in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat,
will be dead through the food that they eat.
I've worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way.
I don't have expensive equipment
I profoundly believe that the power of food
has a primal place in our homes
that binds us to the best bits of life.
We have an awful, awful reality right now.
America, you're at the top of your game.
This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world.
Can I please just see a raise of hands
for how many of you have children in this room today?
You can continue to put your hands up, aunties and uncles as well.
We, the adults of the last four generations,
have blessed our children with the destiny
of a shorter lifespan than their own parents.
Your child will live a life ten years younger than you
because of the landscape of food that we've built around them.
today, in America, are statistically overweight or obese.
but we'll get you eventually, don't worry.
(Laughter)
The statistics of bad health are clear,
We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide,
you name it; it's on the front page of every paper, CNN.
Look at homicide at the bottom, for God's sake.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Every single one of those in the red is a diet-related disease.
Any doctor, any specialist will tell you that.
Fact: diet-related disease is the biggest killer
in the United States, right now, here today.
England is right behind you, as usual.
(Laughter)
I know they were close, but not that close.
all have massive problems of obesity and bad health.
It costs way less than obesity now.
Obesity costs you Americans 10 percent of your health-care bills,
In 10 years, it's set to double:
Let's be honest, guys, you haven't got that cash.
(Laughter)
I came here to start a food revolution that I so profoundly believe in.
We're in a tipping-point moment.
I've been doing this for seven years.
I've been trying in America for seven years.
Now is the time when it's ripe -- ripe for the picking.
I went to the eye of the storm.
I went to West Virginia, the most unhealthy state in America.
We've got a new one this year, but we'll work on that next season.
(Laughter)
Huntington, West Virginia. Beautiful town.
I wanted to put heart and soul and people,
around the statistics that we've become so used to.
I want to introduce you to some of the people that I care about:
I want to show a picture of my friend Brittany.
because of the food that she's eaten.
She's the third generation of Americans
that hasn't grown up within a food environment
where they've been taught to cook at home or in school,
She's eating her liver to death.
This is a normal family, guys.
Stacy does her best, but she's third-generation as well;
she was never taught to cook at home or at school.
Justin here, 12 years old, he's 350 pounds.
He gets bullied, for God's sake.
The daughter there, Katie, she's four years old.
She's obese before she even gets to primary school.
Marissa, she's all right, she's one of your lot.
Her father, who was obese, died in her arms,
And then the second most important man in her life,
and now her step-dad is obese.
obesity and diet-related disease
doesn't just hurt the people that have it;
it's all of their friends, families, brothers, sisters.
one of my early allies in Huntington, West Virginia.
He's at the sharp knife-edge of this problem.
He has to bury the people, OK?
He's fed up with burying his friends, his family, his community.
Come winter, three times as many people die.
This is preventable disease. Waste of life.
By the way, this is what they get buried in.
We're not geared up to do this.
Can't even get them out the door, and I'm being serious.
Can't even get them there. Forklift.
OK, I see it as a triangle, OK?
This is our landscape of food.
You've probably heard all this before.
what's happened that's ripped the heart out of this country?
Let's start with the Main Street.
Fast food has taken over the whole country; we know that.
The big brands are some of the most important powers,
powerful powers, in this country.
(Sighs)
Thirty years ago, most of the food
was largely local and largely fresh.
Now it's largely processed and full of all sorts of additives,
extra ingredients, and you know the rest of the story.
Portion size is obviously a massive, massive problem.
Labeling is a massive problem.
The labeling in this country is a disgrace.
The industry wants to self-police themselves.
What, in this kind of climate? They don't deserve it.
How can you say something is low-fat when it's full of so much sugar?
Home.
The biggest problem with the home
is that used to be the heart of passing on food culture,
That is not happening anymore.
And you know, as we go to work and as life changes,
we kind of have to look at it holistically --
step back for a moment, and re-address the balance.
It hasn't happened for 30 years, OK?
I want to show you a situation
that is very normal right now; the Edwards family.
