London - Jamie Oliver doesn’t mince words: Britain, like
America, is too fat.
So fat that he’s been waging a public war on sugar -- one
that has Big Food up in arms. It all began in June 2015 when the rock-star chef
walked into 10 Downing Street to meet David Cameron, then British prime
minister, and proposed a tax on sugary drinks like Coke and Pepsi.
“I might as well have wafted dog’s muck in front of
everyone,” Oliver recalled. “He said, ‘Well I don’t really like a tax.’ ”
Seemingly against the odds, Oliver got his way, making
the fifth-largest economy in the world the latest wealthy nation to combat
obesity and the health problems that come with it. In March, then-Chancellor of
the Exchequer George Osborne surprised health campaigners by announcing he
would legislate to impose a tax that would raise 520 million pounds ($659
million) a year.
The UK’s vote to quit the European Union cost Cameron and
Osborne their jobs, but new Prime Minister Theresa May decided to push ahead
with the tax in August, when her government singled out Oliver as a key
supporter of it. On Monday, the government published draft legislation, which
Parliament is set to vote on next year.
Local votes
Since the UK announced its plan, Ireland and Portugal
have followed with their own proposals. France, Hungary and Mexico already tax
soda, and at least 10 other countries worldwide are contemplating similar
measures. Several US cities, including San Francisco and Oakland, California,
on November 8 passed ballot initiatives to create local sugary-drink taxes,
following Philadelphia and Berkeley, California. Drinks companies like Britvic and Lucozade Ribena Suntory have vowed to reduce the sugar content of
their products.
With millions of followers on Twitter and Facebook and a
media blitz that included a television documentary and testimony before
Parliament, Oliver argued that the UK’s addiction to sugar had spun out of
control and that companies such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo should be disciplined
like naughty children. As a result, everyone from rival British chef
Heston Blumenthal to British tabloids has called the proposed levy “Jamie
Oliver’s sugar tax.”
The UK’s tax - expected to add about 8 pence to a 70
pence can of Coke - will come into force in 2018 if it wins support in
Parliament. The industry, led by the British Soft Drinks Association, is
lobbying against the bill, saying it would cost jobs and hurt poor people who
spend a disproportionate amount of their income on food and drink.
Read also: What happens to jobs if sugar tax is passed?
“It’s a levy on industry but it will feed through to
higher prices on consumers,” said Gavin Partington, director-general of the
association. “In the process it will lead to job losses in the industry and the
poorest in society will pay higher prices.”
Oliver disagrees. To demonstrate to Cameron that the tax
could work, he implemented a 10-pence surcharge on sugary drinks in more than
45 of his Jamie’s Italian restaurants across the UK starting in mid-2015 and
persuaded other restaurants to do the same. The fee has raised 170 000 pounds,
which Oliver has donated to the health charity Sustain to run children’s health
programs.
’Not anti-business’
“I’m not anti-business,” the 41-year-old chef
said, sitting in the meeting room above his Fifteen Restaurant in London.
“Doing the right thing is good business.”
Oliver said his epiphany came in Los Angeles about five
years ago, when he was making a documentary series for US television network
ABC about the junk food dominating school lunches. The children could get their
free meal only if they also took milk, which was almost always chocolate- or
strawberry-flavoured.
“When we did our surveys, kids didn’t know milk was white
-- they thought it was pink or black,” he said. “There were more total sugars
per 100 millilitres of milk than a can of Coke.”
To illustrate the point, Oliver filmed himself in front
of a school bus and filled it with sand - the amount of sugar, he said, that
children consume from flavoured milk in a week in the Los Angeles Unified
School District, the second largest in the US.
When he told his team a few years later that he wanted a
sugary-drinks tax in the U.K. to be his next big campaign, he watched eyes
roll. “Everyone thought I was mad,” he said. “They look at you and think, ‘For
the love of god.’ ”
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave more
than $18 million to campaigns in support of the tax initiatives in Oakland and
San Francisco, finance records show. Bloomberg is the founder and majority
owner of Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News.
