The diagnosis that brought Jamie Oliver to tears
The chef, who has just turned 50, struggled at school and with the ‘accounty’ part of business. After a formal diagnosis of dyslexia this year, he now knows why.
It’s been 20 minutes since I sat down with Jamie Oliver in a south London pub and so far I haven’t got a word in edgeways. He apologises profusely for being late, calls me “darling” and checks multiple times if I’d like something to eat, with the same politeness and animated Essex accent that made him a famous television chef in the first place.
He has come straight from filming a documentary about dyslexia and is talking fast, straying off topic and going into such long rants that I worry we’ll run out of time. When he finally does fall silent it’s because he is starting to cry.
“I’m unpacking quite a lot of stuff and I’m oversharing with you because I’ve got to f---ing work this shit out,” he says, rubbing his eyes and fidgeting in his chair. “I thought I’d buried it but it’s hitting a nerve. F--- it, the TV crew will be so pissed off, they’ve got none of this.”
The question I’ve asked that has made him so emotional (and so free with his expletives) is how his dyslexia affects him as an adult. Oliver, who has just turned 50, has struggled with the learning difficulty, which causes problems in processing and remembering information, since he was young but received an official diagnosis only in January. It’s all still very raw.
“Genuinely, of all the things I’ve ever done, this documentary is the most viscerally painful,” he says. “I’ve seen so many high-flying, talented grown men cry about this — I’ve just done it to you — the concept of being worthless [when you’re] young is real. It’s really triggering.”
Born in Clavering, Essex, in 1975, and brought up in his parents’ pub, the Cricketers in Saffron Walden, he always found school a struggle. His mum and dad, Sally and Trevor, gave him a “fantastic childhood, real freedom and love. There’s nowhere like a pub,” but things weren’t easy for him. At Clavering Primary School Oliver hated reading and writing. “I just didn’t get it,” he says.
At his non-selective all-boys secondary, Newport Free Grammar School, today known as the Joyce Frankland Academy, his school reports said he “was getting behind and not doing well” with reading and spelling, so Oliver was given “a special needs teacher — everyone says not to call it that, but that’s what they were called then” — who said he was dyslexic, though he wasn’t formally diagnosed.
“I didn’t have any extra time in exams, there were no strategies, just a bit of extra tutoring help,” he says. “There was no robust dyslexic knowledge then.” He felt “stupid, worthless and thick” and developed “a hatred of words and a total resentment for education”. Other pupils called him a “stupid dunce” and he was left with “a deep-seated feeling of constantly being behind”.
“I didn’t tell Mum, Dad or the teachers,” he adds. “I just bottled it up inside.”
Luckily, Oliver could cook. He recalls the week of a particularly bad parents’ evening in primary school when he was 10, where he made “a roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings” for his family. “I remember my dad patting me on the back. All my hairs stood up and I thought, ‘I really like this feeling’, so I just kept cooking,” he says.
He left school at 16 “with a couple of GCSEs”, and trained as a chef at Westminster Catering College (now Capital City College) in London and Highbury College in Portsmouth. It was in his early 20s while working as a sous-chef for Ruth Rogers at the River Cafe in Hammersmith, west London, that he was spotted “doing spinach in the background” by a television producer, who gave him his own show, The Naked Chef, in 1999.
Oliver’s energetic, unpretentious “bit of this, bit of that” approach was the secret of his success. He built an empire spanning more than 50 television series, two dozen best-selling cookbooks, his own cookware range and a chain of restaurants, beginning with Fifteen in London in 2002, followed by the Jamie’s Italian franchise in 2008.
“The kitchen saved me,” he says. “I knew I had something to offer. I knew I wasn’t a useless piece of shit.”
His difficulties with education came back to haunt him, however. In May 2019 his restaurant group ran into trouble. The business was haemorrhaging money and he had to close 22 out of 25 UK restaurants, resulting in a thousand job losses overnight. The remaining three restaurants, at Gatwick Airport, were sold on and have since closed. At the time he took full responsibility for believing he “could turn it around” and described the closures as “the most disappointing few months” of his life.
