Thursday, December 31, 2009


TED

Prize winner announced!



TED Prize winner for 2010:
the chef who's transforming the way we feed our children ...

JAMIE OLIVER

The prize grants him $100,000 -- and something much bigger: "a wish to change the world." He'll unveil the wish on February 10 at TED2010 and we, the TED community, will make it come true.

Some key achievements:

12 television series, seen in 130 countries
10 cookbooks, translated into 29 languages, and sold almost 24 million copies in 56 countries
His School Dinners/Feed Me Better campaign pressured the UK government to invest $1 billion to overhaul school lunches
Founded the Fifteen Foundation, a social enterprise and chef apprenticeship for 18-24 yr olds. Based in London, it has been replicated through franchising in Amsterdam, Cornwall and Melbourne
A new TV series, Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution USA, is to air on ABC in 2010, bringing Jamie's unique vision to America
At the heart of Oliver's work is an assault on the obesity epidemic: The CDC states that one in four Americans are considered obese. It is estimated that 43 percent of Americans, or 103 million people, will be obese by 2018. The cost of this epidemic is anticipated to reach $344 billion per year. It currently accounts for almost 10 percent of the yearly US health care costs, and that rate will rise to 21 percent by 2018. WHO's latest projections indicate that, globally in 2005, approximately 1.6 billion adults were overweight and projects that by 2015, that figure will rise to 2.3 billion.

From the New York Times:
"... this British celebrity chef has made it his mission in recent years to break people’s dependence on fast food, believing that if they can learn to cook just a handful of dishes, they’ll get hooked on eating healthfully. The joy of a home-cooked meal, rudimentary as it sounds, has been at the core of his career from the start, and as he has matured, it has turned into a platform."