It’s Not Always Excellent to Be Jamie Oliver

失去餐馆帝国的杰米·奥利弗，如何让人“吃得更好”？

Just before lunch on a recent Monday, Jamie Oliver wrapped an apron around his dad bod and started mashing mint and broad beans with a mortar and pestle, which has long been his favorite kitchen tool.

最近一个周一，快到午餐时间，杰米·奥利弗（Jamie Oliver）略微发福的身上围了件围裙，开始用研钵和杵捣碎薄荷和蚕豆，多年来这一直是他最喜爱的厨房工具。

That adorable mop of hair he had 20 years ago when he slid down a banister and splashed into popular food culture as the Naked Chef is cropped now. At 44, Oliver comes off more like a pleasant, world-weary high school teacher than the arrogant jokey bloke everyone wanted to hang around with back when he blew up food TV.

20年前作为“原味主厨”（Naked Chef）从楼梯扶手滑下、扎入流行美食文化中时那一头可爱的乱发，如今已经剪短。现年44岁的奥利弗给人感觉更像是一位亲切而厌世的高中老师，而不是当年在美食电视界大红大紫的时候那个目中无人、爱说笑的家伙，人人都想来套近乎。

And are those bags under his blue eyes?

还有，他的蓝眼睛下面，是眼袋吗？

“Sorry, darling,” he said as he seasoned a fillet of Dover sole. “I’m a bit tired.”

“抱歉，亲爱的，”他一边给多佛比目鱼片调味，一边说道。“我有点儿累。”

The day started before 6 a.m. He dropped his children at school, then made his way to the refurbished North London warehouse that serves as his headquarters. After feeding a reporter lunch, he had to meet top officials from Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London who were coming by the office to hammer out a plan to halve childhood obesity rates by 2030.

他的一天，在早上6点前就开始了。他把孩子送到学校，然后去北伦敦一个由仓库改建的地方，现在是他的总部。给一名记者做了午饭后，他还得与来自利物浦、曼彻斯特、伯明翰及伦敦的高官见面，这些官员来他的办公室是要和他商谈出一个计划，在2030年前将儿童肥胖率减半。

It didn’t help that he and his wife, Juliette, who goes by Jools, had exhausted themselves over the weekend moving into a $7.2 million 16th-century Tudor mansion not far from his parents’ pub in Essex. (They’re keeping the eight-bedroom North London town house.)

雪上加霜的是，他和妻子茱丽叶（Juliette，大家都管她叫茱尔斯[Jools]）周末为了搬进一座720万美元的16世纪都铎式别墅，累了个半死。新房子离奥利弗父母在埃塞克斯的酒吧不远。（他们还留着北伦敦那幢八卧室联排别墅。）

Granted, that kind of move is a little different from asking your friends to help you muscle a mattress into a studio walk-up. Still, moving is moving, especially with five children, including a feverish 3-year-old who spent the night “jumping around me like a rattlesnake,” Oliver said.

当然，没错，他们那种搬家，和让朋友帮忙把床垫搬进没有电梯的单身公寓不太一样。但搬家终归是搬家，尤其是当你有5个孩子，其中一个还是极度兴奋的三岁小孩，一整晚“都在我身边像响尾蛇一样蹦个不停，”奥利弗说。

It wasn’t just a bad night’s sleep, a new house and a packed day that weighed on him. “I have probably been pushed to the edge of my capacity over the last four years,” he said.

让他感到疲倦的不只是前一晚没睡好，搬入新家以及日程排得太满。“过去四年里，我可能已经被推到了个人的极限。”

In May, the Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group went into administration, a form of bankruptcy protection. The company, according to some accounts, owed creditors nearly 83 million pounds (about $100 million). Oliver said he tried his hardest to keep the business alive. But after closing some restaurants, injecting the equivalent of more than $15 million of his own money into the company and searching for a new investor, he gave up. In all, he shuttered or sold 25 restaurants, putting more than 1,000 people out of work.

五月的时候，杰米·奥利弗餐馆集团进入管理程序——一种破产保护的形式。有消息说公司欠债近8300万英镑（约7.3亿元人民币）。奥利弗说他尽了最大努力维持经营。但在关闭一些餐馆、将相当于1500万的自有资金注入公司，以及寻找新投资者后，他放弃了。他或关闭、或出售了共计25家餐厅，解雇了超过1000人。

Closing his first restaurant, the fashionable Fifteen in London, hurt the most. He had opened it in 2002 to train unemployed young people, many from difficult backgrounds, how to prepare tasting menus, make fresh pasta and run a proper dining room.

