The journey of the hero is about learning from mistakes, and off- screen, Oliver (and those responsible for Brand Oliver) responded to the criticism. ‘Jamie has really immersed himself in the last few years’, said the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation’s then campaign director, Jo Ralling, when I first met her in 2016 ‘He talks to nutritionists, he talks to NGOs, he talks to the NHS in a way that I haven’t seen him do before. He’s even been doing a course in nutrition.’ She said it wasn’t just about trying to get it right for the audience and the critics: ‘I think it was that process of hearing how bad it is – the 7,000 amputations a year in this country due to type 2 diabetes. It’s shocking. I didn’t know that and I was working for Jamie Oliver.’
Jo Ralling was Head of Operations on Channel 4’s Jamie’s Fowl Dinners (2008), Ministry of Food (2008), Jamie’s American Road Trip (2009), Jamie’s Food Escapes (2011) and Dream School (2011), and when I first interviewed her, she was Director of the Sugar Smart Campaign and UK Partnerships at Jamie Oliver Food Foundation. She explained how Jamie got back in the campaign saddle in 2015: ‘Jamie had been very successful with the School Dinners campaign and we had got the School Food Plan through, but nearly a decade later, we turned around, and the state of the children’s health and obesity rates were going through the roof. There was a real feeling of “what’s going on? We need to do something big again.” ’ An idea in television, as we have heard from the gamechangers, is a process, a collision of factors from personal whim, social movements to cultural zeitgeist. ‘It was a process over a couple of years’, said Ralling. ‘We talked to Channel 4 about what they were interested in making, asked Jamie what he wanted to do, and what we felt would work with his book schedule. It was a process. There wasn’t a moment.’
There had been an enormous amount of conflicting advice, food scares and disinformation about the food industry, and government and campaigners muscled in for position on sorting out the national diet. As obesity levels rose, attention focussed on statistics, including those of the OECD Obesity Update in 2014, which showed that for the first time in history, children were likely to die before their parents because of what they ate. Despite assurances from Sir Richard Peto, Professor of Medical Statistics at Oxford University in 2014, that the probability of dying before 50 worldwide had halved in 40 years because of better medical care, decreases in smoking, cleaner water and vaccination programmes (Norheim et al., 2014), it was the western obesity epidemic that hit the headlines, obscuring the reports of victims of another drought in Africa. Rousseau’s work prods at this assumption, and in 2016 she told me, ‘Directing attention at one thing at the expense of another as if it is not more important, is a key (and frustrating) part of framing.’
‘There’s a huge number of organisations doing things about obesity and how we can tackle it’, said Ralling, ‘but we wanted to do something that was going to cut through. We knew sugar was going to be a strong message. There’s no silver bullet to beating the obesity crisis: Jamie believes that the solutions have to be multi- sectorial. Getting the government to introduce a sugar tax on sugary drinks was one of the things that we put in our own version of the childhood obesity strategy.’ The government had been promising to bring out a strategy but they were taking their time. Jamie decided to publish his version of what a good strategy would look like.
‘My arguments about interference are pertinent here’, Rousseau told me in 2016, ‘mainly in the sense of Oliver claiming the authority to do something – made for television – that he clearly doesn’t have the expertise to tackle. He could bully government to get on with it, sure, but a sugar tax is a job for economists, not a chef.’ But Ralling said that the strategy was intended to do two things: ‘It will help the government see what good would look like and it will also give us and the public and the press something to judge it against when the government brings their own out.’ Rousseau noted the perception of influence on the part of the production company: ‘It’s like judging a house designed by an architect versus one designed by someone who likes to draw houses’, she said in 2016.
