Jamie Oliver

Cor blimey Jamie Oliver gets on my nerves, but it’s hard not to admire his tenacious commitment to changing the way the world eats.

He’s just celebrated the tenth anniversary of his first London restaurant, “Fifteen” and the beginning of a remarkable transformation that’s made him the face of a global movement pushing healthy and nourishing foods.

Oliver’s game has always been making real food that you can prepare fast - a puzzling thing given I find his recipes particularly hard to reproduce. But his heart and enormous amounts of energy are plain to see. Whether he’s stripping the Turkey Twizzlers from the lunch menus of British public school kids or stopping American parents from filling their baby’s bottles with Coca Cola. And he’s not done yet.

Continue reading "Bouquets or brickbats for the Bono of the eating industry?" »

I was spending some quality time with channel 10 the other night. It was blathering on about how good it’s life is now, and I was only half listening. But I did hear it accidently say Masterchef’s name when it was talking about its new friend, Jamie Oliver’s Road Trip.

You see, Channel 10 needs us, guys. In recent times it was on top of the world: Masterchef was the most watched non-sporting event in Australian television history, with the finale reaching a peak of over four million viewers.

It was raking in sponsorship and commercial money, there’s book royalties to look forward to, it seemed like things could never go wrong.

Continue reading "Filling the Masterchef void" »