In hindsight he thinks his dyslexia played a part. After shedding some tears he explains that he finds the creative side of the business effortless, but “the grown-up stuff, legal, accounty things, that ain’t me. I’ve protected myself from that because it’s numerical and a lot of words. That’s set me back over my career and I’ve probably vested too much trust — that’s been my nemesis.” This year, he says, “I’ve started to dismantle some of those walls. I need to accept that I don’t need to know everything, but I need to know more.”
“I knew I had something to offer. I knew I wasn’t a useless piece of shit.”
What he may have lacked in business nous he made up for in social activism. In 2005 his Feed Me Better campaign for more nutritious school dinners resulted in the banning of Turkey Twizzlers from school menus. In 2016 he helped to implement the sugary drinks tax and he continues to campaign for the banning of the sale of energy drinks to under-16s.
He hopes to make a similar impact on dyslexia. He is calling for reform in schools, including mandatory early screening for dyslexia and neurodiversity — “and the tools to do it, which can be easily used by teachers. We also need more training for teachers. In a two to three-year training course only about half a day is given to neurodiversity.”
I wonder if he has considered the backlash this might create — teachers are already feeling overworked and resources are sparse. “I’ve only got love for teachers, we need to appreciate them more,” he says. “But they want to be trained, they want to have the tools to notice, understand and react.”
In March I met Oliver outside the Houses of Parliament. Dressed in a smart suit, he was being mobbed by mums and their children begging for selfies having pleaded his case to the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson. “She said she would look into it, she’s taking this seriously,” he says. “I didn’t quite get the clarity on commitment I would have liked, but that’s politics.”
He describes this campaign as being “much more of a burden” and “a much bigger challenge” than his others. “Not acknowledging or allowing a six, seven or eight-year-old to express their intelligence … that’s kind of child abuse. This is heavy, because neurodivergent kids are falling between the cracks. They end up resenting education, which leads to anger, frustration, poor health, crime, prison and all the horrible things you don’t want to think about,” he says. “I ran from school thinking, ‘F--- you,’ but I was lucky because I had the kitchen.”
In many ways Oliver has the same frenetic schoolboy energy he had at 23 when he began filming The Naked Chef. He still rides the same Vespa he whizzed around on then, but turning 50 “isn’t great, in fact it’s a bit shit”, he says. His sandy blond hair is as thick as ever but peppered with grey and his blue eyes are shadowed with tired bags. In recent years he has struggled with slipped discs in his back, exacerbated by long hours standing in the kitchen. At one point he could barely stand for more than 40 seconds straight.
“I’m trying desperately hard to be the healthiest version of me, working on the right things at the gym and physiotherapy,” he says. “Hopefully I’ve got a few more years in me yet.”
He and his wife, Jools, also 50, celebrate their silver wedding anniversary this month. They got married in Essex in 2000 after eight years of dating, before renewing their vows in the Maldives in 2023 and again last year in Las Vegas. His secret to such a long union is not passion or grand gestures but simply, “Don’t have high expectations. You’ll be let down all the time. Set them correctly and you’ll get nice surprises. Don’t hold grudges, hang around and it might work itself out.”
His oldest daughters, Poppy, 23, and Daisy, 22, have flown the nest, which he says is “hard, but sort of exciting and beautiful”, while Petal, 16, Buddy, 14, and River, 8, live at home.
In the past year Oliver says there have been diagnoses of dyslexia, ADHD and ASD (autism spectrum disorder) within their “very neurodiverse family”, but he won’t go into details. He says he and Jools discuss their children every night in bed and have “learnt to understand that their behaviour is because they’re seeing things differently. Being aware of that allows you to be a better parent”.
Family life is “amazing but bonkers. Imagine four neurodiverse people at the dinner table trying to get their point across”. He believes attitudes towards neurodivergence are generational. “Older people tend to have the ‘we didn’t have that when we were young’ attitude. We just didn’t know as much about our brains 30 years ago.”
Despite having the best intentions, he often manages to upset people when he tries to be more than just a TV chef. During his war on Turkey Twizzlers he was spat at by children who were less than happy about being told what they could eat, and to some parents he was public enemy No 1.
Worse criticism came in November with his latest children’s book. Billy and the Epic Escape, the second in a series, featured a young Indigenous girl living in foster care in Australia. It was labelled “damaging and disrespectful” by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Commission, who accused Oliver of contributing to the “erasure, trivialisation and stereotyping of First Nations peoples”.