The thinking at Jamie Oliver’s production company was that the government strategy was due to be announced at the same time as the documentary Sugar Rush (2015). When it then became evident that this wasn’t going to happen, the producers decided that Sugar Rush should lead to a ‘call to action’. ‘We decided to go for a sugar tax on sugary drinks’, Ralling told me, following the example of France, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and the Caribbean, as reported in Beverage Daily in 2017. ‘Forty per cent of kids’ sugar consumption comes from sugary drinks’, she continued, accepting that in order to make the medium the message, it needed to be simplified: ‘Sugar is an incredibly complex and difficult thing to tackle. There are hidden sugars in our processed food, for example. But I think what we’re really good at, and what Jamie is really good at, is taking complex problems and simplifying them for the audience. We pride ourselves in our factual accuracy. Because, quite often, when you simplify something, you can actually lose context, but we’re always incredibly careful not to do that.’ Rousseau is not convinced: ‘But of course, this is a key problem. As she acknowledges elsewhere, it’s much more complicated than that. Simplifying things doesn’t always do the cause a favour, as it encourages a simplistic understanding of a complex issue’, Rousseau said in 2016.
A production team usually chooses just five or six key points to get their main story across in an hour- long documentary. I asked Ralling how they decided on the most important points in such a complex set of issues. ‘When we’re structuring the documentary, we describe the problem’, she said. ‘We look at why this is so important. We would have been looking at global obesity figures, the rise in child obesity rates and then we look at what the solutions could be and give the audience a call to action.’ The narrative must take the viewer on an arc through a series of sequences. ‘We say, “how are we going to actually illustrate dental health, for example, and how are we going to give people the factually correct information they need, that it’s the slow sipping on a sugary drink all day that damages teeth, and also the carbonation?” [We need to say that] a diet drink is as bad for your teeth as a full- sugar Coke. So we have to think very carefully: “how are we going to make this a powerful sequence that people aren’t going to forget?” Well, we’re going to take Jamie into a hospital and take him into the operating theatre and he’s going to witness one of 24,000 children a year who has their teeth pulled out.’ Collins explained it further: ‘When we talk about what we do with Jamie, we talk about how we have to offer a way out, we have to offer something that is actionable, a way that people can feel moved and do something about it. They can add their voice to the crowd and so in that respect we’re really pleased with it.’
In every TV programme, in every news story, in every article, it’s all about the human story: without people in your ‘top line’, it simply won’t engage the reader – or so the mantra is repeated by editors. Collins explained how to tread the delicate balance of using real stories to shock audiences out of their complacency: ‘Our position right from the start of the show was, “it’s not all your fault.” To say it’s her fault, that she’s a bad mother, is really, really over- simplifying it. There’s a whole range of really complex issues that are about the environment we live in that makes it really difficult to give a crap. And most parents do give a crap. The drinks that that kid drank were mango juices. It wasn’t gallons of Coke. It was West Indian fruit juices.’
Ralling and Fresh One’s team of producers were responsible for casting for the individual storylines. These were then passed on to the executive producer, Zoe Collins. ‘When the team first talked to me about tooth decay’, Collins told me, ‘I went, “meh, I feel I have heard this story.” And when I saw those rushes, I thought, “how did I not know this? How is this image so alien to us?” And it’s the same with type 2 diabetes. You can become so number blind, so blind to the statistics because they’re just so massive that they no longer mean anything to you.’ Bringing them down to the individual is about turning a macro story into micro narratives that have emotional impact. Collins said that examples of this in Sugar Rush are ‘some of the scenes that I’m most proud of ever: the dentist being one of them, and the one with the dietician who lays out what looks like a bog- standard day of food that you would feel pretty good about actually if your children ate all of that – that’s five times over the average day of a sugar. So there was really important stuff in there’. I asked Collins if Jamie had to be there, whether we could view that 6- year- old child having five teeth extracted under general anaesthetic and have the same response. Does Jamie Oliver have to show us how to react? ‘What Jamie does is he brings a lot of emotion to it. He’s a father himself, so when he watches a child being put under a local anaesthetic, his presence makes it more powerful. Could we just interview the doctors and then shoot the sequence? Yes, we could. Jamie also delivers a lot of the facts to the audience in a way that they trust.’