Cameron lunch
Oliver built on work by Sustain Chairman Mike Rayner, an
Oxford University professor who has modelled the effect of food taxes. Other
groups, including the British Dental Association and the British Dietetic
Association, have pushed for a tax, but the celebrity chef catapulted the issue
into the mainstream.
His meeting with Cameron was one of several, including
two round tables with policy makers and a family lunch at the prime minister’s
country residence, Chequers, to try to persuade him to tackle what health
campaigners say is an obesity crisis. As of 2014, 28 percent of British adults
were obese, compared with 34 percent of Americans.
Oliver came armed with other statistics. A third of
children in the UK leave primary school obese. Rates of type-2 diabetes, often
caused by excess sugar consumption, have risen 60 percent in the past decade.
The disease costs Britain’s National Health Service 9 billion pounds a year.
Read also: Sugar tax scare tactics 'shocking'
Oliver spent months filming the effects of the country’s
sweet tooth for a TV documentary called “Sugar Rush” that aired in September
2015. He showed a 5-year-old boy in an operating room getting multiple teeth
extracted because he drank too much soda.
Together with Sustain, Oliver started a petition calling
on the government to tax soft drinks with added sugar, citing studies showing
they’re the largest source of the sweetener for British school children and
teenagers. More than 155 000 people signed by last fall, surpassing the 100 000
needed to prompt a parliamentary debate.
In October, Oliver testified before the House of Commons
committee on health. Dressed in jeans, a grey button-down shirt and a navy blazer,
Oliver walked in and plunked down a cardboard box full of Coke, Pepsi and
Gatorade. He’d devised his own labels showing the number of teaspoons of sugar
in each - as many as 14 - arguing it was the only way people could understand
how much they consume.
School food
“I don’t want business being put before child health -
over my dead body,’’ Oliver told the assembled lawmakers. “I don’t care that I
am going to get a rattling by industry. I was born in the industry. I was born
in a pub. Industry can’t run this country.”
Oliver, who left school at 16 and learned how to cook in
his parents’ pub, isn’t a policy wonk, but he made a name for himself by
pushing for healthier school lunches. He promoted the campaign through
documentaries called “Jamie’s School Dinners” in 2005, charting his efforts to
get children to eat things like salad and stop kitchens from serving meals such
as Turkey Twizzlers - spiral strips of processed meat.
Even for fans of his school-lunch crusade, Oliver’s tax
push was labelled by Conservative politicians and industry observers as a step
toward a nanny state. Oliver unfairly singles out sugary drinks instead of
looking at the need for balanced diets, industry lobbyists argue.
“As a parent, I would say Jamie Oliver deserves a fair bit
of credit for his efforts over the years,’’ said Partington, the British Soft
Drinks Association chief, in October 2015. “I just think on this particular
issue he’s got it slightly wrong. He’s been led by the health lobby to focus on
this one ingredient and one product category.”
Fearing he was losing the fight, Oliver used his
celebrity profile to warn the government he wasn’t going away. In a February
2016 TV interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, he threatened to
“go ninja” and vowed he’d try to push Cameron out of office if he didn’t go
ahead with a sugar tax, urging him to act “as a parent, not a politician.”
Blue scooter
When Osborne announced the tax in March, Oliver was as
surprised as anyone. He hopped on his blue Velocifero scooter, zipped across
the River Thames to stand before the Houses of Parliament and post a Facebook
Live video to his 6 million followers. Cameron and Osborne declined to comment.
While May has pledged to push the tax through Parliament,
Oliver remains disappointed that she backed away from Cameron’s and Osborne’s
broader anti-obesity plan, which included reining in advertising and mandating
sugar reductions in food products. At a Facebook Live event in October, he
urged supporters to send May a message on social media to be bolder, using the
hashtag #TellTheresa.
“I think she doesn’t get it,” Oliver said about May’s
plan to tackle childhood obesity. “I feel let down.”
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