Jamie gives us the low-down on filming Jamie's Return to School Dinners and his plans for the future in this exclusive interview..
Were you looking forward to going back to Greenwich?
Yes, because we put so much work into their school meals making the last programme. I spent a lot of time with my mate Nora who helped me from day one to develop the recipes and menu cycles that schools throughout Greenwich are now using. I wanted to see whether the teething problems had gone away and whether any new problems had appeared.
Were you surprised at what you discovered?
I was really disappointed that Nora still hadn't seen any money to pay for the extra time she and her staff had to spend preparing the new menus, so the kids get freshly prepared food. But worse than that, was the fact that the ban on selling junk in the tuck shop had affected her catering budget. Because she couldn't sell crisps, fizzy drinks and chocolate, it was running at a loss for the first time.
Do you think Tony Blair's offer of money was enough?
I'm really grateful for the extra money and it's thanks to the massive support we had from the public and the media that we were able to get more again this time round. But the reality is that when you work it out at school level, the amounts are tiny. Nora only gets £2,000.
The government is spending £1 billion on obesity. We need a campaign on the same scale to educate kids and parents and schools about proper food and good nutrition. It's about getting people to cook the simple kind of stuff like shepherds pie and sausages and mash which doesn't cost a lot but is way better for you than the convenience junk which most of us seem to live on these days.
There's a generation of parents out there who didn't learn to cook at school and now we're rapidly loosing the skills that have been passed down through the generations and acted as a kind of safeguard to make sure we can feed ourselves properly.
What do you think is the most important issue now re school meals?
Dinner ladies are still the most important. If they don't get the support, training and funding they need, it's going to be very difficult for them to change things in the kitchen. They need more hours, better equipment, new kitchens and training to help them prepare food from scratch again.
What else have you been doing since filming of the last show?
I've been over in Australia launching another Fifteen restaurant. The Fifteen Foundation now has three restaurants in addition to our London HQ, one in Amsterdam, one in Cornwall, which we opened this summer, and the latest one in Melbourne. These have been set up with help from some fantastic private individuals who were prepared to fund the restaurants. They've had to put in the hard work to run the training programme too. We're trying to help disadvantaged young people - homeless, unemployed, overcoming drug or alcohol problems - and inspire them to believe that they can make great careers for themselves in the restaurant industry. These guys go to college and learn how to cook and then have to put it into practice in a top class restaurant. Its hard work but when they graduate they get jobs in some of the best restaurants in the world.
What are your plans now? Do they include lobbying for better school dinners still?
To be honest, I'd really like to see schools and local councils and parents taking the initiative now. I've shown how it can be done, even when you haven't got a kitchen. I think there's a point where you have to say to people “you have the power to make change happen” and hopefully, they will be inspired by the programme and courageous enough to go and do it.
What's your favourite school dinner?
The one which always comes up best with the kids is Hot n Kickin' Chicken. It's the easiest thing in the world to make – just rub a few spices into the chicken with oil and lemon juice, let it marinade and roast it nicely. We put together this recipe for with Nora at Kidbrooke and it's still the best seller.
The following interview was first published in Spring 2005
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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