Off Air... with Jane and Fi - It's a strange time of year isn't it

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Ready for a second helping of the very best of 'Off air with Jane and Fi'? Today, the author and How to Fail podcast host Elizabeth Day joins them in the studio to talk about friendship, writing for different audiences, and what happened when she interviewed Liz Truss.Plus, the chef and campaigner Jamie Oliver talks about his new book, how families can continue to cook good food during the current cost of living crisis, and stopping the government U-turn on health eating for children.If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Producers: Kate Lee, Emma Sherry, Eve SalusburyTimes Radio Producer: Rosie CutlerPodcast Executive Producer: Ben Mitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

VoiceOver describes what's happening on your iPhone screen. VoiceOver on. Settings. So you can navigate it just by listening. Books. Contacts. Calendar. Double tap to open. Breakfast with Anna from 10 to 11. And get on with your day. Accessibility. There's more to iPhone. Yes, hello and welcome.

It's a strange time of year, isn't it? But we're here regardless. I'm Jane Garvey. And I'm Fee Glover. And at the moment, we're looking back at some of our favourite moments from our relatively new late afternoon show here on Times Radio, which goes out, Fee. It goes out Monday to Thursday between three and five. So if that's when your afternoon is being a bit late,

that's when you can tune in to us. We'll be there. So far this week, you'll have heard our conversations with Titan of Comedy, Michael Palin. we've had the supersonic astronaut Tim Peake amongst many others. First though here's our conversation with the journalist and writer Elizabeth Day. Watching Liz Trust yesterday, Fi and I felt something approaching sympathy and I don't think sympathy is great

if you start to feel it for a politician certainly not for a leader of a free country when she was sitting on the green leather in the House of Commons when she came into that chamber her body language could not have been more different to the kind of rambunctious bravura Liz Truss that we'd seen a couple of days before. And she just looked haunted. She

really did look terrible. Is that a woman who's dealing well with a massive failure? I would say no. I think that there's a lot going on here. I think that the broader failure is one of our political system, which we can get into another time. But that is a failure in the sense that she got elected to a role that arguably she wasn't ready for. And also that our system is so combative rather than collaborative. So even when you do something so disastrous, you have to front it out. There's this sense that you have to front it out and you can't possibly admit to having made mistakes. And even when she did offer a sort of half-hearted apology yesterday in a TV interview, I felt that it was quite a sort of passively expressed apology. It was sort of, I objectively feel one could be sorry if someone else had made mistakes.

It was sort of that tenor. And I think the first step to dealing with failure and to learning from it is to have self-awareness of what's gone wrong. Are we still at a stage where we expect more from women in roles like that? Boris Johnson, I can't remember, did he ever say sorry? I think you're totally right that we do expect more from women. And it's a much harder battle to win. Because if you say sorry too much, then you might be accused of being overly emotive. And you're right that Boris Johnson just had this

immense bravado that some people bizarrely found appealing. But he did say sorry, didn't he? He offered one apology during Partygate at the beginning that was much criticised because I think people didn't feel it had authenticity behind it. And then another apology where people noted a proper sense of contrition. So two sorries, he said. Quite far down the road, I think. But he has said sorry.

He was also famously sent to Liverpool to say sorry, wasn't he? Which I'm not sure, back in in the day was an effective apology. I'm not sure that any of us in that city were all that accepted ever entirely come to terms with him but anyway. I've actually interviewed Liz Truss twice once way back when she was I think she was a backbencher but she was not one of the new influx of Tory MPs. And I interviewed her for the Observer left-leaning newspaper. And I really liked her. And she seemed quite fizzy and interesting. And then the second time I interviewed her was when she was being touted as a successor to Theresa May.

Remember Theresa May? Well, some people say she might be making a comeback. Stand by for more later. Carry on. It says a lot that I feel relieved at that prospect. But I interviewed her the second time when she was being touted as a possible prime ministerial contender the first time around. And I found it harder to warm to her, not because she was in any way unpleasant,

but because she lacked a fundamental quality that makes me warm to people, which is introspection. And I think in order to be self-aware, you need to have introspection. And I don't know whether she was just very good at pretending she didn't have it for the purposes of a newspaper interview. But I remember there was a couple of things I asked her when the last time she cried was classic journalist question. She said, oh, probably a film or something. And then she told me the story of how she met her husband and they went ice skating together and uh she fell over and i went gushily oh you fell at his feet and she said yes i've always

enjoyed winter sports and it was quite hard to get a chink of human out of her i'm with liz here i think you were just trying to inject a saccharine note of journo-pap. And she just wasn't going for it. A saccharine note of journo-pap. Is that your second album? We're in conversation with our big guest of the afternoon, Elizabeth Day, podcaster, novelist and writer of nonfiction. And you're going to write something next year.

