Jamie Oliver believes that women should abstain from sex with their husbands or boyfriends to punish them if they refuse to cook.

“Men are driven by sex,” the celebrity chef said this weekend at the annual Hay-on-Wye festival. “So the best way for women to get their men into the kitchen would be to stop having sex with them until they start to cook.”

Oliver, who is making a Channel 4 series centred on the town of Rotherham, said he was appalled by how few men in the Yorkshire town can cook.

“I ask if they cook at all and they simply say, ‘Don’t be so daft’. I found myself working with men who’ve never even lifted a pan, let alone cooked.”

Oliver, who is best known for television programmes such as The Naked Chef and Jamie’s School Dinners, said that once men had got over the first hurdle, there was “a pride on their faces” when they had learnt to cook a few dishes.

“When I was filming the documentary about better school dinners, I never got to ‘the home’. Now I’m living with families who can’t cook; food has no place in these families,” he said.

“I could halve their food budget. With £60 a week they could eat good dinners, plain lunches and a roast dinner from a good free-range bird every week.”

Oliver, who believes the best cooks in the world are women, thinks many British people are simply scared of cooking. “There is this fear, which is not the case in families in Italy,” he said.

Oliver believes that basic cooking skills should be part of the school syllabus. He is also angry with the government for, as he put it, reneging on its £500m plan to improve school dinners.

“The government has not ring-fenced that money,” he said. “Schools could just as easily buy computers and books in that case.”

The chef is still concerned about what children eat at lunchtime. “I now reckon that 60% of packed lunches are worse than school dinners. The number of kids as young as five with reheated McDonald’s meals and Red Bull [energy drink] in their packed lunches is appalling,” he said.

Oliver added that the government should reintroduce a separate Ministry of Food.

At present food comes under the remit of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Oliver claimed that food issues had been marginalised. The government should encourage more towns to set up markets selling fresh food, he said.

Oliver hinted that his next role would be as a “champion for pigs”. The chef, who supported free-range chickens in his documentary Jamie’s Fowl Dinners, said he had considered concentrating on beef or milk, but opted for pigs after asking his audience.

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