Inside Track by Peter Martin
Is the nation really beginning to take what it eats seriously? If the effect that Jamie Oliver seems to be having on both the public and the Government is any indicator, the answer may well be yes.
Latest research from YouGov for the Mirror newspaper suggests that 23% of parents who watched Jamie’s TV show will now stop buying convenience meals as a result of his school dinners crusade.
His impact cannot be under-estimated, not least on the country’s politicians, who tend to recognise a bandwagon when they see one.
Although young Mr Oliver may well prove to be a vital ingredient in creating a "tipping point" in the British attitude to food and healthy eating, he is far from being the whole story.
It is another TV series that has done as much, if not more, to bring home the downside of a junk food diet. That programme is Channel 4’s You Are What You Eat.
It paved the way, and continues to have a major impact on the nation’s stomach.
Last week, Jamie’s latest book Jamie’s Dinners topped the charts as the best selling non-fiction hardback in the country, with almost 8,000 copies flying off the shelves. The next best in the category was the Jamie-related The Dinner Lady, with sales of just over 4,000. Jamie’s Dinners has now sold over 500,000 copies since publication, which is a remarkable effort in publishing terms.
However, topping the UK paperback non-fiction best sellers list, produced by Bookseller magazine, last week was the second book from Gillian McKeith the presenter of the You Are What You Eat series, the You Are What You Eat Cookbook. It sold just short of 30,000 copies in the seven days to April 9.
In second place was the original publication from the programme, the eponymous You Are What You Eat, which still sold 12,000 last week alone. In total, this one book has now sold just short of a million copies since its publication.
To put this into some sort of context, if you look at the overall top 50 best selling books in the country, only two titles sold more than the You Are What You Eat Cookbook last week. They were the Da Vinci Code and its author Dan Brown’s follow-up novel Angel’s and Demons. In the current top 50 only these two have outsold the original You Are What You Eat overall, which underlines the amazing phenomenon the series has become.
Put Jamie Oliver and Gillian McKeith together and you see the amazing impact their straightforward approaches to food and health are having on the nation. This looks much more than a fad.
