Cooking up trouble in Jamie's Kitchen

It was the compulsive quality of the urge of some of the young people to mess things up that was striking

It is simply pitiful now, the depth of the Government's failure to grasp the reality of antisocial behaviour. Even the term speaks of ignorance of, and disengagement from, the sorts of problems we have come to understand as gathering under this umbrella. The obsession with "antisocial behaviour" is, as its name fully implies, all about limiting the damage done to "us" by "them".

In giving vent to their fury and frustration with "them", the Government defeats any sort of moral purpose it might believe itself to have. What other message can be delivered by this negative mantra, than the one that clearly says: "We're not interested in your problems, only in the way they impact on people who don't have them."

Likewise, the legislation itself focuses on punishing people for having difficulties, rather than working to alleviate them. Yes, the havoc caused by stupid, petty crimes, and the ugliness created by vandalism, is a blight and a menace. Yes, it would be great if there was some simple legislative formula to make it all go away. But there isn't.

The fact that must be faced is that this behaviour is primarily destructive of the people perpetrating it, rather than the wider community. Punishing people for being self-destructive is like treating alcoholics with Special Brew or telling depressed people that their only problem is their bad attitude. It's not just stupid, it's also cruel.

For a timely and fascinating insight into the nuts and bolts of such challenges, though, the Government could do a lot worse than tune in to Jamie Oliver's new television series. I very much doubt whether Mr Oliver quite understood what he was letting himself in for when he decided to train 15 unemployed 16- to 24-year-olds as chefs. But what he has actually come up with is truly amazing.

Jamie's Kitchen is shaping up to be not just another stunt in the unreal world of reality television, but a marvellous study into the difficulties and rewards of attempting to motivate and inspire young people going nowhere.

Mr Oliver appealed for his crew through jobcentres in London's East End. The gimmick was that they would be trained before the cameras to work in the kitchen of his first restaurant, Fifteen, which opened in Hoxton, East London, yesterday. He has invested £1m in the project, and while cynics might suggest that an entire television series is quite a slice of publicity for any new venture to garner, the show itself is so full of insight that such quibbles are beside the point.

Episode two was screened this week, with the 1,000 applicants whittled down to the lucky few, who were immediately set to work under a no-nonsense teacher. One, Stephanie Young, disappeared pretty quickly because, as it turned out, she was a journalist who had infiltrated the experiment as a reporter for the Daily Mail.

Still, even without the benefit of deep-throated surveillance, Daily Mail readers would find much in the programme to confirm their Blair-like view of "the trouble with young people today".

In the face of such great good fortune and generous investment in their futures, our bunch of tyros rose to the occasion hardly at all. Truancy, bad time-keeping, disruptive attitudes and sheer lumpen laziness quickly emerged as common responses to the opportunity to learn and to flourish. The speed with which the 15 united to form a perfect microcosm of all the ills we are told are strangling the education system was mesmerising.

Yet it was the compulsive quality of the urge of some of the young people to mess things up for themselves that was striking. Three of the girls quickly established themselves as totally unable to get out of bed in the morning and into their place of work on time. One wept as Mr Oliver explained to her that she could not go on like this.

And one of the boys immediately took it upon himself to act out before the nation exactly the sort of attitudes that ensure that boys fail even more than girls in education. He was clever and lively, but he was absolutely dedicated to displaying his gifts in only the most negative of ways. He clearly craved attention, but found it much easier to get attention by doing things ostentatiously badly, instead of trying – and possibly failing – to do them really well.

Charged with preparing a citrus salad, he composed the dish then swapped his own with the teacher's. Exhorting everyone to watch the guy teaching them make a fool of himself by criticising his own work, he was humiliated when his ruse was rumbled in a millisecond. Also, in a heart-stopping moment of self-inflicted racism, the teacher revealed his notes to the camera. The lad had written beside his name in a list of the participants: "He is the black boy."

What seemed to unite the tardy kids – and not all of them were – was a fear of failure so great that they wanted to get their excuses in early – their excuses being that they only failed because they weren't trying. Truly, it is antisocial not to give of your best, especially when opportunities like the one these young people have been given come along. But what came across most of all in the programme was that this barnstorming negativity was somehow beyond their control. Can the continuing ministrations of Jamie and his cohort of teachers somehow inculcate optimism in this group of self-mutilators? We'll see – and what a lot might be learnt in the attempt.

Maybe Jamie's 15 should have simply been eating more of the food they were being taught to prepare. The latest issue of the New Scientist suggests that much antisocial behaviour may be down to diet as much as any other factor. An experiment on 231 young offenders found that a group being given daily vitamins underwent a 37 per cent decrease in violent behaviour, compared with another group being given placebos. After the experiment, the violence in the two groups returned to previous levels.

It's already established that children given fruit do better in the classroom, and it is clear that poverty and bad diet go together like a horse and carriage. A whole range of environmental factors, rather than simple bad character, are what we have come to see as willfully "antisocial" behaviour.

Maybe, when the word "antisocial" is bandied around, the Government should try to remember that it is antisocial in the extreme to organise society in the way that we do, piling the most pressure on the least able and rewarding the most able – and sometimes just the most lucky – obscenely well. Jamie Oliver, who is no doubt a driven and talented young celebrity addict, would be the first to confirm that.

It is the unmotivated and unskilled who are likely to find it most difficult, for example, to budget wisely on low wages. Yet they are the ones we look to to be motivated enough to get up earlier than white-collar workers, to do the most unpleasant work for the smallest reward, then go home and settle down to some perfect parenting, and some judicious shopping and menu planning.

The amazing thing, really, is that so many people do manage to cope so well. But just because they do, that doesn't mean we ought to be happy to run with an economic model that continues to promote and increase inequality. Couldn't endorsing that model so heavily in itself be interpreted as anti-social behaviour? Maybe Britain's problem is the anti-social behaviour of its government.

d.orr@independent.co.uk