The story was mired with an evolving, controversial science. One of the first things they did was to bring in a science producer. ‘We got her across all the assumptions we’d made’, Collins told me. ‘Her job was to drill down and bring back to us the rock solid [facts]. As you start to dig deeper with a science producer, a lot of the stuff tends to fall away. It doesn’t mean that it’s not true, it’s that if we want to err on the side of caution, and we really do when we’re with Jamie, then these are our absolute undeniable truths. We talk about these with Jamie: the undeniable truth with School Dinners that he can always come back to is that kids at school should eat food that enhances their education; in Sugar Rush, it is that too much sugar makes you ill, so let’s keep coming back to our undeniable truths. So that’s where the stories started off.’
A powerful Jamie narrative is about a journey into the unknown. Sugar Rush was a one- off documentary which journeyed through one of the most complex and multi- layered issues affecting societies across the world. It had to be hard- hitting without being simplistic, and confronting without leaving the audience feeling defeated. I reminded Zoe Collins that when she first told me about the prospect of the show in our second meeting in 2015 it was going to be a new School Dinners- style series, complete with the ‘will he/ wont’ he succeed?’ jeopardy narrative. ‘We could have developed more jeopardy or a different actionable narrative for him’, she said, ‘but a one- off is really a report, a polemic. Even Jay [Hunt, then Chief Creative Officer of Channel 4] calls it a polemic. For a while on the commissioning sheet, it was called Jamie’s Polemic’.
Signe Rousseau told me in 2016 that the Jamie Oliver philosophy is quickly accessible: ‘everyone knows what Jamie believes in. It’s a short cut, a message.’
She compared him to Dr Oz, the Turkish American cardiothoracic surgeon and professor at Columbia University, and author and television personality who has become ‘America’s doctor’. He is, she says, ‘someone they have grown to trust to distil complex information and deliver it in a way that is less intimidating than having to do the work of thinking these things through yourself. But even if you aren’t selling nonsense like some of the pseudoscientific stuff that Oz peddles, and even if your intentions are only well- meaning (as I believe Jamie Oliver’s are), the other possible consequence of that is – ironically for something designed as a ‘call to action’ – a particular kind of complacency in the public at large when it comes to political literacy. We need to encourage more difficult thinking about complex subjects, and I worry that Jamie Oliver’s model rather promises that someone else will do it for them.’
When I met up with Zoe Collins a couple of weeks after Sugar Rush was first screened in the UK and Australia, she was clearly proud of the show. She knows now how to get the best out of Jamie: ‘He’s good at catchphrases’, she laughed. As we talked about the newspaper headlines and the ‘noise’ on social media following the programme, something had changed since we first spoke three years before. ‘It’s not about the show, it’s about the ripples’, she told me. ‘I quite like that. We see our role as agitators and I think it’s done its job. We hit our targets on the petition and we’re in conversation with the government around an obesity strategy which Cameron says he intends to prioritise.’ She said that it felt like ‘a bit of a legacy piece for [Jamie]’: using his considerable influence, the documentary had Oliver talking to ‘all the right people’ including many in charge of restaurant chains who would join Jamie’s Italian in implementing a voluntary sugar tax. Tesco, one of the most powerful British supermarkets, removed some of the sugary drinks from their shelves, while others were considering ‘no guilt lanes’, stripping out the treats from the checkout. Lucozade- Ribena was the first brand to announce huge sugar reduction as a result of the campaign, with Coca- Cola next in line. Collins was not going to accept responsibility for this shift, but agreed that the programme had created debate and that debate can be a catalyst. ‘But other things have to be in place at the same time’, she added: ‘it has to be timely.’
