Slop and Slip

Jamie Oliver and the Epic Oversight

Part One: Slop

People used to say I was good at social media. I think that meant that I posted about things that other people wanted to post about but chose not to in case they got into trouble for it. Whenever I post something opinionated about children’s books, I am not usually in a calm state, nor steadfastly sure of myself, though my statements sound as if I am — I ride waves of regret and imagine what will be said about my big gob behind closed doors — who does she think she is? Another part of me thinks: sod it. The truth is you’d need a magnifying glass to see the ripples made by a strongly-worded post about children’s books from a hardly-known writer in Australia.

This year I rejoined Facebook after years of absence. Was that where all the children’s authors fled to when Musk killed Twitter, I wondered? I thought it would feel like walking into a party in full swing, but besides some thriving communities recommending children’s books to tens of thousands of members, like Your Kids Next Read, Facebook was a bizarre chamber of influencer videos. And I quickly found myself the confused but compliant viewer of a very specific type of video: American mothers feeding large broods.

“Watch me cook for my family of seven,” she begins, and then comes the sizzle of ground meat. Cut to four or five seasonings I don’t catch the name of, two tins of corn tipped in with a flourish; she tells us she’s giving it a good stir. Three generous handfuls of pre-grated cheese go in, and something bright yellow from a jar that may also be cheese, or a cheese understudy. Chopped up frankfurters, a surprising-at-this-stage diced onion, garlic powder from the largest tub of garlic powder I’ve ever seen, and into the oven it goes followed by a tray of Southern biscuits from a tube.

Now she’ll lovingly plate up on disposables, and the final cut is what was left on the plates after the meal. A hundred thousand viewers click the heart. Two thousand people tell the mother she’s feeding her kids poison, that she is a terrible parent, that she is everything that’s wrong with the world today, that they wouldn’t feed their dogs that slop. A further five hundred clap back at those naysayers: she’s doing her best, at least her kids are fed, why are you hate-watching, what is the matter with you, be kind!

The best and worst of me watched these videos for a while. I was the two thousand people who couldn’t believe the culinary horror I’d witnessed, and I was also the five hundred people who wanted everyone to be kind. I wished I had only kind thoughts; I wished I could stop watching these videos. She’d make another one tomorrow because even if thousands of people thought her cooking was abominable, people were showing up, people were glued — the chilli cheese dog casserole got more views than the previous week’s easy banana pudding, 380k plays.

The last reel I posted about one of my books got 96 likes. What are we meant to do if people don’t want what we cook up for them?

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Part Two: Slip

Jamie Oliver and I are the same age. He started to get famous as a chef in 1999, the year I was working for Penguin as a junior editor of children’s books.

Since then, we’ve both become authors — according to Wikipedia: “Oliver is the second-best-selling British author, behind J.K Rowling . . . Oliver has sold more than 14.55 million books, generating just under £180m for the chef”. And while he’s been killing it in my chosen field, I’ve perfected the Sunday roast in his. Without a ghost-chef’s help, I might add.

In 2005, Jamie Oliver fronted a documentary series aimed at improving school dinners in the UK. The budget for a school dinner then was 37 pence per child. That’s 69 pence today, or $1.34 Australian. The focus was on one school in southeast London.

During the documentary, Jamie introduced a new menu and closed the tuck shop. When he realised that part of the struggle with introducing healthier meals was what the kids were used to eating at home, he showed kids what goes into chicken nuggets. Meat from a young bird made to grow very large, very fast in a barn; fat, bones, nerves, connective tissue. The school implemented his new regime. Changes were also taken up in the wider area, such as assurances that fried foods would only be served twice a week.

A year later, the school in southeast London was struggling with Jamie’s menu: the budget didn’t work, the workload had increased, and the kids didn’t like the food. Further tweaks were made, Jamie worked with local suppliers, gave talks to parents about healthy eating, and secured more money and a bunch of promises from the British government to make nationwide improvements to school meals.

That seems like a long time ago now but I remember thinking that it was good to see a celebrity chef do something meaningful. He wasn’t without his critics during the campaign, but he was cushioned by numerous supporters and, perhaps more importantly, by his authentic belief in what he was trying to achieve — and his conviction that he was the best person for the job.

Far less authentic is Jamie Oliver’s career as a children’s book author.

It began last year with the release of Billy and the Giant Adventure, a 350-page novel consisting of “magical battles, a long-lost mythical city, fantastical flying machines, and epic feasts”. You could hear the collective groan of the UK children’s book community from Australia, and it caught on. The Australian market is flooded with David Walliams twice a year, alongside our own collection of feeble, derivative children’s books by celebrities.

This morning I was listening to the radio when I heard Andy Lee advertising his picture book . . . Do Not Buy This Book, It Stinks? or something like that. The first 4,000 people to place an order on UberEats from one of the participating grocery merchants would get a copy of Andy’s book. The terrible profit loss of that aside, imagine if genuinely good children’s books were delivered directly to households via such a scheme, instead of celebrity pap.

I didn’t go full throttle in my initial critique of Jamie Oliver’s foray into children’s books because the marketing campaign in 2023 led with the fact that Jamie Oliver is severely dyslexic. The spin around how he’d managed to write a whole novel seemed to have potential for encouraging dyslexic kids. Jamie talked about how he’d recorded his stories and would spend fifteen minutes a day trying to get words on paper. I was willing to give Jamie Oliver — who had after all once shown a genuine commitment to what we serve up to kids — the benefit of the doubt.

But you cannot continue to spin a story about how difficult it is for a severely dyslexic, extremely busy celebrity chef to create his first 350-page novel one year, and then pump out an even longer novel the following year. We all know how the creative process and publishing cycles work. The maths don’t math. By rushing out book two, the publisher seemed to indicate that Jamie Oliver does not after all write the children’s books that have his name on them.

After the story that broke while Jamie Oliver was touring in Australia, nothing could convince me otherwise. He was promoting another cookbook when it was reported that his second children’s book, Billy and the Epic Escape, contains a subplot about a First Nations child. That storyline and its execution were strongly criticised by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Corporation, for contributing to the “erasure, trivialisation, and stereotyping of First Nations peoples and experiences”.

The papers reported that Jamie was devastated and that Penguin were sorry, too . . . but that no decision had yet been made on what to do about it. One thing I found interesting was how emphatically Penguin fell on their sword, going so far as to say that “the author” had requested an authenticity read of this book, and that Penguin had failed to make that happen.

They were asking us to believe that Jamie Oliver — very famous man and second bestselling author in the country — asked for a simple editorial process and that Penguin . . . refused? forgot? made a little slip-up that allowed a culturally insensitive storyline to be printed in its tens of thousands?

The update came not twenty-four hours later that all copies of Jamie Oliver’s children’s book will be withdrawn from sale.

Now that was some very expensive slop.

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Thank you for reading Voracious.