(Video) Jamie Oliver: Let's have a talk.
This stuff goes through you and your family's body every week.
that this is going to kill your children early.
Stacy: Just feeling really sad and depressed right now.
But, you know, I want my kids to succeed in life
and this isn't going to get them there.
something that I'm fairly much a specialist in.
What is school? Who invented it? What's the purpose of school?
School was always invented to arm us with the tools
to make us creative, do wonderful things,
make us earn a living, etc., etc.
You know, it's been kind of in this sort of tight box for a long, long time, OK?
But we haven't really evolved it
to deal with the health catastrophes of America, OK?
that most kids -- 31 million a day, actually --
have twice a day, more than often, breakfast and lunch,
So you could say that school food is quite important, really,
(Laughter)
which I'm sure you're waiting for --
(Laughter)
I need to say one thing, and it's so important
in, hopefully, the magic that happens and unfolds
The lunch ladies, the lunch cooks of America --
I offer myself as their ambassador.
They're doing the best they can do.
But they're doing what they're told,
and what they're being told to do is wrong.
The system is highly run by accountants;
there's not enough, or any, food-knowledgeable people in the business.
If you're not a food expert, and you've got tight budgets
and it's getting tighter, then you can't be creative,
you can't duck and dive and write different things around things.
If you're an accountant, and a box-ticker,
the only thing you can do in these circumstances
the food that your kids get every day is fast food,
there's not enough fresh food in there at all.
You know, the amount of additives, E numbers,
ingredients you wouldn't believe --
there's not enough veggies at all.
French fries are considered a vegetable.
Pizza for breakfast. They don't even get crockery.
Knives and forks? No, they're too dangerous.
They have scissors in the classroom,
If you don't have knives and forks in your school,
from a state level, fast food, because it's handheld.
And yes, by the way, it is fast food:
It's sloppy Joes, it's burgers,
it's wieners, it's pizzas, it's all of that stuff.
(Sighs)
Ten percent of what we spend on health care, as I said earlier,
is on obesity, and it's going to double.
There's no statutory right to teach kids about food,
elementary or secondary school, OK?
We don't teach kids about food, right?
And this is a little clip from an elementary school,
which is very common in England.
(Video) Who knows what this is?
Jamie Oliver: Potato? So, you think these are potatoes?
JO: What about this? Our good old friend.
JO: No. What do you think this is?
JO: Immediately you get a really clear sense
of "Do the kids know anything about where food comes from?"
Who knows what that is? Child: Uh, pear?
JO: What do you think this is? Child: I don't know.
JO: If the kids don't know what stuff is,
(Laughter)
JO: Normal. England and America,
We've got to start teaching our kids about food in schools, period.
(Applause)
I want to tell you about something
that kind of epitomizes the trouble that we're in, guys, OK?
I want to talk about something so basic as milk.
Every kid has the right to milk at school.
Your kids will be having milk at school, breakfast and lunch, right?
They'll be having two bottles, OK?
But milk ain't good enough anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I support milk --
probably paid a lot of money for some geezer to work out
that if you put loads of flavorings,
Yeah.
Obviously now that's going to catch on
the apple board is going to work out
that if they make toffee apples they'll eat more as well.
For me, there isn't any need to flavor the milk.
Okay? There's sugar in everything.
I know the ins and outs of those ingredients.
Even the milk hasn't escaped the kind of modern-day problems.
There's our milk. There's our carton.
In that is nearly as much sugar as one of your favorite cans of fizzy pop,
and they are having two a day.
having, you know, eight tablespoons of sugar a day.
And I've taken the liberty of putting in
just the five years of elementary school sugar,
Now, I don't know about you guys,
but judging the circumstances, right,
would look at the statistics and the evidence,
and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse.
(Applause)
Now, if I came up here, and I wish I could come up here today
and hang a cure for AIDS or cancer,
you'd be fighting and scrambling to get to me.
This, all this bad news, is preventable.
So, let's just think about, we got a problem here,
Okay so, in my world, what do we need to do?
it cannot just come from one source.
