Donuts, Pizza and First Principles Thinking

21 Jun

The lunch bell rings. We have to wait for the teacher to dismiss us from class. This isn’t America where the kids pack up and leave once the bell rings. I look around and we’re all on the edge of our seats. It’s our day today and there isn’t a second to spare. Seconds cost you.

I’m not the fastest in the class that’s for sure. I haven’t yet had my teenage growth spurt when you can eat an impossible amount of food and still seem to keep a thin waistline. After an age, probably ten seconds, the teacher lets us go. ‘Slowly!’ They shout at our backs as we sprint away. Out through the double doors into the Harry Potter style quadrangle where we immediately slow down to a speedwalk. Breaking this speed limit would mean serious consequences – automatic demotion to the back of the queue by the teacher on duty.

We speedwalk past the back of the queue, past the older kids and join the other eleven-year-olds. It’s our day.

As soon as the cooks open the canteen doors, we get to be the first group in. This means first choice. In a boy’s high school, going last means bad choices. Maybe there will be a soggy corner of a pizza left. Possibly some undercooked potato squares. God forbid, maybe one of those ghastly fruit bags that McDonald’s had introduced to their menu two years earlier to make their nutritious food ‘healthier’. We’re buzzing though. Today, despite our diminutive size, we get to go in first.

The doors open. Heaven.

Nutella filled donuts. Fresh pizza. French fries. The perfect breaktime for a young boy. My classmates and I choose our spoils, pay for it with our pre-loaded cards and head to the playground to inhale our treats.

Watching a legend on Netflix’s Chef’s Table Legends

At the same time my friends and I were chasing donuts, Jamie Oliver was taking a stand. He was using his platform as a young popular British chef to change what we ate at schools.

As a young adult he moved to London and landed a job at the ‘coolest restaurant in town’, The River Cafe. On one of his few days off he got a call from the kitchen, asking him to come in and cover for someone who was sick. Arriving at the restaurant he found out a camera crew would be filming that day in the kitchen. The 24-year-old Jamie was cooking a complicated pasta dish, rotolo.

Throughout service they “kept asking annoying questions” and he just answered with his usual energy. When the show aired on the BBC the phone calls from producers came asking him to make a TV show to get young men back in the kitchen.

A first principles fish pie

His idea was to “strip down restaurant food to the bare essentials” – The Naked Chef was born. Traditionally, TV cooking shows were always about mums cooking. He had to show cooking “wasn’t for girls but could get you girls.” It wasn’t cool to be in the kitchen. Why would a young guy want to emulate an old French moustachioed man or his mother?

He approached the problem from first principles.

First principles thinking means stripping away all assumptions about how something should be done and asking: What are we actually trying to achieve?

His question from first principles was: what do people hate about cooking? “Long shopping lists? That’s a blocker. Long cooking times? You’ve gotta be able to justify that. Or that’s a blocker. Multiple pans for washing up? That’s a blocker.”

The traditional fish pie involved poached fish. Making a bechamel sauce with flour, butter, roux. Another pan with infused milk. “Three pans already and we haven’t even started yet.” So much mess to make such a humble dish. Rather than cooking a fish pie in the traditional way, he thought of the most effective way. Take one tray, chop up a fresh fish. Add crème fraiche, lemon juice and herbs. Top with mashed potato. Done.

Jamie didn't ask “how can I make a better traditional fish pie?” He asked, “what's the simplest way to combine fish, potato, and cream into something delicious?” It got more young men into the kitchen.

The same thing happened when he took on the challenge of removing the donuts and chips from our British schools. Jamie went into a school to cook, educate and change minds. He reminisces during the Netflix show, “that’s where I went from being a TV chef to standing for something.”

Alongside the standard school junk, he served meals that were slightly more expensive but significantly more healthy. At the end of lunch, the bins were full. Full of Jamie’s food. He was in his late twenties and being derided by school kids and kitchen staff.

“It was the most miserable 18 months of my life.”

Whilst we were stuffing our faces with donuts, pizza and chips, Jamie was lying in bed at night, his head spinning with the first principles question:

“Why won’t they fucking eat it?”

He broke the problem down into the fundamentals. There was nothing wrong with the taste. The real problem: it wasn’t cool to eat healthily. Think back to the marketing campaigns of the early 2000s. Remember cowboy Beckham drinking Pepsi as he took a penalty? How about Beyoncé, Britney and Pink dressed as gladiators drinking the same sugary drink?

This was the age of fun crazy marketing campaigns to get kids to drink Sunny D and eat sugary cereals. It’s insane, of course Beckham and Beyoncé weren’t drinking Pepsi, but we still bought into the marketing.

Jamie had to counter the huge advertising budgets of the food companies and start from grassroots – in the schools. He put on food events for the kids, repeatedly sharing with them that David Beckham really eats chicken, not Pepsi. Interestingly, research shows it takes 10-15 times for a kid to try something before they like it – and many kids had simply been eating junk due to the lack of choice.

Week after week the bins got less full.

When the first program came out, a magic spell was cast and public opinion shifted. Within two weeks and just shy of his 30th birthday he met Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. “My team wants to film the last episode of this series: you have three options. Do nothing. Use a band aid. Or create wholesale change. Communities and countries are defined by how they treat their most vulnerable. It’s your legacy.” Jamie said to the Prime Minister.

The government added £280m to the budget for ingredients and training. Bans on unhealthy food came into place two years later. Wholesale change.

Lead with passion, curiosity and first principles thinking

Finishing this episode of Chef’s Table Legends, Liv and I were both moved by how much, at such a young age, Jamie did for all of us in the UK. He did all of this without us, the primary beneficiaries, even knowing about it. He did it without the plaudits and with all the backlash that comes from standing up for something – and he did it with passion, curiosity and first principles thinking, all before he was thirty.

One of my strongest food memories is mum saying to me, “if you cook dinner, you can buy any ingredients you want.” It was never world class, but our parents never told us, it was always “thank you for cooking.” I’ll never forget being so happy I could buy some scallops and pancetta. In its own small way, this was first principles thinking.

We want our children to cook more. People do things when they have agency. Agency means choice. Therefore, let them cook what they want.

Whether through a ripple or serendipity – Jamie got another young guy into the kitchen, a place I love being. That’s what happens when you approach problems through first principles, you create a wave of change and opportunity for others. If you want to change something, start by asking a better question. Jamie did it with a fish pie. You can do it with anything. What outcome are you chasing? What’s the most effective way to get there?