Jamie Oliver warns that 'obesity horror show' now looming
A MINISTER for Food must be appointed to combat the obesity crisis before it becomes a “horror show”, Jamie Oliver warned MPs yesterday.
The celebrity chef accused Labour of not doing enough to improve the nation’s diet and said it was now an “emergency”.
Oliver slammed the Government for setting up school cookery lessons for 11 to 14-year-olds – but making children bring in the ingredients.
He told the health select committee’s inquiry into health inequalities that part of the reason so little was now known about food was that women, who traditionally handed down culinary skills at home, had gone out to work.
It was wrong, he said, that the Government had taxed their earnings and not ploughed some of it back into teaching their children to cook at school.
“In secondary school education kids are going to have to bring in their own food – which means parents will have to pay for it – which I think is a drag and a pain,” he said.
Health, obesity and education have struggled to be taken seriously for 10 years.
“That means half the class will bring it in and half will not. I don’t think young people or parents should have to pay for ingredients and if this was chemistry and young people were asked to bring in magnesium, you’d be thinking ‘What a liberty’.”
A Ministry of Food was created in the Second World War to advise Britons how to maintain a good diet under rationing restrictions.
Now Oliver believes that it should be re-established to prevent Britain’s obesity crisis becoming as bad as in the United States. In his latest TV show, Oliver set up a Ministry of Food in Rotherham to teach people how to cook.
“Health, obesity and education have struggled to be taken seriously for 10 years,” he said. “I think it is an emergency. I don’t understand why there is not a Minister for Food – one person from the private sector who is inspirational.”
His most high-profile campaign has been improving school meals.
But figures suggest this has only had limited success, with an increase in children snubbing healthy school meals for packed lunches instead.
The chef revealed that in the five years since he began the campaign, only about 5,000 of the 125,000 dinner ladies had been trained how to make healthy, tasty food.
He also warned that lack of cooking knowledge would hit hard in the recession, making obesity worse.
“The obesity problem is an epidemic, it’s a massive problem. If we don’t deal with it in the next 10 years it’s going to be 10 times harder to fix and it will be a horror show,” he added.
