Those in state education at the time will likely remember 50p plates of chips being replaced by bowls of tomato pasta, while vending machines full of chocolate and fizzy drinks were removed from squeaky-floored corridors. “I think they spent about £240m to try to improve things in schools.” “It was quite quickly that the Blair government threw some money at it,” said Green. Then Prime Minister Tony Blair met the star chef in the garden at Number 10 and admitted things needed to change. A healthier option The new branding paints a healthier picture (Photo: inews)Īll this work was part of a broader strategy. Twizzlers soon disappeared from school canteens and, subsequently, supermarket shelves. Such dramatisation prompted revulsion and disgust. At one point, in seeking to demonstrate the popular foodstuff’s failings, he graphically pulped turkey meat in a blender before shaping it into tell-tale, elongated pig tails. “The new Twizzlers have only a third of the fat level of the average pork sausage, yet you don’t hear Jamie Oliver telling people not to eat sausages.”ĭespite resistance, Oliver was successful. “Turkey is the least fatty of all meats,” he said. There was a lot of shaped processed meat back then,” he admitted. It became the poster food, but it could’ve been anything. The Twizzler was more a metaphor for the general shit that was served. We never heard from Bernard Matthews directly, but we did try to contact them. “Then the programme came out and people started getting a bit unhappy. “For about a year and a half while he was making the programme, we were operating under the radar – no-one really knew what we doing other than the Government,” said Peter Berry, Oliver’s publicist for 14 years who worked for him at the time. Calls to discontinue the Turkey Twizzler was the nanny state intervening where it wasn’t wanted, others claimed. While many parents supported Oliver, others felt he was patronising – another young middle-class chef misunderstanding limited resources. There was, before Oliver, an apparent indifference in school bodies and local authorities when considering the matter of quality.Ī 2005 relic Original tomato and chilli cheese Twizzlers (Photo: inews)Īlthough Oliver appeared to have a genuine desire to see young people eating healthier meals, citing the increase in childhood obesity levels, there was a significant backlash, and the nation was divided. Two of the country’s biggest school catering firms, Scolarest and Sodexo, distributed them, while family packs were available in leading supermarkets. Twizzlers were high in saturated fat, covered in a chemically enhanced crispy coating full of salt and sugar, and were fed to thousands of pupils every year. But the tangly curls of glistening grey meat became the obvious pin-up for Oliver’s campaign. It wasn’t only Turkey Twizzlers – the likes of cheap burgers and slices of American-style pizza were commonplace in Britain’s state school system in 2005. Oliver targeted the product, manufactured by the Norfolk-based turkey giant Bernard Matthews, on his Channel 4 show Jamie’s School Dinners. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was intent on improving the quality of food served to school children and had ensured the spiralised strips of processed meat were an issue of national concern. Fifteen years ago, the Turkey Twizzler was the most talked about food in Britain.
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