I know you’ve bought already – I don’t want you to read the recipe and then go shopping.”
His new book is all about celebrating the joy of cooking while making it easy for people to fit cooking into our too-busy lives. The recipes can be made in under 20 minutes and cover midweek meals, weekend wins and tips to transform leftovers into a tasty new dish.
He knows they work, because he cooks them.
“Each recipe I write costs me about £1800 (about $3500) to test, because it’s like four times in the business, two or three times outside the business, I pay all the shopping bills for the people that work for me, I do the master edit on every recipe,” he says.
“And you times that by 130 recipes – that’s a huge amount, but I do that for every book.
“There’s no such thing as a perfect recipe, but my job is to get as good as we can – we test in different ovens, we test different brands, different pans.
“Like one of these is about three metres from someone in the kitchen,” he says, holding up one of his books proudly.
“And it’s an amazing job.
“It’s such an honour to be in the best room in the house. And if you look at Aussie, I mean, I haven’t done the maths, but it’s probably like one in every five homes has got one (book), so I feel very blessed.”
So after all these years – does he still like to cook? Well that’s an easy one.
“I dream about it all the time,” he says of creating good food – even after having it dictate his life for 40-odd years.
“I daydream about it all the time.
“Because I really believe that it’s an antidote to many of life’s challenges.
“And what I haven’t realised is that the last 25 years, really, what I’ve been doing is studying people, anthropology, but not knowing it.
“With my dyslexia and the challenges that’s thrown me, which is quite a lot, it’s made me do things very differently.
“People talk about it, but I can say because I’ve probably earned it – but probably ‘pound for pound’ … as documentary making with a campaign that changes the structure of the world we live in, through food, there’s no one on the planet that comes close.
“We at Pound are the best, and that’s not showing off because we’re deeply under-resourced. But if I could have 10 people or 15 people, we could start doing amazing things, but I do what I can afford.”
His time in Sydney will also include hosting the Food Hero Awards, which he launched in July. Boasting Dannii Minogue, The Wiggles and friend Andy Allen among celebrity judges, the awards celebrate the amazing individuals, community groups and schools, who day in and day out make sure Australian kids are well nourished.
Winners will be announced at a ceremony on-board Royal Caribbean’s Ovation of the Seas in Sydney on November 13, by none other than Oliver himself.
“I’ve seen brilliant work happening in the Australian food system, from farm to fork, that deserves to be celebrated,” he says.
“There are many unsung heroes – educators, caterers, cooks – who are providing deliciously nutritious food for our kids and inspiring them to lead happy, healthy lives through the joy of food. And I’m sure what I’ve seen is just the tip of the iceberg.
“I can’t wait to uncover more food heroes, and to share their stories.”
Oliver’s own mum and dad have never been to Australia – but he’s going to bring them next year to celebrate his 50th birthday with some very special things he’d like to achieve. Stay tuned on the details – but if he looks back on his career, working with kids who struggled like he did stands out, still to this day.
“I mean as a dyslexic kid – when I started Fifteen, which took quite a high proportion of neurodiverse kids, quite a high proportion of kids from prison, kids that struggled at school, most of them homeless kids – that’s what we were taking on every year,” he says.
“So what was beautiful about cooking, and an example is pasta – you can take flour and water or eggs you put it together, you make Play Doh, you can shape it, colour it, stuff it, roll it and it holds – and like in the book, I give you a principle, then it’s quite often you’ll find six, seven, eight expressions of what to do with it.
“And hopefully then, that sets you on your own little journey.
“But when I was teaching these kids, it’s like when you get something precious in the post, and it’s wrapped up in bubble wrap – every day, I was trying to give like 10 or 12 little bubbles.
“Even if they had a shit day, give them 12 bubbles.
“And I could see these kids just finding purpose and finding consistency and finding their place in the world.
“It’s really powerful and to this day, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
He says cooking is one cog in the gears of a racing bike – and Simply Jamie brings what he thinks we, the public, need now more than ever. Hope.
“Simply is my expression of what I think the public need now, based on what I know is a fact,” he says.
“Half of my books are like from my heart, and half are like, kind of solution books to problems that are out there.
“The other thing that I love is, I probably got the worst exam results in my year, so I was in special needs – that’s what we called it – and I was in special needs all of my secondary school life.
“So to be the second biggest author in the country – for me that is and hopefully I can say it without sounding arrogant – but I just love the idea of hope.
“Actually, quite a lot of what I’ve done has been about hope.
“The story of Fifteen – I’ve got students that graduated and have gotten Michelin stars and I haven’t – how incredible is that?
“So I think, as my life was blessed, what I tried to pass on to the young people is just – there’s no ceiling.
“Be wild.
“Surprise yourself.” ■
Originally published as Jamie Oliver: ‘Lots of my heroes were so horrible to me’
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