Transformational Leadership Blog

Have you ever heard of TED? It’s an amazing website with thousands of videos about technology, education, design and other amazing ideas that are worth spreading! It also has a thriving community that gain insights from these talks. The TED Community established the annual TEDPrize to be awarded to exceptional individuals. These individuals will then receive $100,000, which they can use for their advocacy and project.

This year’s TEDPrize recipient is celebrity chef and nutrition activist Jamie Oliver. While he is known for the books, TV shows and DVDs he has produced, he is also considered as the standard-bearer of the fight against obesity and other preventable health-related issues.

Jamie Oliver was born in May 1975. He was exposed to the kitchen early in his life. his dad runs a pub-restaurant called The Cricketers in Clavering, Essex. He was fascinated by what went on in the kitchen. By age 11, he was already helping out in the kitchen and earning something in return.

Indeed, family influence is important in the development of our passions and career. The profession of our parents and relatives can inspire us early lessons in life, which we can also decide to pursue.

Jamie Oliver says that when he was a teenager, the boys in his school thought that cooking was for girls (or perhaps for wimps!) but he was not discouraged. In any case, he can buy cool trainers with the money he was earning!

Don’t mind what the hecklers say! Just pursue your passion. That is how you can stay ahead of negative comments that may come from your friends and even family members.

Jamie then realized that he wanted to be a chef. So he did pursue that and went to Westminster Catering College, then to France to learn all that he could about cooking! After a few years, he went back to London to serve as the head pastry chef for Antonio Carluccio at the Neal Street Restaurant! After this stint, he worked at the River Café owned by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers for more than three years.

While working at The River Café, he got involved in a documentary about the restaurant. He got tremendous exposure from that documentary, probably because of his young age. After the show was aired, he got calls from production companies about a possible TV show!

Learn all you can about your passion or your niche! Whether it is in the realm of cooking, of leadership, of social entrepreneurship or even of blogging, you have to give it your best shot! Learn all you can and start mastering the field you chose to enter.

After working at the River Café, Mr. Oliver became the host of The Naked Chef and started on his social entrepreneurship journey. He does not only cook, he also spearheaded a new social movement called Jamie’s Food Revolution!

The battlecry of this revolution is summed up by Jamie Oliver, himself:

“I believe that every child in America has the right to fresh, nutritious school meals, and that every family deserves real, honest, wholesome food. Too many people are being affected by what they eat. It’s time for a national revolution. America needs to stand up for better food!”

Speak to the masses and not to the elites! Jamie Oliver did just that. In an article by Matthew Fort in the Guardian UK website, he says:

And that’s why Jamie was and is important. He doesn’t speak in the clipped tones of the middle classes. His vocabulary is distinctly limited. Much of his cooking, is frankly, slapdash. But he addresses directly a mass of Britons who formerly had been completely ignored by the clever clogs who clutter up the columns of print media and the ever-multiplying sequence of food shows on television. He makes extra virgin olive oil and rocket seem as homely as dripping and cabbage. He makes passion about food and cooking seem normal.

Here are some notable achievements of Jamie Oliver from the TED Prize Blog:

12 television series, seen in 130 countries
10 cookbooks, translated into 29 languages, and sold almost 24 million copies in 56 countries
His School Dinners/Feed Me Better campaign pressured the UK government to invest $1 billion to overhaul school lunches
Founded the Fifteen Foundation, a social enterprise and chef apprenticeship for 18-24 yr olds. Based in London, it has been replicated through franchising in Amsterdam, Cornwall and Melbourne
A new TV series, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution USA, is to air on ABC in 2010, bringing Jamie’s unique vision to America

At the heart of Oliver’s work is an assault on the obesity epidemic: The CDC states that one in four Americans are considered obese. It is estimated that 43 percent of Americans, or 103 million people, will be obese by 2018. The cost of this epidemic is anticipated to reach $344 billion per year. It currently accounts for almost 10 percent of the yearly US health care costs, and that rate will rise to 21 percent by 2018. WHO’s latest projections indicate that, globally in 2005, approximately 1.6 billion adults were overweight and projects that by 2015, that figure will rise to 2.3 billion.

From the New York Times:
“… this British celebrity chef has made it his mission in recent years to break people’s dependence on fast food, believing that if they can learn to cook just a handful of dishes, they’ll get hooked on eating healthfully. The joy of a home-cooked meal, rudimentary as it sounds, has been at the core of his career from the start, and as he has matured, it has turned into a platform.”

Watch the acceptance speech of Jamie Oliver at the TED 2010 Conference. He also shares his wish for a United States that is free of preventable food-related deaths.

Here are some quotes from his TEDPrize acceptance speech.

“I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best picks of life. We have an awful, awful reality right now…America, you are the top of your game. This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world.”

“Fact: Diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States right now here today. This is a global problem. It’s a catastrophe, it’s sweeping the world!”

“Obesity and diet-related disease doesn’t just hurt the people that have it, it’s all of their friends’ families, brothers, sisters.”

After dumping a whole wheelbarrow of sugar on stage to demonstrate how much sugar an elementary child consumes for five years. “Judging the circumstances, any judge in the whole world would look at the statistics and the evidence and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse. That’s my belief…”

Related posts:

1. How John Wood Left Microsoft to Change the World
2. Nelson Mandela: Change the World
3. The Giving Pledge: Can the World’s Billionaires Help Make the World a Better Place?