In 2016, I asked Signe Rousseau if she thought Oliver might see himself as our moral guide: ‘He fashions himself as one’, she agreed, ‘and there are plenty who are willing to confer that status onto him because it lessens the burden of having to be their own moral guide.’ But she doesn’t deny him that position: ‘In terms of these questions about authority and expertise, I don’t think that Jamie Oliver should not be involved. It’s not so much about Jamie Oliver. It’s more about what the success of a campaign like his tells everyone else about the roles we confer upon people. It’s a tricky thing because it’s easy for me to say on the one hand celebrity chefs shouldn’t be interfering with people’s everyday choices, where clearly some people benefit very much from external guidance, whether it’s from a doctor or a Jamie Oliver. I’m not denying that at all.’
Jo Ralling was with Oliver when he gave evidence to the Health Select Committee in the House of Commons ahead of the surprise decision by then chancellor George Osborne to impose a sugar tax on fizzy drinks. Ralling was moved: ‘If you want to see the power of Jamie in action, what he did in that room that day was extraordinary. It was a flawless delivery of the facts, and his passion and his commitment came over. We mocked up some drink bottles and showed them with the teaspoons on [to show how much sugar was in each portion], and you could visibly see change. You could feel it in the room that day.’ She said it was remarkable to be part of shifting public opinion: ‘I think there was a moment when the dentists, the doctors, the NGOs, Cancer Research, Diabetes UK, were all calling for the same things. They were all going, “we now support a sugar tax, we now support a ban on marketing and promotion of sugary products…” So, we’re lining up the opposition. The media were covering it, and I think there was a moment when George Osborne probably realised that this, as taxes go, it probably wasn’t going to be too unpopular, that, actually, we’d shifted opinion.’ Collins, Ralling and the team were thrilled with the outcome. ‘I think we were expecting them to say, ‘If the food industry doesn’t do something, then we will put a sugary drinks tax in’, said Ralling. ‘We thought they’d use it as a sort of carrot towards reformulation. But they didn’t. They went for it. And it was an amazing day.’
Osborne announced the new tax with an unusually personal explanation (accompanied by an interview with Oliver punching the air): ‘I am not prepared to look back at my time here in this Parliament, doing this job, and say to my children’s generation: “I’m sorry – we knew there was a problem with sugary drinks. We knew it caused disease. But we ducked the difficult decisions and we did nothing.’ Many Britons didn’t even know that Osborne had children. He had adopted the mantle of personal crusader and, for a moment, he looked like a mortal, a father, a Jamie.
The tax would be levied on the volume of sugary drinks produced and exported, and the delay of two years was deliberately designed to give companies enough time to alter their recipes using less sugar. But post- Brexit, the impact is unclear in terms of how it will affect British business. The tax would become enshrined in law in April 2018, but pressure mounted from the food industry: ‘The whole thing should be paused’, Ian Wright, director general of industry lobby group the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) – whose members include the makers of Coca- Cola, Pepsi and Tango – told The Guardian newspaper in July 2016: ‘Confidence in the consumer goods market is very fragile and the government has promised not to impose any new burden on industry.’ The food and drink sector accounts for 16% of UK manufacturing, and of the 400,000 people employed in UK food and drink manufacturing, one in four are from other EU countries.
Rousseau was sceptical about the tax: ‘One of the issues in global debates about sugar taxes is that while it may be tackling one contributor to obesity and diabetes, it also simplifies the issue to make everything about sugar, which it isn’t’, she said in 2016. ‘Demonising sugar in the end may not be as effective as working harder to get people to limit how much [they consume] of everything. Studies continue to confirm that unless you are diabetic and therefore sugar is literally toxic to your system, when it comes to weight- loss, low- carb is not much more effective than calorie restriction. So the sugar story is more of a heuristic for cutting calories than it is a solid scientific necessity.’
