Jamie Oliver has been many things: celebrity chef; restaurateur; campaigner for healthy eating and the second best selling British author since records began. In this talk, Jamie and Arianna Huffington discuss what is involved in driving a healthy and sustainable food revolution.

The conversation begins with Oliver looking back at how his career got started. "Twenty years ago my job was about disrupting tv cookery," he says, "the idea that men could cook, that it wasn’t just for women". Jamie expresses disdain for the ideas of that time, that although men and women both worked, when they got back home the men would just look at the women as if to say, “well, what’s for dinner?” For Jamie it was about changing that prevailing attitude. “My job was to prove that cooking wasn’t just for girls, cooking got you girls”, he jokes.

Things began to change for Oliver as he became more educated about the state of world food.

It wasn’t just about the joy of food, he says, there was a disconnect - the food industry was broken. He describes as a shocking revelation the moment when he realised that the food industry was the biggest in the world.

Jamie sees the problem as being truly systemic. "Having one or two things in a country change is cute," he says, "but it isn’t effective, you need society to change". Despite the enormous challenges facing campaigners Oliver believes it is important not to allow yourself to become discouraged by defeats.

Discussing his support for taxing sugary drinks, Oliver explains that in developed countries the largest source of sugar in people's diets is these drinks. “I’ve been to too many countries where the poorest hydrate themselves on sugary drinks," he says. Responding to Huffington’s assertion that ten percent of food stamps in the US are spent on sugary drinks, he replies, yes, it’s just manufacturing obesity.

Oliver mentions the problem of education in the USA. “If you teach a kid about food, it has a quadruple effect," he says. He describes how many children didn’t know the association between a potato and a french fry, and had never seen pure, white milk. Milk was all coloured, he says, it had more sugar than a fizzy drink.

To Oliver, this was a major problem since, in America, you had to get a milk to get a free school lunch. It’s all interconnected, he explains, it just makes it easy to become unhealthy.

Despite his many successes in campaigning, Oliver doesn’t believe that either he nor governments are the sole solution.

He expressed appreciation for how the British arm of McDonald's had changed over the last fifteen years. "They were public enemy number one," he says, "but they’ve done really good work promoting salad, real eggs, and proper food production".

Oliver says that he is pleased about how things have progressed, but that there is still a long way to go. "In Britain eleven or twelve years ago we had exacting standards for dog food but not children’s food," he says.

Oliver says that he hopes to establish food awards for companies who do well promoting healthy food and eating.