The finest moment on food television next week - and, let's face it, there's not much TV that isn't about food these days - will be the sight of 5,000 Rotherham United fans chanting “You fat bastard” at Jamie Oliver. St Jamie takes this with a slight wobble in his smile. All he had done was go on the pitch at half-time to offer them a free steak sandwich and a chance to train as cooks in his new show.

Celebrity, food and football marinate together more often than you'd imagine in the cause of our health. The results can be odd. This week Steven Gerrard, of Liverpool FC, helped to launch a book of footballers' recipes. There were no pies. Gerrard's offering was aromatic sea bream, a personal favourite. Dishes such as that, he said, would help children “learn to cook and eat like champions”. The European Health Commissioner, who, with Uefa, paid for Eat for Goals!, put it more plainly, telling children at the book launch: “We don't want you to grow up fat.”

Similar motives brought Jamie's Ministry of Food to the culinary wasteland of Rotherham. It is, he said, the fattest region in England, full of toothless children with diets worse than Aids orphans whom he'd met in Soweto. His mission is to set up a pyramid cooking cult. The idea is that if he teaches eight Rotherham parents to cook simple dishes (meatballs or curry), and they each teach two more, who do the same. Soon every household in Yorkshire will be eating better.

But it's a struggle: Jamie's subjects include Natasha, who has never lit her eight-burner stove and feeds her children on doner kebab takeaways. And Clare, who lives on ten packets of crisps and a bar of chocolate a day. Watching the pan of meatballs in tomato sauce she asks: “Does it bubble when it boils?” Jamie is aghast: “You don't know what boiling water looks like?”

This is freak-show TV, designed to make us comfy middle-class foodies gape. You try to pity the Rotherhamites, as Jamie does, and look for ways to excuse them. Jamie blames the Government, the schools, and the mothers for not passing on their skills to their children. And there is a big problem: one 11-year-old in six in Rotherham is obese, and 60 per cent of adults overweight.

But the Rotherham diet is not, as some suggest, all about class and poverty. Natasha lives on £80 a week in benefits. She spends £70 a week on junk food. Her five-year-old has had two rotten teeth removed. She buys cigarettes. Here the show gets interesting because it dares to go beyond fingering the familiar villains and suggests that ignorance and laziness play a part in bad eating. We have to address those too.

Rotherham is already in a rage about this portrayal of its citizens. But shaming a town into improving its diet could be a route forward: it's plain to see that in the poorer parts of Britain no other initiatives are working. The Government has spent a lot of money telling people that cooking with fresh ingredients can be cheaper than pre-cooked, and that the job needn't take that much of a tired parent's time. Jamie's scheme does better: instead of telling, he shows. And in their own kitchens. You think, “this could work”. Especially if Stevie G rolls up his sleeves beside him.

I warmed to Jamie and his sincere anger. But not enough to get over the fact that nowhere, in what I've seen, is there a mention of the fattest elephant in Rotherham: the supermarkets. Their role in pushing convenience food and high-sugar snacks to the poor is more crucial than all the chip shops in Rotherham - 80 per cent of the food that we buy in Britain is from supermarkets. They play a major role in determining the nation's health (and sell the cheapest hard alcohol in the high street).

So why not have a go at them? Well, Jamie gets more than £1 million a year from Sainsbury's - that might be an issue. But until celebrity chefs and the Government get together to demand real change in the marketing practices of the industry that peddles most of our bad food, Rotherham and all the towns like it will stay fat.

alex.renton@thetimes.co.uk

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