大象传媒

Jamie Oliver shared happy memories of visits to Derbyshire during an interview with 大象传媒 Radio Derby's Ed George.

The former Naked Chef said he used to make regular visits to our county during his formative years.

He said: "When I was a schoolkid, I went to Castleton quite a few times. We'd be there studying rocks, going down these big hills. It was a great place!"

But Jamie's main reason to appear on Ed's show is to promote his new Channel Four series 'Ministry of Food' which marks the start of a new campaign to get British people learning how to cook properly.

He said: "I wouldn't say that processed food, ready meals and even takeaways aren't relevant to modern life, it's just that over the past 40 years there are three generations of people who have come out of school and gone through their home life without ever being shown how to cook properly.

Watch out for the giant chicken!

"So with that in mind, we thought 'how do we look as a nation?'

"It got us thinking about the old Ministry of Food founded just after the Second World War which pushed the idea of not wasting food, doing as much as possible with very little and creating food that makes us happy.

"Instead of looking to the future, we've taken a look backwards and wondered what a modern day version would look like.

"So we opened a shop in Rotherham which does free demonstrations every day, six days a week and it's been very popular.

"Actually we were never prepared for the amount of requests for information on nutrition and diet. We had to quickly get up to scratch on that."

Jamie now hopes to create a national word-of-mouth movement called 'Pass It On' where people will share cooking skills with their friends and family to gradually improve standards across the country.

He explained: "Pass It On is about saying to ourselves 'instead of waiting for the government to sort it out, maybe we should all start doing a bit ourselves.'

"It's just us trying to start a movement where everybody passes on a bit of cooking knowledge. We estimate that one person can potentially affect 180 others very quickly so we're just trying to spread the word."

You can use the audio link above to listen to the interview in full.