Food Network continues to evolve into the purest expression of food porn: it's getting hard to find a current edition of any show that doesn't have wall-to-wall shtick (Alton Brown) or a cheesy music soundtrack or both.
An occasional appearer in the FN world is the British chef Jamie Oliver.
Once you get past his Essex accent, Oliver, who turns 33 later this month, is a smart and thoughtful exponent of good food, simply prepared. His books include one on how to use things you've already prepared in more- and more varied- meals through the coming week. One measure of his worth, at least to Waldo's Faithful, Nameless Assistant, is that we've been cooking regularly from recipes of his for eight years now.
Where other Brit celeb chefs seem mostly to be controversial- Robert Irvine got sacked from FN for padding his cv, and Gordon Ramsay runs a Punch-and-Judy show called Hell's Kitchen, where the bleeps practically render him mute, Oliver wins out personal praise for his commitment to use his money and celebrity to more useful ends. His Fifteen Project takes street kids and turns them into chefs in fine dining restaurants. He single-handedly pressured the British government into spending and extra 280 million pounds over three years to improve school lunches.
And he stands up to Bill Clinton and the cult of I want what I want that invariably seems to attend him: "During the school dinners programme, Oliver's Fifteen London was visited by Bill Clinton. Clinton asked to see Oliver; however, Oliver refused, as Clinton's party had asked for other diners to be removed to make room for their larger-than-agreed-upon group. In episode 2 of Jamie's School Dinners, Clinton's party had 36 show up for a booking of 16 and many of them were on a South Beach Diet and did not want the special menu that had been prepared, even though the menu had been approved in advance. [11]"
Oliver's website is a grab bag of things: a blog, a podcast site, a report on his various books and initiatives, a pitch site for the inevitable product tie-ins, and a recipe source. It's worth a read because it's not what you'll expect from the usual celebrity chef website. You can even set up your own food blog on the site. Worth a read. Good photos, goes without saying.
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