Jamie Oliver admits controversial school dinners campaign was 'most miserable' time of his life

Chef Jamie Oliver has spoken out about the time when he became public enemy number one, admitting it was the ‘most miserable’ time he’s ever experienced.

Back in 2005, he launched a campaign to introduce better, more nutritious food into British schools across the country – something that many remember, often with an inflated sense of rage for comedic effect, as the death of the famed Turkey Twizzler.

Indeed, Oliver's efforts proved something of a surprising uphill struggle, with parents seen sneaking chips through the school gates to their kids.

Opening up about the period in a new episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table series, he recalled: “I just wanted to get in there and fix it all.

“We're talking about feeding kids better at school – it shouldn’t really be a debate.”

While it seemed clear to him, it seemed many people took much more convincing, from schoolchildren to top government officials.

“I was like the enemy,” he continued. “I used to look in the bins at the end of lunch service in a school and it was full of my food, because they f**king hated it.

“It was probably the most miserable 18 months of my life.

“I had faith that the more nutritious food could work, but I remember laying in bed at night going, ‘Why won’t they eat it? Why won’t they f**king eat it?’”

Eventually, however, there was a turning point for Oliver.

(Channel 4)

“Those kids I was serving were debatably the fourth generation of British kids that had never been taught to cook at home or at school. My mind just started exploding with this realisation: it wasn’t the fact that they didn’t like what I was doing, it’s marketing." he said.

“The science I was told is a child has to try something 14 times before they will openly try something. To get kids to try stuff, kids need encouragement, they need love, they need nurturing, just like you would to your own child.

“So you do that en masse, every day, and then you start seeing your harshest critics turning. And, slowly but surely, over the weeks and over the months, the bins got less full, and less full, and less full. They’re not slagging you off so much, their trays are full of the good stuff – progress.”

Oliver said he was still ‘struggling’ to get ministers to communicate with him and commit to any funding and legislation, saying it still just felt like a numbers game on how much everything cost.

Oliver found a lot of people needed convincing about the campaign (Channel 4)

But after his Channel 4 series Jamie’s School Dinners came out, it was like a ‘magic spell’ had taken over, meaning and ‘everyone was on side’.

“I was able to see Tony Blair in two weeks,” Oliver said, with footage showing the moment he managed to get the prime minister to agree to extra funding.

"He committed to tangible, real, well thought-out change."

Later in the episode, we also heard from Blair himself, whose tribute to Oliver proves his impact lasted well beyond the 2005 campaign.

"Jamie's much more than a chef," he said. "His legacy is multi-faceted.

"He made cooking cool, and he also linked food - really at a very early stage - to nutrition and to health."

Watch Chef's Table: Legends on Netflix now.

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