Another mad thing Jamie says these days is: “I don’t want to be famous any more.” After making £12 million, at the age of 29, he says he will quit in three years to concentrate on his private life. In his new TV show, in which he attempts to feed the kids of Kidbrooke Comprehensive healthily for 37p a day, we see him rowing with his wife about bathing the baby, and admitting: “I’m a shit husband. I feel sorry for my kids.” By the way, the Oliver family are shortly to relocate to New York and Los Angeles — those notorious boltholes where people go when they don’t want to be famous.

But the very strangest, maddest thing of all was Oliver’s statement last week that he had done his new show to make us “a cooler, cleverer and healthier nation”. This man was born and raised in Britain — Essex, even better! — so how and where on earth did he ever pick up the notion that it was possible to be both cool and healthy, let alone clever and healthy?

Poor Jamie — he thinks he’s a leader of men (well, kids), but he’s actually the latest victim of the cult of Food Voodoo — or “Foodoo”, if you like. Like a mixed-up, self-obsessed teenage anorexic/bulimic who seeks to control their food intake because they feel they can control nothing else (self-fulfilling prophecy; it’s pretty hard to rule the world with your head down the khazi), Foodoo followers focus on grub as a way to put right all that ails the world. Working-class kids doing lousy at school and the gap between rich and poor growing ever greater? It’s not our foul class system and the strength of the old boys’ network which bolsters the dumb rich kid and keeps down the smart poor kid; no, it’s CHIPS! That’s all right, then!

“A healthy mind in a healthy body,” goes the old saying. All well and good. But as Peggy Lee might have asked, is that ALL there is? More to the point, when was a healthy mind ever a clever mind? If you are what you eat, no wonder most healthy eaters have the mentality of vegetables. Whereas look at all the great stylish wits and brains since time immemorial — what an all-round smokin’, drinkin’, guzzlin’ crew they were. I only thank the Lord that Oscar Wilde and Dottie Parker aren’t still around to be subjected to the imbecility of the Foodoo Nation — she’d be forced into examining her droppings on prime-time TV by Gillian McKeith, while poor Oscar would be being yelled at by Harvey the Mad Marine on Celebrity Fit Club. My dear, the indignity!

Of course, stuff like the latest big Sudan 1 food-colour scandal is meat and drink to the Foodoo cult; 300 food companies are recalling more than 420 products featuring the scary-sounding red dye that also tints shoe polish and petrol, among others. It is thought that the fiasco will eventually cost the food industry more than £100 million; amusingly, Sainsbury’s had a whole swath of products on the list. (That’ll be the Sainsbury’s that pukka old Jamie Oliver earns £1.2 million a year promoting, will it?)

Nobody likes the idea of crap in their grub. But let’s not lose our perspective here — oops, too late, the Daily Hell has heard about it! And aren’t they whipping themselves into a positively orgiastic frenzy of fear and fury — TOXIC, TAINTED, TIMEBOMB, ARMAGEDDON and WE’VE EATEN IT FOR MONTHS! are just a few of the responsible, sensible headlines that the Mail has used about Sudan 1. As if there weren’t enough poor boobies with eating disorders in this country; now every finicky nutter will have a field day starving themselves. After all, it’s been proved that food gives you cancer.

It is the hysterical, hate-filled politics of Foodoo that led last week to a harmless, gentle 23-year-old man weighing 33 stone (210kg) being forcibly sectioned and locked away under the Mental Health Act. Chris Leppard suffers from a rare disease that leaves him permanently hungry. He has been released, but his ordeal at the hands of East Sussex County Council, which he is now suing, sounds chilling. His mother, Anne, said: “We didn’t know they could just take him away. But four people turned up saying they wanted to speak to us. After asking him some questions, they said they were taking him away. Chris was crying and said that he didn’t want to go. As far as we are concerned he is being punished for being ill.” This, in a country where — quite rightly — people are left alone to smoke and drink themselves to death, and also where — quite wrongly — violent mentalists are repeatedly released to kill and kill again.

What is missing in the lives of the followers of Foodoo that they have taken it upon themselves to worry so obsessively about what other people eat? Well, I don’t know if it’s cause or effect, or what came first — the corn-fed chicken or the free-range egg — but it is a fact that people who are obsessed with being healthy are often quite mind-blowingly boring to talk to. I mean, who would you rather be stuck in a lift with — Kate Moss or Carole Caplin? Keith Richards or Jamie Oliver? And perhaps the idea that other people are getting a kick out of life, albeit through scoffing takeaways till they puke, makes their eyes fair cross with envy. Because in my experience, there are few things people envy as much as FUN.

WINNING OLYMPICS CAN STOP BRITAIN BECOMING A NATION OF VICKY POLLARDS! screamed a recent Mail headline. But my fear would be that a nation of health-bores could never have produced the sick, brilliant minds that created Vicky Pollard and the rest of Little Britain in the first place. Frankly, I’d rather be unhealthy than dull-minded; I’d rather put rubbish into my mouth than have boring garbage come out of it. A chub, after all, can lose weight — but a bore, alas, is forever a bore.

julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk

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