“I’ve spent two years being PC about parents,” he rages. “Now is the time to say, ‘If you’re giving your young children fizzy drinks you’re an arsehole, you’re a tosser. If you give them bags of crisps you’re an idiot.
“I get f****** bored of being polite about this,” he says now, looking scruffy and tired at the Channel 4 HQ after a preview screening.
Oliver’s campaign on children’s diets started four years ago as he found himself being asked again and again about school meals. “I was saying, ‘they’re dreadful’, like every other chef,” he recalls. “But I realised that in my position I could do more than that.”
The role of parents comes increasingly into focus in the new film, which airs next Monday on Channel 4. But its main purpose is to consider changes arising as a result of last year’s Bafta-winning series, Jamie’s School Dinners.
These include strict nutritional standards for school food. Sweeping regulations ban all sales of fizzy drinks, crisps and chocolate on school premises, and allow deep-fried items like chips to be served no more than twice a week. Hot dogs, burgers and Turkey Twizzlers are replaced by high-quality meats, oily fish and two daily portions of fruit and veg.
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The new rules are based on recommendations by the School Meals Review Panel and the School Food Trust, both launched last year after Oliver delivered a petition comprising 271,677 signatures to Downing Street. They also take account of warnings from the Department of Health that 22% of girls and 19% of boys will be obese by 2010 if nothing is done.
Travelling round the country, Oliver finds serious problems. One of the consequences of his success last time was that parents took children off school meals: within six months, take-up dropped by 9%. Bad news: this meant less money and scope for improvements.
In the Greenwich school where he first met dinner lady Nora Sands — the Sancho Panza to his Quixote — Oliver finds that the termination of lucrative tuck-shop sales has pushed her kitchens into financial deficit. Meanwhile children bring rubbish to school.
“I’ve had a look inside a lot of lunchboxes,” Oliver says now. “I have seen kids of four or five, same age as mine, with a cold, half-eaten McDonald’s and a load of crisps and a can of Red Bull. It makes me want to cry . . . You might as well give him a line of coke.”
Worst of all, the new programme reveals that a dozen or so counties have no kitchens in their schools. Altogether these account for about half a million children.
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In Lincolnshire, Oliver learns that many pupils come to school without eating any breakfast, eat the same sandwich for lunch every day, and often go without a cooked meal at home in the evening.
He’s proud of the new film, he says. “But don’t go thinking it was a pleasure to make it. It was quite miserable. Some of the things we saw we weren’t able to get permission to broadcast. We live in Great Britain, and I think it’s a f****** great country. But to allow our kids to grow up and form habits that are unsafe is criminal.”
Can reluctant parents be reformed? “Apart from going through the press and cookery programmes I don’t know. That’s why I’m so passionate about school dinners and home economics.”
Under the government’s new proposals, any pupil who fulfils 24 hours in a voluntary course will be awarded a “licence to cook”. Oliver thinks the lessons should be mandatory. “The syllabus we have now is caca. You can pass a food technology course without having to cook.
“When kids leave school at 16 they should be able to survive. Know how to buy food economically, and freeze things, and cook a roast and a bleeding curry and a stir fry. You can learn all you like about chemistry or physics but at the end of the day you have to eat.”
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Oliver welcomes a nanny state. In the programme he confronts the education secretary, Alan Johnson, “Why can’t we ban junk food altogether?” Johnson suggests that might infringe civil liberties. “We ban drugs,” counters Oliver.
“There does need to be somebody saying, ‘F*** me, they’re getting bigger, they’re getting fatter, they’re dropping dead younger’. This is the first generation of kids that is going to die before their parents. Someone has to get strong, someone has to be the governor, and you don’t have to like them.”
In the finale, Oliver sees Tony Blair in Downing Street and the prime minister agrees to all his demands. There’s a further £240m to subsidise the new healthy eating regime in schools up to 2011, £2m to establish training kitchens for staff, and a fund for building kitchens. “That last scene almost makes me cry,” says Oliver.
“I’m a big gob, but I know a bit about this: I’ve lived and breathed it for four years. And I’m in this for the long term. If I wasn’t, I’d get a kick up the arse. And rightly so.”