To reboot and make real tangible change,
real change, so that I could look you in the white of the eyes
the history of your children's lives,
happiness -- and let's not forget, you're clever if you eat well,
you know you're going to live longer --
all of that stuff, it will look different. OK?"
Where else do you shop so religiously?
How much money do you spend, in your life, in a supermarket?
They just sell us what we want. All right.
They owe us to put a food ambassador in every major supermarket.
They need to show us how to cook quick, tasty, seasonal meals
It is done in some, and it needs to be done across the board
The big brands, you know, the food brands,
need to put food education at the heart of their businesses.
I know, easier said than done.
It's the future. It's the only way.
you know, it's very competitive.
I've had loads of secret papers and dealings
I mean, basically they've weaned us on
to these hits of sugar, salt and fat, and x, y, and z,
and everyone loves them, right?
So, these guys are going to be part of the solution.
But we need to get the government to work
with all of the fast food purveyors and the restaurant industry,
and over a five, six, seven year period
wean of us off the extreme amounts
of fat, sugar and all the other non-food ingredients.
Now, also, back to the sort of big brands:
labeling, I said earlier, is an absolute farce
Obviously, in schools, we owe it to them
to make sure those 180 days of the year,
from that little precious age of four,
they need to be cooked proper, fresh food
from local growers on site, OK?
There needs to be a new standard of fresh, proper food
(Applause)
Under the circumstances, it's profoundly important
that every single American child leaves school
knowing how to cook 10 recipes
(Applause)
That means that they can be students, young parents,
and be able to sort of duck and dive around the basics of cooking,
no matter what recession hits them next time.
If you can cook, recession money doesn't matter.
If you can cook, time doesn't matter.
The workplace, we haven't really talked about it.
You know, it's now time for corporate responsibility
to really look at what they feed or make available to their staff.
The staff are the moms and dads of America's children.
Marissa, her father died in her hand,
if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly.
Definitely they shouldn't be left out.
Now, look, if we do all this stuff, and we can,
You can care and be commercial.
But the home needs to start passing on cooking again, for sure.
For sure, pass it on as a philosophy.
And for me, it's quite romantic,
but it's about if one person teaches three people
and they teach three of their mates,
that only has to repeat itself 25 times,
and that's the whole population of America.
Romantic, yes, but most importantly,
it's about trying to get people to realize
that every one of your individual efforts makes a difference.
We've got to put back what's been lost.
Huntington, where I made this program,
we've got this prime-time program
that hopefully will inspire people to really get on this change.
I truly believe that change will happen.
Huntington's Kitchen. I work with a community.
I found local sustainable funding
to get every single school in the area from the junk, onto the fresh food:
six-and-a-half grand per school.
(Applause)
That's all it takes, six-and-a-half grand per school.
The Kitchen is 25 grand a month. Okay?
This can do 5,000 people a year,
which is 10 percent of their population,
You know, it's local cooks teaching local people.
It's free cooking lessons, guys, in the Main Street.
This is real, tangible change, real, tangible change.
Around America, if we just look back now,
there is plenty of wonderful things going on.
There is plenty of beautiful things going on.
There are angels around America doing great things
in schools -- farm-to-school set-ups,
there are amazing people doing this already.
The problem is they all want to roll out
what they're doing to the next school,
We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly,
identify them, and allow them to easily find the resource
to keep rolling out what they're already doing,
Businesses of America need to support
Mrs. Obama to do the things that she wants to do.
(Applause)
having an English person standing here before you
And I believe truly, actually,
that if change can be made in this country,
beautiful things will happen around the world.
If America does it, other people will follow.
(Applause)
When I was in Huntington,
trying to get a few things to work when they weren't,
I thought "If I had a magic wand, what would I do?"
And I thought, "You know what?
I'd just love to be put in front of some of the most amazing
movers and shakers in America."
And a month later, TED phoned me up and gave me this award.
is for you to help a strong, sustainable movement
to inspire families to cook again,
and to empower people everywhere
(Applause)