You're writing it now about friendship. Yes. What inspired this? This is nonfiction. It's nonfiction. First of all, I love being called a big guest. Thank you very much. I'm going to put that in my Twitter bio.

You're huge. It's nonfiction and it's a book called Friendaholic, Confessions of a Friendship Addict. And it's about my journey through friendship and what prompted it was the pandemic, to be fair. And I think actually a lot of people underwent re-evaluations of their friendships during that time because overnight our diaries cleared out. And either we felt extremely lonely or we felt the blessed relief of having a few evenings in. where I'd gone wrong with friendships and how I'd said yes to too many encounters that should have just stopped at being friendly rather than making them into bona fide friends and then how

sometimes you get overwhelmed there's a saturation point that comes from more and more connections and because friendship isn't something that socially we're allowed to fail at it's seen as a failure if a friendship ends whereas romantic romantic relationships, part and parcel of that is that you'll probably have a few before you find someone that you want to settle down with. And so I realised that there wasn't a language to express some of the things that I was feeling and that I knew a lot of my closest friends were also feeling. And Friendaholic is an attempt to explore my addiction to friendship and also to provide a language of it. Okay, do you think you are a good friend? I think I'm a good friend in certain respects. And this is something that I've had to be really clear eyed and honest about in the book. I think I'm a bad

friend in the sense that I'm extremely conflict avoidant. I care too much what other people might think of me. And that makes me cowardly. And so sometimes I haven't faced up to the ends of friendships and I haven't said in black and white or I haven't spoken to someone about why I feel our friendship is ending. And I have just fallen out of their lives, which might be called ghosting. And I feel really bad about that. But I think part of the reason that is the case

is because there is a lack of vocabulary. And because we all feel ashamed if a friendship has in some way gone awry. And what I realised during the writing of the book is that friendships are not failures just because they end. They can have an incredibly meaningful impact on your life forever, even if they're not an active daily part of it. It's a bit like volcanoes. Volcanoes can be dormant, but they completely shape the landscape around them. And so I think I'm a good friend in that respect, in that I've realised that and I think of my former friends with love. And I think I am relatively funny. I mean, maybe you two could disabuse me of that notion. Just go on.

And I'm present. Like, if you need me, I will be there. Yes, I was going to say, that's the ultimate test, isn't it? I mean, I honestly think I have, there are people I know I could ring at three o'clock in the morning. And actually, isn't that, what do you, what would you regard as the biggest test of a friendship? Well, so I've got this test, which i inherited actually from somebody else which is the m4 friend would you when you're driving on your way to a really lovely weekend on the m4 if you got a phone call from somebody would you just turn around and go back to help them would you take the call in the first place and would you ruin your own weekend if it was safe to take it i would yeah okay i mean obviously not a u-turn on the M4 using the necessary slip roads, etc. But it's that kind of thing, isn't it?

To be able to know that you would interrupt your own life, whatever you're doing, to go and help somebody else out and stay with them until they are OK. And I sometimes think as women and men who are listening can really correct me about this but I think we have such an expectation of those kind of friendships and finding lots of them that sometimes we're not looking we're not we're not hard enough with ourselves to kind of go actually I can only have two of those people across a whole lifetime I can't expect everybody to become that or for me to become that to them I don't know whether men do the same thing. I think we collect friendship in a different way. Well, I think that goes into that notion of shame and failure because women,

and this is a huge generalisation and therefore I'm sure inaccurate, but women generally speaking are meant to be friendly. They're meant to be pleasant and pliable and nice. And we're meant to be able to foster that sort of small talk and that communication at the school gates. And therefore, it feels humiliating and shameful if we don't carry on friendships lifelong. And you're totally right that that's completely impractical.

