Jamie Oliver calls for all-out assault on our ignorance of food

This brand new talk by Jamie Oliver ("The Naked Chef") at TED 2010 is one I highly recommend you watch. This topic is very dear to my own heart as chronic poor eating habits were a strong contributing factor in my father's premature death when I was a child. You may have noticed that a few slides I have used in my books and seminars feature OECD data on obesity rates across the globe. In developed countries, the increasing rates in obesity has been dramatic. Japan has a relatively low obesity rate compared to the USA, but it is unfortunately growing as younger generations have developed a taste for fast foods and refined, packaged meals. I agree with Oliver: we need an all-out assault on our ignorance of food. Watch the 20-minute talk below or on the TED site.



Delivery
I liked this talk because the message is vitally important. I tend to give people a break for little imperfections in delivery style so long as their points are clear and their passion evident and sincere. Ideally, I would liked to have seen more visual displays of data to back up a few of the claims he made, and it would have been better if he did not pace as much or turn his back on the audience as much to look at the visual behind him. These are things you and I need to be concerned with in our talks, but given his celebrity and the venue, I think his talk was overall quite effective. I was fired up and inspired after this talk, but with me he's speaking to the choir. Still, there's nothing wrong with preaching to the choir from time to time. You can't change the world by yourself; you need the choir to go out there and fight the battles too.


Oliver shows the amount of sugar one child will have just from school milk in five years of elementary school — a wheelbarrow full of sugar cubes.

One thing I liked is that Oliver made a strong point with the aid of a simple bar chart at the beginning. We spend our lives being paranoid about things like murder, says, Oliver "...it's on the front page of every paper, CNN — [yet] look at "homicide" — at the bottom, for God's sake!" This was a strong point that surely made some people pause. We worry about the well-being of our kids — Are the streets safe? Are there enough police on the streets? and so on — all the while our youth are munching on Turkey Twizzlers and downing cans of sugary beverages.

Some may say that Oliver's delivery was a bit over the top or a little disjointed, but I think this was a great, raw, naked presentation. He got people's attention, he stated the problem, and he offered some solutions all while engaging his audience.

The wish
“I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.” — Jamie Oliver

Related
• 6-min TED talk by Dean Ornish on the world's killer diet
• Presenting a case for healthy food (PZ post)

Comments

[HKToastmasters]

Proud to be an Essex girl! Agree that Jamie was a bit unpolished, but that's kinda his trademark. His language and accent were/are very 'Eastenders' and I even suspect he hammed up this up a bit for this American audience.

This is a great example of a simple, concrete idea that connects with the audience, delivered with tons of passion.

[simondroog]

Great talk... I agree he's a bit over the top sometimes, but it gets the job done and expresses his enthusiasm very well. Also love that this topic gets more attention. We really need to change our eating patterns!

I liked his use of props, videos and graphs... they added a lot of value to his talk.

Thanks for sharing, Garr.

[MikeSporer]

This was indeed a great TED talk. What we eat is as important as how much...I like how you have frequently reflected on the Japanese thought "Eat until 80% full". And your images of bento boxes make an impression too.

[Nihonjon]

Nice, I liked this raw presentation a lot. Plus thanks for linking the other presentation. I'm just now watching it.

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[Lydia Sugarman]

The TED audience is smart and the speakers are validated by the fact that they are TED speakers. Deliver us from more boring PPT slides w/ a glut of statistics! Less slides, more passion.

We don't need no more stinkin' slides!

It's about speaking and the listening, not the reading and the real-time blogging.

[Carles Caño]

I really liked Jamie Oliver's talk too.

Jamie's talk had all the elements of the book "Made to Stick": Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotion and Story (SUCCES). And it really worked well.

I also liked the "look at homicide" moment. However, I wanted to check other causes of death in the US but I couldn't: the text was too small.

So I thought of some way to combine the "big picture" of a bar chart with the "focus on details". You can find a possible solution to this problem at http://www.vimeo.com/9424067

[sázky]

The TED audience is smart and the speakers are validated by the fact that they are TED speakers. Deliver us from more boring PPT slides w/ a glut of statistics! Less slides, more passion.

[Carles Caño]

Sázky,

I think passion is key when presenting. But I think visuals are very important too.