Six months after Osborne’s announcement of the sugar tax, a survey carried out by Censuswide for the sugar- free drink Hey Like Wow revealed that over a third of the 1,000 people questioned supported it, including nearly half of those aged 16– 24 (FoodBevMedia, 2016). Parents of younger children were less in favour, with almost half of the parents of children aged between 14 and 15 and over a third of parents of children aged between 9 and 11 saying that they did not agree with the tax. Ralling says that there’s more work to do: she went on to head up the Sugar Smart Campaign in 2016, which aimed to give UK towns a toolkit to engage public services and tens of thousands of locals in becoming ‘sugar smart’. Stickers on vending machines in schools and hospitals with information about how much sugar is in each drink, and Jamie Oliver- style cooking classes were available. With leisure centres, the university, several tourist attractions and the local hospital trust buying into the campaign, Brighton was the first Sugar Smart city in the world, and it was rolled out across 55 cities in the UK as the Food Foundation did with Ministry of Food. ‘We’re witnessing a generation which has lost any close affinity to food and where it’s come from’, explained Ralling. ‘They don’t cook anymore. It’s all very well saying we want food education back in our primary schools, but the teachers can’t cook. The young teachers in their twenties have got no idea how to pick a knife up, chop an onion and cook some mince. These skills have been lost by an entire generation.’
Ralling is very clear about where the fault lies: ‘I think it’s the responsibility of the food industry. I think the fact that the cheapest foods on our supermarket shelves are the ones that are highest in calories is the responsibility of the food industry.’ She believes that while a sugar tax is crucial, a plan of action can’t wait: ‘Sugar is such a cheap ingredient, and that’s where legislation will kick in. But the legislation will take years to kick in and we don’t have years. In the next year, 24,000 kids will have their teeth pulled out and 7,000 people will have a limb amputated. We’ve just hit four million people in this country having type 2 diabetes. They believe there are another six million people who are in a pre- diabetic condition. We can turn the tide, we can reverse their condition. And I absolutely agree, it’s the most hard- to- reach populations that we have to get to. That’s where Jamie can help.’
But the closing of Jamie Oliver’s Food Foundation in 2019, probably due to the falling revenues of his restaurant business, which had injected a crucial sum, meant that Ralling’s Sugar Smart Campaign was transferred to Sustain’s management. The annual report said that the trustees had decided ‘to wind down the activities for JOFF within the next 12 months’, adding that ‘the charity is considered to have fulfilled its original purpose’.
In her 2012 book, Signe Rousseau says, ‘It is the literal and figurative conflation of food consumption and economic consumerism that ensures the cultural capital of the chef, who, unlike other public figures with enormous cultural capital and economic influence like film stars and footballers, has the ability to influence the most mundane and necessary of daily tasks.’ I asked her if the Odyssey narrative worked, and if so, for whom? ‘I’d imagine Jamie would argue that his various missions are precisely about giving people tools to satisfy actual needs (health primarily) in order to fuel stronger “spiritual” satisfaction (happiness, productivity, hope, etc). What Jamie himself gets out of that is perhaps indeed some quest fulfilment – or failure – though I guess that depends on how one interprets his altruism.’
Zoe Collins understands that she and the team are all on a journey with their construction of Jamie. She told me in 2018: ‘I think a place we’ve got to with Jamie these days is we understand that Jamie has a job to do for us. Jamie talks about it – we both do – as a job. We do all of the hard work and bring back the easy solutions for the audience. And nobody wants to know what it took to do it.’ She said that it was about offering the viewer ‘the easy answers for you to adapt. Certainly, some of our best books have done that’. She added that time, money and health are what they understand as the key drivers for the audience: ‘We’d always say that everything that we’ve ever done is part of a mission of sorts which is how to help people lead a healthier, happier life with food.’ She thinks that there is a tension between the ‘chop ’n’ cook’ and the campaigning shows which can make some people feel ‘hectored’ while others ‘feel a lack of complexity or compelling narrative’. She said that she and the team are clear that one is ‘a service we’re providing and the other is ‘definitely the big campaign that we’re driving.’
From Taste and the TV Chef, Gilly Smith, 2020. Reproduced with permission from Intellect Books. You can buy the book here.