Oliver apologised and said he was “devastated” in a statement. He and his publisher, Penguin Random House UK, pulled the books from sale. It is an episode that he is clearly wounded by and a subject I am told is off limits. The most he will say is that, as somebody who struggles with dyslexia, writing fiction where he had to “develop characters and do a start, middle and end” was “the hardest thing”.
He takes allegations of cultural appropriation over his twists on traditional recipes a little more lightly. A row over his “punchy jerk rice” ready meal in 2018 led the Labour shadow women and equalities minister Dawn Butler to say that Oliver “didn’t know what jerk was”. In 2016 he had the audacity to post a recipe for paella on social media that included chorizo, which is not present in the classic versions. He says he received “death threats and abuse that went on for months”. The same happened when he crushed a clove of garlic into his carbonara a year later.
“It’s not traditional but if you want to, why not go for it?” Oliver says of the carbonara. “People know so little about food, they don’t even know what’s authentic. I tend not to get offended but you want to be respectful. With appropriation, what you’ve got to be careful of is claiming that you invented something or that something’s yours.”
He says he runs all of his international recipes through a specialist from that region. “The last thing I’d want to do is upset anyone.”
Oliver has restaurants all over the world — even after his UK establishments shut, his 70 branches abroad remained intact. Ever the patriot, he thought having one at home “was really important”. So in November 2023 he opened Jamie Oliver Catherine St in Covent Garden. Last year other celebrity chefs including Marcus Wareing, Michel Roux Jr and Monica Galetti had to close their restaurants. Doesn’t he worry that history will repeat itself?
“Making a quid out of restaurants is really hard,” he says. “If you’re a neighbourhood restaurant that buys local produce and trains people to be chefs, you’re treated the same as Domino’s. The costs are unbelievable.”
Last January his restaurant had to take £65,000 a week to break even. Now, he says, it needs to take £80,000. “It’s a lot of money to make nothing, but it’s what I do,” he says. “It’s all I’ve known. It’s my happy place.”
I comment that his frenemy Gordon Ramsay seems to be doing well, having recently opened five flashy restaurants at 22 Bishopsgate, a skyscraper in the City of London. The pair fell out in 2009 after Ramsay referred to Oliver as a “one-pot wonder”. They continued their spat publicly for the best part of 10 years before making up. Are they still friends?
“Me and Gordon are absolutely friends, our little berating decade is behind us,” Oliver says, smiling. “He’s smashing life at the moment. He’s doing things that no chef’s ever done. We’re on good terms and long may it continue.”
Recently Oliver has been thinking deeply about how to future-proof his career. That involves looking at how he can turn his Essex farmhouse into a business, hosting cookery courses and opening a bakery.
“I’d really love to keep going, so if I can keep my job I need to be clever about it,” he says. “I need to think about what that looks like at 60, at 70. That’s if I’m allowed to have a career — I’m very disposable, by the way.”
Our conversation has been littered with his self-deprecations. At one point he says he believes “no one gives two tosses” about him. At times this comes across as artificial — part of his “humble guy” TV persona. At others it feels genuine. I believe him when he says he is at his happiest when serving someone a plate of food. He may have celebrities on speed dial but he loves “serving normal people and meeting normal people, because I feel like I am a normal person. Often people think I’m not, but I am”.
To celebrate his 50th he’s planning “a mini festival, a rave in the vegetable patch” at home, where he’ll ask some of his chef friends to “feed a bunch of reprobates until the early hours. I haven’t thrown a party for a while, so I’m probably due one”. After that, his dream is “to get old cooking, travel less and work with more young chefs. The happiest version of me is when I’m bigging up other people and shining a light on them”.
Will it be possible for him to slow down?
“I’m still here, I’m still alive. I’d like the 50s to be different. I’d like them to be celebratory. I like the idea that my 50s require a different Jamie.”
Does that mean an end to the campaigning? “I probably need to wind it back a bit and stop being so relentless,” he says with a sigh. “But we’ll see, it might end up being completely different. Knowing the Olivers, it could go anywhere. Ultimately, my job is to wear my heart on my sleeve. I think I’ve done that.”
The Sunday Times
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