There are some people who are excellent as public speakers and they don't need any slides (e.g. Sir Ken Robinson). There are others who have great visuals but speak poorly. Obviously I prefer the first group.

Anyway, if I see a very good speaker with very good visuals, then I'll be delighted and I'll really enjoy the presentation.

What I suggested in my last comment is a way to combine Jamie's Oliver words about causes of death with data in slides that can be read. I guess that many people like me wanted to read that text too.

In my case, I tried to decipher the text after watching the whole talk, but the video resolution was so low that I couldn't grasp anything.

With my suggestion, Jamie would have been able to say the same and keep those of us wanting more detail happy.

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[Hemant]

I liked the presentation. More than that I liked that Americans and English people who are supposed to be leaders of the world are so ignorant about the basics. I fail to understand why those terrorists are preparing bombs to defeat Americans. They should just stop Americans from cooking food. We in India are blessed with fresh & home cooked food. Not that all of it is healthy but the new generation is slowly moving to processed food. The faster Jamie changes Americans, better for us as we will return back to our roots.

[Ken Leebow]

As the author of a book that addresses this issue, I’ve recommended this presentation to people.

However, he makes some bold statements that cause him to lose some of his credibility. Such as when he states that a specific 16 year-old will be dead in 6 years.

He also makes the statement that our children will have shorter life-expectancy than adults. Of course, this claim is being made by many, however, no one knows about future medical advances that will assist in longevity.

If you can ignore some of those claims, for the uninitiated, it’s an interesting presentation.

[Jérôme Cukier]

thanks for the link to our data. In June this year we (OECD) are going to release a book called "Fit not Fat: Obesity and the Economics of Prevention" with hopefully better data.

On the form, what I found interesting was the use of people. IMO, videos true stories transcend statistics. they are proof that the speaker cares.

Guy Kawasaki recently passed a link to a video on how to write stories about numbers (www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kMydB5l9Ns) and the speaker main point was to "find a face", i.e. to write about an economic phenomenon, find someone who illustrates it and start writing on that person, then generalize. I wasn't convinced by the youtube video but the TED talk showed it does work.

[Patrick Newell]

It was great live as well... Really wish you were there watching it with me this year.

Patrick

[Michael Mathieu]

Jamie has excellent presentation skills that he has practiced for years on his television shows. He's just so easy to understand, and being that he works on cooking shows he knows how to use props in the best of ways.

[MavisBenjamin18]

This is understandable that cash makes people free. But what to do when someone doesn't have cash? The one way is to try to get the home loans or just consolidation loan.

[Ian Cheung]

I love Jamie and what he is trying to do but I agree with Ken above, some of the presentation relied on shock and awe tactics that have the opposite effect.

Even the sugar in milk part was overdone, of course it is better to have natural no additives milk but since the amount shown is over 5 years (or more?) it is difficult to accept that it would have been treated as child abuse in the past. It also ignores that it is still better than say cola along with meals.

Don't get me wrong, I liked large parts of it, the chart mentioned above, the passion he showed, kids knowing nothing about vegetables, and the emphasis on how so much is preventable especially with education. But cutting out the shock 'facts' would make it a more effective presentation, especially to a wider audience than TED attendees.

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We really need to change our eating patterns!

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Not that all of it is healthy but the new generation is slowly moving to processed food. The faster Jamie changes Americans, better for us as we will return back to our roots.

[Boris Gorelik]

Am I the only one who didn't like this presentation? I think that bringing that wagon of sugar was a simple "bells and whistles" trick that brought no added value with it.

[Boris Gorleik]

I felt like I had to elaborate on my previous comment, so if you are interested learn why I think this presentation wasn't as good as almost everyone thinks, please read this: http://www.inthehaystack.com/blog/on-post-modern-bells-and-whistles/

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I love this video! I’m from Ohio but live in Italy and I really see the difference in food cultures. It’s so important to keep eating fresh, healthy foods and cooking at home part of the culture in the US!!

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Not a big Jamie Oliver fan, but interesting vid.

[Joshua Powers]

I have never really been a fan of Jamie. He tries to be a little too cool and charming that the focus on food is lost.
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