Jamie Oliver is best known for his optimist cooking shows like Jamie Oliver: Together and recipe books like 30-Minute Meals. What’s lesser known about the celebrity chef is his relentless campaigning to reduce obesity: “Diet-related disease is the biggest killer in America, in Canada, and in England, but it’s just not glamorous or cool. There are no bullets or car chases.”

Jamie may be determined to make nutritional food attractive, but there are no 30-minute solutions. Obesity and weight-related health issues are part of a global epidemic that kills almost 3m people a year. Still, if anyone can charm their way into the nations’ kitchens and government corridors to effect change, it’s Jamie Oliver.

He’s already persuaded British schoolchildren to eat broccoli and pushed the UK government to make school meals healthier. He won an Emmy for Food Revolution where he tackled childhood obesity in America. And if he’s not on your television testing Vegan corn burgers, Oliver’s probably peering out of your bookcase offering advice on spinach pancakes.

He’s sold almost 15m books, generating about $240m in sales. Not bad for a chef from Essex, England who learned how to cook in his parents’ pub.

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The only way is Essex

Jamie was born in 1975 in Clavering, Essex - a village above an hour’s drive east of London - where his parents ran The Cricketers gastropub. By his own admission, he was a poor student. He was diagnosed with severe dyslexia at a time when few allowances were made for special educational needs. He wouldn’t read his first book cover to cover - Suzanne Collins’ Catching the Fire - until the age of 38, despite having published almost 20 cookbooks.

“I got chucked out of classes,” he told a magazine in 2017. “The way of dealing with dyslexia when I was a kid was to get me to stand up in front of 880 boys in an all-boys school and read five minutes of Shakespeare. Are you kidding me? It was terrible, with all the boys doing all the gestures and signs.”

By 16, Jamie Oliver left school. His parents had turned The Cricketers from a village pub into one of the best restaurants around, so it was a natural next step for Jamie to attend catering college.

The Naked Chef

Jamie was soon working at The River Café, a glamorous Michelin-starred London eatery. For 35 years, it’s been a hangout for media types and celebrities. It was there that Jamie got his TV break when, in 1997, the BBC filmed a documentary about the restaurant.

He appeared unscripted. His casual ‘cheeky chappy’ manner stood out and by 1999 he had his own show, The Naked Chef, a reference to the simplicity of his cooking. A year later, he made it to US TV screens via The Food Network.‍

Blokeish and approachable, Jamie married his teenage sweetheart, Juliette ‘Jools’ Oliver, and within five years he was a TV star, best-selling food writer, and multimillionaire. He also became a high-profile campaigner and social entrepreneur along the way. 

Fifteen restaurant

In 2002, aged just 27, he plowed his earnings from his cookbooks (then $870,000, according to The Times) into his first social enterprise and restaurant: Fifteen. The restaurant took troubled youngsters and trained them to become chefs and to do other jobs in the restaurant industry. It was a success, as was the TV series he made about it.  

“Fundamentally, Fifteen was about social mobility,” Jamie told The Times in 2019. “The young people who graduated were the profit.”

Patrick Cambell, a former London gang member, is now a caterer after training at Fifteen: “When I look back on it, it’s probably the best thing I've ever done in my whole life,” he said in an interview. “Jamie Oliver gave us all the opportunity to turn our life around.”

In 2005, Jamie launched another campaign via a TV series to improve Britain’s un-nutritious school dinners. The program put pressure on the government, which led to investment in school dinners and a healthier approach.

Campaigns followed thick and fast, all leveraging his media profile via popular and influential TV programs. He next took on childhood obesity, excessive sugar consumption, and unhealthy eating - the subjects of his award-winning TED Talk. 
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Business failures

Unfortunately, by Jamie Oliver’s own account, 40 percent of his ventures failed.

At the height of his success, however, Jamie had 25 restaurants across Britain. In 2017, however, despite putting millions of his own money into the business, Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group collapsed under the weight of its debts. Only a handful of restaurants survived. Fifteen, which was part of the group, closed after 17 years. It was, he said, “very upsetting.”

“I appreciate how difficult it is for everyone affected,” Jamie said at the time. “I'm devastated."

A true superhero to the community and politicians

While the collapse of a restaurant empire would have been a blow to even the most seasoned of entrepreneurs, Jamie Oliver still had an income from his publishing empire, and his television appeal has never been in doubt. His commitment to tackling obesity never waned throughout the difficult times.

His campaigns and charitable work are too numerous to mention save for a few highlights, among them improving food in school cafeterias. He has also reduced food waste and helped pass a tax on sugary drinks. His Ministry of Food eight-week community cooking course has trained nearly 100,000 students on how to prepare healthier food. Jamie Oliver is now also in the midst of the 2030 Project, an effort to cut childhood obesity by 50% by 2030.

He is, what the British call, ‘a grafter’, someone who works hard at working hard, one of the qualities of a true superhero. For more than 20 years, Jamie Oliver has used his celebrity status to campaign on social and food issues, and to inspire parents, school boards, and governments to choose healthier options.

“If I’m being reflective, I’ve had the best and the worst of it,” he told journalists a few years ago, after the collapse of his restaurant chain. “I see differently now. It doesn’t mean I’m cynical. I still feel I have 20 years of good work ahead of me, but I don’t have an appetite to, sort of, see my name all over the globe in restaurants.”