There are few British chefs to have sparked conversations around food quite like Jamie Oliver.
He rose to fame in 1999 with TV show The Naked Chef, and has since gone on to be one of the UK’s most prominent celebrity chefs. With over 20 cookbooks to his name, and a long filmography of TV shows and documentaries, he’s as much a household name on these shores as Gordon Ramsay.
While Oliver’s brand has been built on household cooking, Ramsay’s more of a fine dining kind of guy with his 17 Michelin Stars to Jamie’s nil. Where Ramsay’s been fighting tough battles in the kitchen, Oliver’s chosen different battlefields.
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Back in 2005, Oliver’s campaign for healthier school meals famously saw the defeat and removal of Turkey Twizzlers – twists of reconstituted meat that contained vanishingly little turkey and tonnes of artificial additives.
Since then he’s continued to campaign for better food in schools and early years care, championing the importance of strong nutrition both for development and performance.
With his latest documentary, Jamie’s Dyslexia Revolution, he’s turned his attention to another shortfall of school-based care: supporting the neurodivergent.
Having faced struggles with dyslexia that persist to this day, Jamie Oliver experienced the confidence-ruining challenges of going through school with a developmental disorder.
Struggling with reading, writing and comprehension creates a rocky foundation for any kind of academic achievement, and in the documentary he demands more from the government in terms of support provision.
It’s telling that, over 30 years on from the end of his own school days, it seems support for kids with learning difficulties has scarcely improved in state schools, and he is emotive and powerful about the damage that this lack of support and focus on academia can have on children and adults.
You can watch the documentary for yourself on Channel 4.
Back to the comparison with Gordon Ramsay, you might not know that he and Jamie Oliver had something of a public falling out that lasted for the better part of a decade.
In 2010, the ever-blunt and controversy-inviting Ramsay described his countryman as a ‘one-pot wonder’. Ouch! The comment was a riposte to Oliver’s fair defence of Australian journalist Tracy Grimshaw whom Ramsay compared to a pig in 2019.
The personal jabs didn’t stop there, with Ramsay referring to Oliver as ‘just a cook’ and even stooping as low as to call him ‘fat’, while Oliver reportedly taunted the opposite number over ‘having botox’.
You’d think that such public causticity would put any chances of friendship to bed but, in a conversation with The Times, Oliver revealed that they’ve reconciled in recent years.
“Me and Gordon are absolutely friends, our little berating decade is behind us,” the Naked Chef told the publication.
“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.”
Fair play to them both for burying the hatchet. Who knows, maybe we’ll see them together in the kitchen or on the campaign trail sometime in the future.
Topics: Celebrity, TV and Film
Rachael Davis