And there's a very famous scientist in this field called robin dunbar who i'm sure you've heard of who developed dunbar's number which is about how many we'll certainly pretend we've heard of i'll be honest and say no but he said this thing he developed his theory and evolved it somewhat he developed something called friendship layers and in your innermost layer you can have five people who are like the m4 people. It's a very privileged road to choose. There are other motorways do exist, but you have five of them. And if you fall in love

and you have a long-term romantic relationship or you have children, that will cost you two of those other relationships, which I thought was fascinating. And it's just at the end of the day, it's just about how much time we actually have and time is a finite resource. And that's Yeah, the other thing that I realized about friendship is that we all have different ways of measuring it. So the M4 test is a great one. For me, my primary friendship metric is generosity of spirit. If someone thinks of me

well, even if I don't get in touch with them all the time, even if I'm terrible on the phone, if they're thinking of me well, and they know that I'm thinking of them well, that for me is true friendship. And we can pick up where we left off. Whereas some people really need the kind of face to face contact. And their metric of friendship is time. So it's really on some it will be shared hobbies and book club. So it's really a question of finding out what your metric is. Can we talk a little bit about the book you're writing for young people? I'm sure you have already written it. This is Philosophy for Teens. Is this out now or is that the new year as well?

That's coming out in January. January, a time when we all turn over a new leaf. Well, exactly. We shouldn't feel the pressure of that. A time when we have a lot of book tokens. That's also true. I don't think the book token really exists anymore does it anyway um I was just thinking how I often feel how grateful I am not to be 14 frankly oh me too um presumably is that is that where you come from in terms of

absolutely toughness of it yeah so philosophy is a book that I wrote for adults which was a distillation of seven failure principles that I came up with from having done four years now of the how to fail podcast and it's a reworking of that specifically for the teenage market, because I have three teenage stepchildren. And so I get a bird's eye view on how monumentally difficult it is to be an adolescent in today's society. Because not only are they the most tested generation we've ever had in terms of exams, But there is the inordinate pressure of peer groups on social media, and feeling like you have to be living your best life, and comparing yourself to gym girls or boys on TikTok. That's a huge amount that I never had

to deal with. And I'm so grateful for. And so really, this is meant to be an empowering, warm and practical guide as to how failures don't have to define you but they can actually just be useful data acquisition for the future about who you really are right and you don't feel you shouldn't feel pressure to have this i mean instagram has its uses i mean i've bought a number of pairs of elasticated trousers that have been offered to me via that the trousers i'm wearing now were advertised to me on instagram and they are elasticated ways elizabeth i would not have known but thank you but it's idea even i i mean i'm a reasonably intelligent mature woman i get so exercised by the great time everybody else appears to be having on instagram and then i'll

speak to the same person the next day and it turns out their holiday was rubbish yeah and they hadn't spoken to their husband for three days of it but don't you think it's really interesting what Elizabeth's done with the how to fail podcast because it's put another horse in the race hasn't it because we know that we've got all of that perfection search going on and we're really hard on ourselves when we look at all of that but your podcast people love because it's the flip side of that. So we are managing to, you know, to ride different horses. It's not all going to hell in a handcart.

You just have to choose something different. We are capable of making that choice. Definitely. And I think the important thing to remember when you're scrolling through social media is that you are comparing your insides to everyone else's outsides. So you, we know what neurotic messes we are inside our own messy heads,

but we can't possibly fathom that that person posting about her yoga retreat in Ibiza is also feeling like that because we only have her outside projection to go on. And that's been a very useful thing for me to remember as well, plus the airplane mode function on your phone yeah just switch it on oh it hadn't occurred to me you can put that on anytime any time change such a rule follower i thought you could only put it on on airplanes you're absolutely joking me no i'm not are you joking what jane that's the sweetest what a great title for a book what did you think was going to happen if you put it on during the day?

The airplane mode police would come and arrest you. Yes, I thought they would. I thought it was like a thing that could only be applied. So what have you been using when you just don't want your phone to ring? This explains why my phone pings all night because I've got a student getting into an Uber at ten to four. Jane, I'm not surprised you're tired. No, this is my gift to you. That's an extraordinary revelation. Well, I've learned something today.