关闭他的第一家餐馆——时髦的伦敦“十五”（Fifteen）餐厅——让他最为难过。2002年，他开设了这家餐厅以便向无业年轻人提供培训，这些人许多出身贫寒，他教他们如何准备品鉴菜单，制作新鲜意大利面，以及管理一间考究餐馆的大堂。

“That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” he said of the closing. “Just terrible. Awful.”

“那是我不得不做的事情中最困难的一件了，”他谈及餐厅的关门时说。“太糟糕了。可怕。”

It would be easy to see a touch of Icarus in Oliver, or to view his saga as some sort of life lesson from an overachiever. But it’s too soon for deep reflection, and that’s not really his strong suit.

很容易在奥利弗身上看到一点伊卡洛斯（Icarus）的影子，或是将他的传奇故事看作一个高成就者的人生教训。但现在开始深刻反思还为时尚早，而且那也不是他擅长的事。

He was a lousy student, but he knew his way around a kitchen, so he went to culinary school. He was a sous-chef at the River Café in London when a BBC crew showed up to shoot a documentary. A smart producer saw how much the camera loved him.

他读书成绩很差，但却对厨房轻车熟路，于是进了烹饪学校。当他在河畔咖啡馆（River Café）担任副主厨时，一个BBC摄制组到那里拍摄一部纪录片。一个聪明的制片人看出他非常上镜。

“The Naked Chef” debuted in 1999 on BBC Two in Britain, and a year later on the Food Network in the United States. The camera work was shaky, and his style kinetic. Oliver froze up when speaking directly to the camera, so producers hung just off to the side and asked him questions.

1999年，《原味主厨》在英国的BBC2台首播，一年后在美国的美食频道（Food Network）播出。节目采用了摇摇晃晃的方式拍摄，而他的风格是充满活力的。奥利弗在直接对着镜头时会说不出话来，于是制片人就站在画外问他问题。

Oliver secured an endorsement deal with Sainsbury’s, the second-largest supermarket chain in Britain, that would last 11 years and earn him close to $12 million. He wrote a bestselling cookbook. It was a lot for someone in his early 20s.

奥利弗获得了英国第二大连锁超市塞恩斯伯里（Sainsbury’s）的代言合约，这份合约后来持续了11年，让他挣了将近1200万美元。他写了一本畅销食谱。对于一个20出头的人来说，这是相当大的成就了。

In 2008, he opened his first Jamie’s Italian restaurant with help from his mentor, Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo. The idea was to disrupt midmarket dining. The meat had an animal-welfare pedigree. Butter was organic. Wages were decent and prices affordable.

2008年，在他的师傅、意大利大厨詹纳罗·孔塔尔多（Gennaro Contaldo）的帮助下，他开办了自己的首家杰米意式餐厅（Jamie’s Italian）。餐馆的意图是颠覆中端餐饮市场。肉有动物福利记录。黄油是有机的。薪水不错，价格也不贵。

The restaurants were packed from the get-go. He started other chains, including Barbecoa, a pair of upscale steak and barbecue restaurants, in partnership with American chef Adam Perry Lang. At his peak, Oliver served 7.5 million meals a year and employed 4,500 people.

餐馆从开张起一直爆满。他开了其他连锁，包括与美国大厨亚当·佩里·朗（Adam Perry Lang）合作的Barbecoa——两家高端牛排及烧烤餐厅。在巅峰时期，奥利弗一年售出750万顿餐食，雇佣了4500人。

 

It’s rarely one thing that brings a big enterprise down, and Oliver was battling several dragons at once. Taxes and the cost of ingredients he favored went up. So did rent, especially in fast-gentrifying neighborhoods. But he kept expanding, sometimes into neighborhoods without enough traffic.

让一个大企业倒下的很少是单单一件事，而奥利弗是在同一时间与好几条恶龙缠斗。税金和他喜欢的原料价格都有所上涨。房租也是一样，尤其是在迅速士绅化的街区。但他依然在扩张，有时候扩张到了那些没有足够顾客的街区。

Casual dining had become a lucrative draw for investors, and the market flooded with competitors. People started using delivery apps instead of eating out. After Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the value of the pound fell. Retail spending plummeted. Critics began to complain about his restaurants’ food and service.

休闲餐饮成了吸引投资人的赚钱买卖，市场竞争激烈。人们开始使用送餐应用，而不是出门吃饭。2016年英国公投决定离开欧盟后，英镑下跌。零售业的支出暴跌。批评人士开始对他的餐馆的菜品和服务怨声载道。

Things were no longer looking so pukka.

