CASE STUDY

Chapter $7$ : The Pure and Easy Food Lifestyle

Have you ever cooked "lovely jubbly" $[=$really nice$]$ or "pukka" $[=$excellent$]$ food?

Then you have not seen a cooking show by the people's chef, Jamie Oliver, so far.

The British cook, who helped in his parents' pub's kitchen as a kid, started his career at The River Caf$,$ a famous Italian restaurant in West London. That is where he was discovered during the filming of a documentary by the $BBC,$ who subsequently offered him his own TV show in $1999.$ TV food formats that dominated the TV networks then were either posh, eccentric, or purely instructional. Moving away from these for$-$mats, the concept of Jamie's "The Naked Chef" programme was based on stripping food down to its plain and pure essentials. Jamie's inspirational and authentic demeanour, his enthusiastic passion for healthy fresh food, and his spontaneous, laid$-$back approach to cooking was paired with the presentation of simple recipes. The idea was to reduce complexity for home cooks, make meals easy, take away the anxiety of preparing dishes from scratch, and thereby encouraging home cooks to prepare food fresh instead of resorting to takeaways. The approach hit home with the show becoming a huge success in the expanding "living well" lifestyle market: from amateur cooks to timid cooks eager to prepare healthy food quickly to the generally growing number of people interested in cooking and food quality, the programme struck the right note.