This is going to make headlines. VoiceOver describes what's happening on your iPhone screen. VoiceOver on. Settings. So you can navigate it just by listening. Books. Contacts. Calendar. Double tap to open. Breakfast with Anna from 10 to 11. And get on with your day.

Accessibility. There's more to iPhone. Welcome to the best of Jane and Fi, where we're mulling over some of afternoon joining us from the cheltenham literature festival which might immediately alert you to the fact that he's got a book out it's called one and it's all about how to cook using just one pot or tray or dish we have more than one topic to discuss though and i apologise for that link. It is only Monday. His recent Eaton Mess campaign, the pressures on the restaurant trade, what he calls the bad divorce of Brexit, the ups and downs of fame and fortune, and possibly being part of the anti-growth coalition, the Prime Minister Liz Truss seemed

to suggest he might be when she took down those campaigning against the buy one, get one free deals in her speech to the Tory party conference last week. Jamie has been vociferous opponent on the government's U-turn on its anti-obesity strategy, which had included a curb on unhealthy bog-offs. More of all of that in the next half an hour. But hello, Jamie. Morning. Afternoon. Afternoon. You've done so many interviews, you don't know who you are.

I was listening to your show, kind of engrossed in what i'm going to talk about that's very kind of you jamie so the idea behind one i mean i almost feel a fool for asking you to explain it because it's a kind of self-explanatory title but you tell us in your own words oh it's pretty simple i mean i tried to uh look at the way that people are shopping, consuming, living, the things they're juggling, and try and write my most user-friendly cookbook. So ultimately it's one, mainly not just because of the one cooking vessel, a pan, but our hatred of washing up, keeping the ingredients low, you know, sort of quick preparations,

and just trying really to create a cookbook that is relevant to now. And, you know, contrary to what maybe lots of people think, things change quite a lot quite quickly. So, you know, the way we're shopping and living has really changed as well since it's since Covid. So I'm just trying to stay useful, I guess this is the way i'm trying to do it would you agree that there's something just really weird going on in the world of food at the moment where there's an enormous gap between the kind of the the top which is the instagrammable food with the gold leaf and maybe even the kimchi and the kombucha and the 75 000 pound burgers or whatever it is and then then the real, real hard need to understand

how you can make a shopping basket last a whole week to feed a family. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think in any trade, whether it's art or music, there's always extremes. And to a degree, social media allows that to sort of search and track more. And people follow people for different reasons of course but um i mean ultimately um we are animals of habit our basket doesn't really change much about four percent every week um we pretty much buy the same thing this week as we did a month ago in the month

before that so um what we say and what we do are very different things and um the only truth actually in the whole food industry is basket data. So in a weird sort of way, for me, when I'm writing this kind of book, because, you know, obviously different books do different things, but I try to write recipes that had the ingredients that you normally buy most of the time anyway. So I'm just trying to constantly take away reasons to not cook and just pick up the phone and get a takeaway. I'm just trying to constantly take away reasons to not cook and just pick up the phone and get a takeaway.

So you'll know all of the criticism that has been thrown at you in the past. Did you feel that when Liz Truss made that comment at the Tory party conference, she was taking a direct pop at you with the buy one, get one freeze? Not really, no. I think I think the newspaper decided to put me in there to make it a little bit more of a conversation piece but i think um i think liz's strategy is to sort of take away you know anything that you know involves when you're trying to progress public health and and look at the masses and try and um they as they would call level up it involves lots of different specific things that might help people and it involves having to fight the food industry and lobbyists um so i think she doesn't want any stress of that at the moment because that's like too much work so um you know i think that's um that's pretty much why it was brought up but i mean look i've been doing it a long time

so i'm kind of used to you know i think it's the seventh prime minister that I've worked through, 13th head of education. So I think I have to take a long view at it. And she didn't mention me specifically. But, you know, for myself and a lot of the, I guess, charities and NGOs that fight for public health, You know, we stand together always. But it's a funny time right now. And obviously, you have to react to what is relevant and useful now. And certainly, that's cost of living and the cost of ingredients. And for sure, cooking can definitely help you if you can cook

and if you have access to cook. So, you know, never in my career have we ever. I've always costed recipes for the last maybe 10 years just to make sure the books are roughly within the sort of, you know, a mixture of all the prices that look normal. But now we're costing energy 12 pence for this, 10 pence for that, 5 pence for that. So I never thought I'd ever be doing that. So that's just a showing of the times, I guess. Is there ever an argument, though, Jamie, for just pressing pause on something like the buy one, get one free, which I know you're only critical of that when it's unhealthy food.