事情看起来不那么顺风顺水了。

“There’s no way to sugarcoat it,” he said. “I thought I could fix it, but I couldn’t. I can absolutely look at myself in the mirror knowing I tried everything to the last very minute. We ran out of money. It’s as simple as that.”

“我想不出什么好听点的解释，”他说。“我以为我能解决，但我不能。我可以摸着良心说，我绝对是尝试了一切途径，直至最后一刻。我们没钱了。就这么简单。”

Although he still has plenty of fans, there are, and always have been, detractors. They deride his accent as “mockney,” and hold him responsible for new school-lunch rules that banished foods like Turkey Twizzlers (essentially meat curly fries). They call him a hypocrite for his $6 million deal to sell healthy-ish Oliver-branded food at Shell gas stations despite his crusade against climate change.

尽管他还是有很多拥趸，但也有批评者——一直都有。他们嘲笑他的口音是“仿考克尼”，认为新的学校午餐规定是他造成的问题，该规定去掉了火鸡肉麻花（基本上就是肉版的卷卷薯条）之类的食品。由于和壳牌达成了一份600万美元的合约，在后者的加油站卖较为健康的奥利弗品牌食品，他们说他虚伪，尽管他一直在努力抗击气候变化。

When his empire collapsed, the tabloids were particularly brutal.

当他的帝国轰然瓦解时，八卦小报尤其残忍。

“There is something in the British psyche that sort of quite enjoys the discomfiture of successful people,” said food writer Nigella Lawson. “You get laughed at in this country for wanting the world to be a better place.”

“英国人的心态有些乐于看到成功人士变得狼狈不堪，”美食作者尼盖尔·劳森（Nigella Lawson）说。“在这个国家，如果你想让这个世界变得更好，是会受到嘲笑的。”

It is hard, she said, for someone who attained so much fame so young to navigate the business world. “It’s nice to have some good things said about him, because he’s had such a hard time lately,” she said. “I have no doubt he will turn it around.”

对一个在如此年轻时就获得了巨大名气的人来说，要应付商业世界是很难的，她说。“说点关于他的正面的事挺好的，因为他最近实在不容易，”她说。“我从不怀疑他能扭转局面。”

In many ways, Oliver is relieved to be out of the restaurant business. His empire is smaller now, with about 120 employees. He spends most of his day doing the things he loves: cooking, talking about cooking, producing content about cooking and trying to make the world a healthier place to eat.

从很多方面来说，离开餐馆业对奥利弗是个解脱。他的帝国如今规模变小，只有约120名员工。他每天大部分时候都在做自己喜爱的事情：烹饪，谈论烹饪，制作关于烹饪的内容，并努力让这个世界的饮食更健康。

Oliver’s other ventures still make plenty of money. He has sold a lifetime total of 27 million pieces of Tefal cookware, and it’s easy to find his kitchen gadgets on Amazon. He recently signed a deal to become the health ambassador for Tesco, Britain’s largest grocery chain.

奥利弗的其他经营项目仍然很赚钱。他已经卖出了2700万件特福牌（Tefal）厨具，要在亚马逊网站上找到他的厨房小工具也很容易。最近他签下了一份合约，将成为英国最大连锁百货乐购（Tesco）的健康大使。

Oliver’s preternatural ability to connect with an audience has helped him make the leap to digital content while other food media stars from his litter have struggled to fit content made for television onto platforms like YouTube.

奥利弗有着能与受众建立起联系的不可思议的能力，这让他得以跃入数字内容，而其他和他同期的美食媒体明星，在把为电视制作的内容移植到YouTube这样的平台方面举步维艰。

He mostly stays off Twitter – “it’s not a platform that makes me a happier person” – but he crushes Instagram, where he has 7.3 million followers. His YouTube channel, Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube, has 4.4 million subscribers. His average monthly social media reach is more than 30 million followers, and his global TV audience is 67 million, said Saskia Wirth, head of communications for the Jamie Oliver Group.

他基本上不上Twitter——“那个平台不会让我变得更快乐”——但他在Instagram上大展拳脚，他在那里拥有730万粉丝。他的YouTube频道Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube拥有440万订户。杰米·奥利弗集团的传播主管萨斯基亚·沃斯（Saskia Wirth）说，他每个月在社交媒体上平均可触及超过3000万粉丝，而他的全球电视观众有6700万。

Books, however, remain the engine of the Oliver machine: He has sold more than 45 million of them – $7.4 million worth just last year, according to Nielsen Book Research – and is the country’s best-selling nonfiction author. For a time, only J.K. Rowling outsold him.

