"jamie oliver" news and stories

We were pretty excited to hear the news that "The Big Fish Fight," a U.K.-based show featuring superstar chefs Jamie Oliver, Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay was taking on the dark side of the fishing industry. But the news got even juicier yesterday when bad-boy Gordon Ramsay told The Daily Mail that while in Costa Rica filming his episode on the illegal shark-fin trade, things got downright harrowing for the chef when he got close to a Taiwanese crew with a full load of fins and a stash of cocaine. The story continued to be a nail biter when he crossed paths with a shady character named Enrique, who is thought to be the third largest supplier of shark fins in the world.

The experience includes cars with ominously darkened windows, pointed steely rifles and chilling threats of bodily harm. In the backdrop? The sheer gruesomeness of sharks being shocked with electric prods, their fins sliced from their bodies, and then being thrown back into the sea to die.

"At one [point], I managed to shake off the people who were keeping us away, ran up some stairs to a rooftop and looked down to see thousands and thousands of fins, drying on rooftops for as far as the eye could see. When I got back downstairs, they tipped a barrel of petrol over me," Ramsay told The Daily Mail.

Jamie Oliver's new 30-Minute Meals cookbook is literally selling faster than hot cakes. The book, much like his American TV spots, is based on "a revolutionary approach to cooking good food fast," and contains 50 recipes that follow through on that promise.

As Daily Mail UK reports, despite the book's hefty price of £26 (that's close to $45), it has remained on bookstores' bestseller's lists every week since it was released, just two months ago. It has already sold 735,000 copies, they say, which is "an average of 10,500 a day." In fact, it's the fastest selling non-fiction work -- ever.

That means it already beat out the "ten-week sales record previously held by comedian Peter Kay's memoir The Sound of Laughter which sold 483,000 copies" after it came out in 2008, reports the Mail. And in the past week alone, the book sold "well ahead" of The Guinness Book of World Records and The Simples Life, another British high-seller. It won't be beating out the highest selling book ever (the Bible) anytime soon, but there is speculation that it may bump another TV chef out of the running: Britain's Della Smith, whose book How to Cook is the reigning king with just over one million copies under its belt.

Jamie's publisher told the Mail: "Jamie proves [his approach], by mastering a few tricks and being organized and focused in the kitchen; it is absolutely possible, and easy, to get a complete meal on the table in the same amount of time you'd normally spend making one dish!" That's good enough for this year's Christmas tree, we think.

Congress has made First Lady Michelle Obama one happy woman, and likely even made Jamie Oliver cry a little, in a good way. After a unanimous vote in the Senate back in August, then a delay in the House, the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act finally reached the President's desk by a House vote of 264-157, yesterday afternoon.

This is huge. As previously noted, the bill's extended budget of $4.5 billion will account for the first raise in funding for school lunches in 30 years, which amounts to an additional 6 cents per meal. So schools can maybe spring for greens and "real" chicken rather than the stand-by frozen pizzas and processed nuggets. The bill will also fund nutritional education programs, expand the number of low-income students accepted into the school lunch program, and rid school cafeterias and vending machines of junk food (think new-age carrots).

Sorry Sarah Palin, but you lose. Apple-a-day for the win.

"Jamie's American Road Trip," a six-part series that Jamie Oliver says has already aired in 120 countries, may soon find a home on American television. "It may finally appear in the country whre it was shot," he told an audience at a screening of the series in New York (Nov. 15). He was also promoting a related cookbook, Jamie's America: Easy Twists on Great American Classics and More.

In the third segment of Slashfood's three-part video interview (also see posts for part 1 and part 2), Oliver explained that he did, in fact, kill the alligator he is shown carrying in one of the books photos.

"Game or fair game is different wherever you are in the world," he said. "In England it's rabbit and hares and pheasant. In Louisiana, it's alligators."

Watch out, Los Angeles school officials! You may become next season's prime-time TV villains.

Jamie Oliver, the English chef who won an Emmy for his show "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" (which portrayed some school-lunch bureaucrats in West Virginia as ensuring that children are given meals sure to make them obese and short-lived), is bringing the show to L.A. for season 2.

When producers wrote to officials at the Los Angeles Unified School District, asking for permission to film in the schools, it was denied.

"Our feeling was that his time would be better spent or invested in other communities," an L.A. school official told the Los Angeles Times.

In part two of Oliver's exclusive three-part interview with Slashfood, he lays down a warning to the district.