But if you are a mum or a dad who is really, really struggling to make ends meet, you want to buy something that your kids are just going to eat. You haven't got the luxury of trying to get them to eat broccoli three times or whatever it is you just need them to have a full stomach don't you so if you're talking about just putting these things off while we get through a crisis point very very possibly it was never both the press and and and the businesses didn't like that one even though the science and the data proved that they made you spend more, eat more and waste more. But all I would say to you is, do you want to have a pizza for 60 pence or two for one pound 50? Yeah, that's that's it's a mechanic.

So look, it's not it's not me that's inventing. It's a very specific mechanic that people don't want to understand. So what people want is cheaper food, not cheaper deals, making you want to... That's the point of it. So, I mean, look, so much so that the biggest supermarket in the country,

Tesco, haven't been doing this mechanic for quite some time now. And as they represent the people, that's probably because they have it in the interest of the people to have better prices on the whole, not sort of specific mechanics

that are being shown to lead people the wrong direction and make them ultimately uh you know less healthy less well off and waste more so i think it's just something that the media has struggled to articulate because it's not a one-liner do you you think, Jamie, that in order to improve public health, someone, and the Prime Minister has said she is prepared to be unpopular, but she doesn't want to be unpopular on this front, someone has got to say uncomfortable things about the way perhaps too many of us eat, what we eat, the amount we eat.

And that's kind of what you've been trying to do, isn't it? Yeah, no, I think for myself myself personally when i did school dinners campaign yeah um uh you cannot do that job properly and not be emotionally moved by the free school lunch kids and what that represents and um currently there are 800 000 kids in this country between the free school lunch kids and um universal credit so just to give you some context on that to get a free school lunch in Britain today your family has to earn per household just over less than seven grand right annually that's all so that's how hard up they are that's how vulnerable they are and there's an 800,000 kid child gap between that and universal and universal credit and and we've known for a long time and

been talking about and can campaigning for a long time i'm talking about five years since its creation um that this is an unfair gap and and and i guess if if if you spoke to any teacher or any uh lunch lady or manager um this is where you're starting to hear narrative now about kids coming to school starving it's always happened in in pockets and and for any democracy that any of us could respect like we always want to catch the most vulnerable so free lunches do that but it's not enough it's not wide enough and and and certainly now more than ever with everything that's going on that's what we're campaigning for currently there is no question in your mind that some people need proper clear messages about how to cook and what to cook look if we're talking about truth in food this is something that look the biggest the biggest

industry on the planet is food uh it's it's it's it's pretty tough out there the con you know just getting truth you know whether it's you know we haven't we know, just getting truth, you know, whether it's, you know, we haven't even agreed on color-coded front-of-pack labeling to help busy parents yet. Why? Because they don't want you to know. You know, if you look at,

I mean, even if you look at, say, the sugary drinks tax, you know, the company's made more money by reformulating it. It's the biggest sugar reformulation ever in global history. And what it did was not just get them to reformulate their products, but widen their portfolio, which in turn gave the public more choice, which in turn made their businesses more sustainable, which in

turn made them more profitable. So this narrative that doing good is not good business is actually incorrect and, from what I can gather, wrong. So what we need to do as a nation and as a government is make sure the people that are geeky and clever and care about public health and communications and labeling and truth and ingredients and things that should be banned because they're toxic, from pesticides to additives, you know, you want that to happen. You want your child to be in the presence of that nation. What you don't want is a passive government that keep rattling on about nanny states

when kids need a good nanny in their life. And when you go up in an aeroplane and you're up there at 36,000 feet, you want regulations and controls in place to make sure the rivets don't pop and you don't fall out the sky. And it's exactly the same with the three meals you have a day. Thank you for answering all our political questions, Jamie.

I think both Jane and I can hear in your voice a sense of real fed-upness. I don't know whether that's a technical term. Well, look, it's just... Is it Cheltenham? I'm at Cheltenham doing the Literary Festival. I haven't been here for about a decade. It's all very lovely down here. And I've done my gig.