然而，卖书仍然是奥利弗这台机器的引擎：他已经卖出了超过4500万本——尼尔森图书研究（Nielsen Book Research）的数据显示，仅仅去年一年就价值740万美元——他是英国最畅销的非虚构类作者。有一段时间，只有J.K.罗琳（J.K. Rowling）能超过他。

Oliver, who has dyslexia and what he says is an unusually short attention span, likes to dictate his books rather than type them. His topics swing with the times. He has veered from comfort foods to superfoods. He has produced 30-minute meals and 15-minute meals and five-ingredient meals. He has written recipes for squash mac and cheese for a family cookbook and, in 2018, interpreted dishes he learned from Italian nonnas.

奥利弗患有阅读障碍，另外据他说他的注意长度也出奇地短。他喜欢口述自己的书，而不是写下它们。从休闲食品到超级食物，他写书的主题紧随时代。他制作了30分钟菜、15分钟菜和五种原料菜。他为一本家庭食谱写下了西葫芦芝士通心粉的菜谱。在2018年，他还诠释了自己从意大利奶奶那里学来的菜品。

His latest is “Veg: Easy & Delicious Meals for Everyone.” An edition for the American market (retitled “Ultimate Veg”) will come out in January.

他最新出版的一本食谱是《蔬菜：每个人都能享受的简单美味菜肴》（Veg: Easy & Delicious Meals for Everyone）。面向美国市场的版本（书名叫做《终极蔬菜》[Ultimate Veg]）将于一月面世。

He brushes off criticism that his books are derivative. “No one has a copyright on five ingredients or 30-minute meals,” he said.

有人说他的书是在抄别人的想法，对此他不以为然。“没人拥有五种原料或是30分钟菜的版权，”他说。

And then there is the mission. Next to his family, doing his part to fix the food system matters to him the most. His list of campaigns, which he has waged with television shows and documentaries and all manner of political pressure, is long. Among them are improving school food, bettering conditions for chickens, reducing food waste, helping to pass a tax on sugary drinks and his latest, curtailing ads for fatty, sugary foods aimed at children.

然后，还有他的使命。解决食物系统的问题，在他的心目中重要性仅次于他的家人。他发起了大量的行动，通过电视节目、纪录片以及各种各样的政治压力进行。其中包括改善学校膳食、改善鸡只饲养环境、减少食物浪费、帮助通过一项针对含糖饮料的征税，最近的一个，是减少以儿童为目标的含脂肪、含糖食物广告。

His Ministry of Food, an eight-week community cooking course now in its 11th year, has trained nearly 100,000 people to prepare healthier food. His new North Star is the 2030 Project, an effort to coordinate health and governmental organizations in a campaign to halve childhood obesity by 2030, and it’s hard for him to stop talking about it.

他的“食品部”（Ministry of Food）是一个为期八周的社区烹饪课，如今项目已进入了第11年，培训近10万人烹制更健康的食物。他的新北极星是2030项目，一个协调各健康和政府组织的统一行动，努力在2030年前实现儿童肥胖率减半，他一说起这个项目就滔滔不绝。

That’s why the gaggle of government officials who shuffled by the test kitchen an hour earlier were still waiting for him to finish up lunch. He waved off his communications director, who had been gently trying to cut him off. He had a few last points to make.

这就是为什么一小时前从实验厨房走过的政府官员仍在等着他吃完午餐。他没有理会一直在小心提醒他该结束了的传讯主管。他最后还有几点要说。

“If I’m being reflective, I’ve had the best and the worst of it,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot. I smell differently now. I see differently now. It doesn’t mean I’m cynical. I still feel I have 20 years of good work ahead of me, but I don’t have an appetite to sort of see my name all over the globe in restaurants.”

“如果要反思的话，我经历过最好的，也经历过最糟的，”他说。“我学到了很多。我在用不同的方式去嗅闻。用不同的方式去看。这不意味着我变得犬儒了。我觉得我还有20年的大好时光去工作，但我没有兴趣看到自己的名字在遍布全球的餐馆里了。”

He just wants people to be able to eat better, no matter what their economic situation is. And who better to take on such an impossible task?

他只想让人们能吃得更好，不管他们的经济情况如何。还有谁比他更适合承担起这项不可能的任务呢？

“You don’t want someone who’s had success after success after success,” he said. “You want someone like me.”

“你需要的不是一个不断成功的人，”他说。“你要的是我这样的人。”

英文、中文版本下载：http://www.yingyushijie.com/shop/source/detail/id/2224.html