All The Times Jamie Oliver Made Everyone Angry

Being a celebrity chef isn't all about the cooking, although that's certainly a huge part of it. You also need to have a big personality, light up the television, and get everyone's attention. You want people to listen to what you have to say, after all, and part of getting your message across is getting people to respect you, your opinions, and your abilities. 

For some inexplicable reason, Jamie Oliver seems to have missed the memo. 

He shot to fame and stardom after the debut of his first show, The Naked Chef, on BBC 2 way back in 1999. The name alone got your attention, right? By the time you tuned in and he explained the "naked" referred to his food and cooking style, not actually him, you were probably already hooked. Fans attribute his success to his super-friendly personality, but sometimes, that familiarity has led him to go just a little too far. 

Oliver has a shocking track record of making people very, very angry, and often the anger is for good reason. You know, like the time some of his unfounded comments cost hundreds of jobs? Yea, that happened. Sometimes, the only thing left to ask is, "Why on earth did you think this was a good idea?" These are the time Jamie Oliver has made way more enemies than friends. 

Jamie Oliver and his wife, Jools, have a fairly large brood of children, and in 2016 he made some comments that made it clear he believed his fatherhood made him qualified to tell the women of the world just why they needed to start breastfeeding their babies. 

He remarked (via Good Housekeeping), "If you breastfeed for more than six months, women are 50 percent less likely to get breast cancer. When do you ever hear that? Never. It's easy, it's more convenient, it's more nutritious, it's better, it's free."

While some were quick to point out that more breastfeeding mothers need to be given proper resources, others condemned the fact that he called it "easy."

For many women, it's not a choice they can make. There's a lot of reasons women decide not to breastfeed, and for some, it's just physically impossible. Victoria Young wrote in The Telegraph about not just the difficulties she had, but the guilt and feelings of inadequacy that were devastating to her — and why Oliver needed to keep his mouth shut on the subject. Women all over called Jamie Oliver out because of his comments, which were exactly the type that made countless women feel bad about something they couldn't help.

We all know where meat comes from, but that doesn't mean we want to see something go from a living, breathing creature to our plate... especially if it happens badly, and well before most kids are in bed. 

On British television, the watershed is 9 p.m. — that's the time channels can start showing programming that's a little more adult. Before the watershed, there's no graphic violence, offensive language... you get the idea. That's when the kids are watching, after all, and in 2005, Jamie Oliver brought some graphic, pre-watershed violence to the television. 

It was an episode of Jamie's Great Escape, which showed him slitting the throat of a still-conscious lamb. He remarked (via the Evening Standard), "A chef who has cooked 2,000 sheep should kill at least one, otherwise, you're a fake."

It doesn't matter how legit that idea is, there was another big problem with the scene. Not only did it air at 8:30 p.m., but animal rights campaigners had a huge problem with the fact the lamb was very clearly conscious and aware of what was happening. Advocates for Animals called it a "brutal slaughter [with] no compassion or respect for the animal", while Mediawatch pointed out the likelihood that children had been watching.

You've heard of "pink slime," right? Did you know you can thank Jamie Oliver for coining the phrase? That's according to a $1.2 billion lawsuit filed against ABC for airing the episode of Food Revolution where he made the comments. 

The lawsuit was filed by Beef Products, Inc., a processing firm in South Dakota who had their products targeted and condemned as being filled with ammonia as part of the process. It had catastrophic consequences for the company — stores started dropping their products, and that led to an 80 percent drop in sales. Three of their four plants were closed, and 700 people lost their jobs. 

And according to The Independent, a huge part of the problem was Oliver's claims that the meat was "not fit for human consumption," and full of bacteria like E. coli. They also weren't happy with his demonstration of how meat was processed — using a washing machine and household ammonia. All of that, the company said was grossly misleading. 

Surprisingly, Oliver wasn't even named on the lawsuit, which Business Insider says ABC and Disney paid $177 million to settle.

In 2013, Jamie Oliver was kicking off a new show called Save With Jamie. That's all well and good, but in the run-up to the show he made some shockingly tone-deaf statements about poverty... while, critics were quick to point out, enjoying having a net worth of millions and millions... and millions. 

Among the comments that raised particular ire was his condemnation of a family struggling to make ends meet, who were eating "chips and cheese out of Styrofoam containers, and behind them is a massive TV," leading Oliver to suggest they didn't have their priorities right.

Jack Monroe from The Independent called the comments "not only out of touch but support[ive] of dangerous and damaging myths," but it didn't stop there. 

Oliver went on to lament how he couldn't transport Britain's poor to the Mediterranean, where he claimed even the poorest people ate really, really well. He sang the praises of mussels and pasta and fresh tomatoes, while ignoring the fact that in 2010, more than 100,000 of Barcelona's entire population were using food banks for even the basics — and that's a percentage three times higher than Britain saw at the time Oliver was talking. The New Statesman said that many couldn't even afford to cook what they'd been given, replying on "social dining rooms" to serve them their hot meals after their gas and electricity were cut off. 

They warned, "poverty isn't picturesque by the Mediterranean either."

When Jamie Oliver took a stand against the way in which many commercially sold chickens have historically been raised, he made it clear he was really against it. According to The Independent, he declared "the conditions under which standard eggs and chickens are reared are morally wrong," and called on viewers to change the way they shop to put pressure on the industry to be more responsible. 

Where's the problem? That came when it was revealed he had signed a multi-million-dollar deal with the massive UK supermarket giant Sainsbury's. Animal Aid put it this way: "If he's going to lecture the public he needs first to stop profiting from animal exploitation."

While Sainsbury's confirmed they had plans to move to conform to food standards put forward by the RSPCA by mid-year, they also said that only applied to eggs, and they had no such plans in place regarding the 90 million chickens they sold annually. 

Later that same year, Sainsbury's announced (via The Telegraph) that they were expanding their animal welfare programs to cover chickens, too — which Oliver partially took credit for.

In 2018, the UK kicked off a campaign to try to lower the amount of sugar in their citizens' diets. The so-called sugar tax would raise the price of soft drinks, and it goes without saying that Jamie Oliver was one of the campaign's staunchest supporters. Not long after the price hike kicked in, The Telegraph reported he was already campaigning for extending the products covered to include other high-sugar foods, but way back when he started celebrating his war on sugar — back in 2016 — people were quick to point out that he really should practice what he preached. 

A quick look at the recipes on his website showed an almost insane amount of sugar, right in plain sight. Many of his drinks called for tablespoons of sugar per drink, his "Children's Party Cake" contained three times the recommended amount of daily sugar per slice, there was a "healthy" breakfast that had more sugar than a bowl of Frosties, and he had a gammon ham he advised cooking in four liters of cola. 

Do you think people started finding high-sugar recipes and posting the results on social media? You bet they did!