A vast number of people still don't cook. They may know a lot about food, from watching endless cookery programmes, but they never actually pick up a knife or wooden spoon themselves. To Jamie Oliver, who has been on a decade-long mission to get us all – young, old, and now fat Americans, too – eating fresh food, that's a red rag. But how do you reach this recalcitrant bunch?
"Ovo" – as my teenagers say when they mean obviously – you reach them through their favourite gadget. Hence the phenomenal success of the new "app" that St Jamie of Essex has devised for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Haven't heard of an app? Nor had I until I borrowed a Touch and downloaded his recipes and videos for whipping up 20-minute meals. Even at a cost of £4.99, the premium rate app seems to have hit the spot because, within a fortnight of its release last month, it was the No 1 grossing iPhone app in the UK , beating a field of 100,000. (More than two billion apps have now been downloaded from Apple's App Store in just over a year.)
Clever him to spot this new way to get his message across. "Technology fascinates me, always has," he says in his endearingly high-speed fashion, squeezing in an audience between being father-at-home for half-term, and racing off to Huntington, West Virginia, where ABC is filming his attempt to convert the most obese citizens in the US to healthy eating. "Things like Facebook and Twitter are great for bringing people together. The iPhone is simply another brilliant tool for inspiring and helping people to cook fresh food, which is what I've been trying to do ever since I started 10 years ago. A genius little piece of kit not only helps you decide what you want for dinner but also tells you the ingredients you'll need as you're going around the shops and gives you step-by-step instructions when you're cooking it in the kitchen. How great is that?"
Jamie himself has probably less time to spare than any man on earth – except, perhaps, Barack Obama – so he understands the need for speed. At the last count his empire consisted of two chains of restaurants (Fifteen and Jamie's Italian), the cookware company he started this year and the Ministry of Food, which is poised to expand its learn-to-cook message far beyond Rotherham. Then he has Jamie's America to promote, another book on the way and a Christmas television series.
Most exigent of all is his wife, Jools, who wisely insists on him being incommunicado at weekends and half-term so he can concentrate on their three daughters, Poppy, seven, Daisy, six, and Petal, only seven months old. So I believe him when he says: "I don't have much free time for downloading apps, to be honest. When I'm working, I'm working and when I'm at home, I'm with the kids. With my iPhone, I spend most of my time checking out the music that I've downloaded and looking at iTunes."
The only apps he has signed up for himself are those that tell him about the weather – "they were useful when I was travelling around America" – and "the beer one". There's no time to quiz him on his beer preferences because Sainsbury's is queuing up for a quick dose of his apparently unflagging energy. But, even in his permanent state of leg-jiggling overactivity, which made his school days a disaster, the 34-year-old chef has time to be excited by the astonishing take-up of his online linguini and stir-fries.
It doesn't surprise him that this new means of delivering his message seems to have hit the spot with frantic young professionals who currently grab a ready meal or ring for a takeaway. "You just have to come to a book-signing to know that my stuff tends to appeal to many different kinds of people. iPhones are owned by more people every day but their core is professionals aged between 25 and 45.Maybe some of them love cooking and maybe some of them are a bit afraid of cooking or maybe don't think they've got the spare time for cooking. So it's really those people who would buy the app and get inspired. I hope so. But it's for everyone really."
As a cooking enthusiast outside that core group, I'm not sure his app is for me. I don't need to see a video on chopping an onion, at least I think I don't. But when I watch it I discover that not only does Jamie look rather fetching in his blue denim shirt, he also has a brilliant way of slicing his onion, first vertically, then horizontally, then vertically again. Not for the first time I succumb to his charm. Next minute I too will be traipsing around the supermarket with my new pocket-sized screen letting the young evangelist tell me what to buy for dinner tonight, and how to make it.