And look, from one side, part of my job my gig and and um and look like from one side i'm part of my job is jazz hands and cooking and chopping chat shows and but i think over the you know i the way i look at my job is i work for the public and you know buying a cookbook which is essentially my living it's not a like it's not a view it's like a proper vote you even have to pay for it and that responsibility of of talk my i mean a lot of the things i've campaigned for over the years isn't things that i've necessarily come up with or even driven it's the public that have asked me to talk about the things that they're worried about and they care about so it's an incredible ball and chain that i have to wear um and i do

take it seriously i love it and it sort of is the best and worst thing that i do but not yet have we ever seen a government that has put child not yet have we ever seen a government that has put child health when have you ever seen a government put child health first on any election and um so it for me i'm just one of many charities and ngos around the country that spend hours every week looking at public health data and spend hours looking at how um you know working with you know people like trestle trust and food banks and and and looking at how, you know, working with people like Trestle Trust and food banks and looking at what do people need and how bad is bad. So I think we're all quite aware by now that things are quite bad,

but you do want a government that takes this thing seriously. Shall we do some of the jazz hand stuff? Jazz away. It's turned out to be quite a bright, sunshiny day here in London town, but it was very gloomy this morning, Jamie. Yes, it was. And I was flicking through your recipe book and I came upon Pick Me Up Chili Fried Eggs, which I can make according to you. Trust you.

That's the only hangover cure that I wrote in the book. And you've been magnetized to it. Jamie, I do not have a hangover. This is our first day on the job. Don't be so mean. I don't. Yeah, but it genuinely was the hangover cure. That's why I wrote

that recipe but um yeah yes okay do you still like cooking so when you wake up on a miserable Monday morning isn't there a bit of you that just that just thinks I'll deliver rude tonight I don't want to have to cook very rare hardly ever and I just think look it's it's the one thing that is like has given me a living. It's my safe place. I use it to invigorate me. I use it to cuddle, you know, food to cuddle me. I use it for therapy.

I think food can be anything you want it to be. And it's your choice to make sure you use it in the right way to suit you in your life. And I love it. I've traveled the world and seen, you know, similar families with similar jobs, but reacting and living in completely different ways with food. And especially now, you know, when we're talking about cost of living and stuff like that, it's like I've got so many years behind me where I've seen similar challenges in different countries and seen how food can really help and lift and even even on

tight budgets so I mean I guess the reality I mean for a lot of people now we don't learn to cook at home so much or at school so you know it makes my job quite a strange one but ultimately I think cooking is incredible life skill and superpower. How old are you now Jamie Oliver? Oh you bless you for that 47 thank you very much you're looking you're looking good on it thank you if you were to go back and do it all over again are the bits of it you'd do differently god i mean i i i think no it's it's been an extraordinary honor and privilege to surf this world in the public eye i think like the best stuff has been the hardest stuff and the most painful stuff and i think dare

i say it um and i've and i've really been on a personal journey you know trying to put meat meat around the bones of what i was back then um coming out of school and the sort of experiences that I had at school um which where I struggled quite a lot and um having worked with thousands and thousands of people in teams I just feel like I'm getting I'm you know feeling quite rounded at the moment just as a person and as an employer and feel like I've got a good 10 years to give before I'm knackered I feel like you know I do I do and there's good work to be done and you know um you know it is all part of the same noise I mean I use tv and publishing as a lever and a tactic to try and empower people to buy stuff do stuff to it and create beautiful meals

and hopefully memories. But as from our earlier conversation, like people forget that the biggest business on the planet, bigger than arms, bigger than oil, bigger than city trading is food. And therefore, why should we not presume that there's many, many powers out there trying to market you into living a certain

way and and and you know i think that's where where it gets really interesting so it's quite a a big job remit but i love it i still love it and and um and i'm still trying to make myself learn new things now you've been listening to Off Air. A Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Ben Mitchell. You can listen to us on the free Times Radio app or download every episode from wherever else you get your podcasts. And don't forget, if you like what you've heard,

then you can listen live Monday to Thursday, 3 till 5, on Times Radio. it just by listening. Books, contacts, calendar, double tap to open. Breakfast with Anna from 10 to 11. And get on with your day. Accessibility. There's more to iPhone.