Jamie Oliver makes honest admission about own kids being 'tough audience'

Jamie Oliver may have spent much of his career persuading people to eat better, but it seems even he doesn’t get an easy ride when it comes to cooking for his own family.

The 51-year-old chef and campaigner has opened up about his home life, revealing that his children can be a particularly demanding audience when he’s the one cooking.

It’s bad enough that much of the British public hasn’t forgiven him over the whole Turkey Twizzler thing, but to have your own flesh and blood grumbling? Ouch.

Oliver is dad to five children: Poppy, 24, Daisy, 23, Petal, 17, Buddy, 15, and River, 10.

With a professional career built around making food accessible and appealing to families, it might be expected that dinner at the Oliver household would be a relatively straightforward affair.

Apparently not.

Jamie Oliver opened up about his family life and cooking for the family (Instagram/@jamieoliver)

Speaking to HELLO!, Oliver confessed his kids are a ‘tough audience’ when it comes to his cooking at home.

"I want them to be more grateful and in awe of their father, but I'm just their dad," Oliver jokes. "They're so unimpressed by me."

"Sometimes I'm like, kids, do you not realise people queue up to have this, are you kidding me?" he added.

Speaking about his 'tough audience', he said: "They really don't know how lucky they are!"

Despite creating countless recipes aimed at making home cooking less intimidating, the reality of feeding your own children is rather different from cooking for a television audience or writing a recipe for a cookbook.

Anyone who has tried to serve dinner to children will recognise the problem.

A meal can be carefully planned, freshly cooked, enthusiastically and beautifully presented, only to be met with a shrug, a complaint about one ingredient or a firm declaration that the child simply does not like it.

Oliver's comments also offer a glimpse into the more ordinary side of family life for a man whose professional world revolves around food.

The admission comes as he embarks on another campaign close to his heart, with the chef continuing to use his platform to push for improvements to children's food and health.

The government has revealed plans to ban or limit certain unhealthy foods from school lunches from next year.

Jamie Oliver is a household name but says his kids don't appreciate his cooking (Photo by Paula Lobo/American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. via Getty Images)

Oliver has also previously spoken candidly about the difficulty of working with children and young people.

During his series Jamie's Dream School, he told The Guardian that adults can have a ‘completely clouded view’ of their own children, contrasting the experience of dealing with one child at home with managing a whole classroom.

For Oliver, though, the challenge appears to be part of the fun.

His children have grown up with a father who is constantly experimenting with ingredients, recipes and ideas, meaning they were hardly short of opportunities to try something new.

The chef has previously been open about the realities of raising a large family, including the fact that his children have very different personalities and tastes.

That makes the family kitchen a useful reminder that there is no guaranteed formula for getting children to eat well.

Being Jamie Oliver's child may mean having one of the country's best-known chefs in your kitchen, but it doesn’t guarantee that dinner will receive five-star reviews.

For many parents, this is the most relatable thing Oliver could ever have admitted.