Jamie Speaks!!
He never thought he’d have to get rigged out as a giant sweetcorn! Jamie Oliver looks back on the highs and lows of filming Jamie’s School Dinners.
When you turned up at school on that first day, were the kids different from what you’d expected?
I had to get my head around 2005 kiddie-lingo pretty quick, but otherwise things haven’t changed that much, except some kids are more sophisticated, and others are more backward than when I was at school.
In the series you were sometimes cast as teacher as much as a chef. Is teaching something you enjoy?
Yeah, I suppose I’m always teaching in kitchens, I do it a lot. In Programme 2 I was a teacher. My job there was to try and understand where the kids were coming from and see if I could persuade them to make better decisions about what they were eating. It wasn’t easy – it gave me a reality check on what teachers do, and how hard it is to be a teacher.
How did you feel, dressed up as a sweetcorn?
Bloody ridiculous – a right prat. And ‘cos so many kids didn’t even know what loads of vegetables look like, they probably didn’t even know what I was!
What about those bolshy teenagers who wouldn’t try the food and demonstrated against you. How was that?
Not very much fun. Especially when you’re trying to change things and get them to be more open-minded. But it’s not easy because they’ve grown up accepting what they’re told by marketing giants like Nike or McDonald’s. I wanted to take them out of that attitude and present them with something different. It really takes time, but when they stopped whingeing and got on with it, they didn’t want to go back to the old rubbish, ‘cos this was much better.
You had your ups and downs with Nora. How are you getting on with her now?
Nora – she kicked my backside a bit. She knew I was coming in to experiment, and I took her well out of her comfort zone. But she stuck with it – she could have kicked me out on day two, but she didn’t. It’s funny really, after the way it started with her, but in the end without her it wouldn’t have worked. She was a huge support. At first she was vulnerable and I was confident, then she became more confident when I was shaky. Without her we wouldn’t ever have achieved the rollout through the borough. Nora’s a really amazing lady. But dinner ladies like her need supporting with more money.
What were the high points of making the series?
Seeing the dinner ladies transformed and taken to another level. And seeing the children transformed, too. Feeling that with my school dinners I could get kids to try new things, and actually enjoy stuff that was much better for them. It was a struggle, though. You want them all to be trying things and they don’t want to. But it’s gotta be fun, not forced, then slowly, slowly, they’ll start to shift.
And the low points?
Too many. The sheer scale of trying to change a whole borough, get the teachers and dinner ladies behind me, bring the parents and kids onside. It was very tiring and a bit depressing sometimes. Hard to focus, because it was just so big.
It looked like a pretty punishing schedule you had set up there.
Yeah, it was exhausting – dreadful, for a while it overtook and compromised everything I was trying to do.
It must have been tough on your family too.
Yeah, it was hard for them. I was usually with them at weekends, but not mentally there that much – I was always worrying, thinking about it. But this year feels much better.
Did you achieve what you set out to do?
Yes, and I’ve still got four people working on school dinners in Greenwich – chefs going into schools to help them to change
What are you doing next?
I’m looking forward to the programmes being seen and I hope parents and teachers will demand more support from the Government. I want to try and get government-backed change – that might mean working with them or whatever. We need to get them to make the right decisions. As a nation, you can’t always expect children or parents to know what’s best; you expect the government to step in and help people. So much of it is down to common sense.
Foodwise, what do you think the future will be like for the kids on the programme?
At the moment, it all depends on their families. There’s no food culture at school. And in lots of families people haven’t got a lot of time for food and cooking. Some of the younger ones don’t always get any dinner at all at home. That’s why it makes more and more sense for schools to step in. Whether they’re lucky kids with good food at home or not, they all should get decent food at school.
What have you learned from doing the series?
One of the most shocking things that I just hadn’t realised was how much food is taken on the go, it’s not there to be shared or enjoyed. A lot of kids don’t even have a table at home, they just take their food and go upstairs and eat it in front of their PlayStations. I mean, I like a bowl of noodles in front of the telly with the missis all right, but it’s also great to share meals with others, and sometimes it’s fantastic for the family to sit down and eat together.
The other really important thing is making people understand. People say: ‘My kid eats this or that junk food, and he’s all right.’ They don’t realise what the long-term effect’s gonna be. It takes a doctor or paediatrician to say to them, your kid’s storing up this that or the other health problem. The information’s all there: the statistics show that we’re growing more obese, getting more diseases linked with poor diet. We should be saying, f— it, what are we doing? If we don’t act now, in 100 years what will people think – they’ll look back and see, all the signs were there – and they’ll say why didn’t they do something?
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