Someone asked me if you had a button, so if you could turn off
your bipolar, would you use it? I said only if I could turn on
again because there's a bit of bipolar.
Fantastic. Do you have a sense of how
you've influenced only? Since when I came out of the
hospital for bipolar and I realized that I did change the
world of cooking, but I didn't. I didn't realize I was doing it.
Had I known how hard it was going to be before I did it,
would I have done it? I don't, I don't know.
Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World.
I'm Christian Guru Murphy, and this is the podcast where we
talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their
lives and the events that have helped shape them.
My guest today is Heston Blumenthal, one of the world's
most influential chefs, known for combining cooking with
science to transform the modern dining experience.
The self-taught chef rose to international fame with The Fat
Duck, his experimental restaurant in Berkshire that
went on to earn 3 Michelin stars and was named number one on the
planet in 2005 by the World's Fifty Best Restaurants.
Renowned for imaginative dishes like snail porridge and bacon
and egg ice cream, Heston has built a reputation for pushing
culinary boundaries, exploring how memory, psychology and the
senses shape the way we taste food.
He has also spoken about his own mental health.
In 2017 he was diagnosed with ADHD and in 2023 with bipolar
disorder. After being sectioned and
spending two months in hospital, he's now an ambassador for the
charity Bipolar UK. Heston Welcome.
Thank you. If you could change the world in
any way, how would you change it?
Well, one way would be I I think that everyone on this planet
should have access to free drinking water, clean drinking
water, because the same amount of water exists now as it always
has done on on our planet. It's just the distribution has
changed because of water companies selling selling water
and to give water back. One of the ways I thought of of
doing this was eating mindfully. So the more a mouthful of food
you can value, you eat slower and you get more enjoyment out
of food. So that means less food is
produced and that means there's less water is produced, and that
water can then be used to feed the world, so to speak.
So eating mindfully is is quite difficult to get your head
around sometimes, yes. What is it?
Well, it's being aware of what the food looks like, what it
smells like, what your expectation is when you put it
in your mouth. Maybe there's a story behind
where the food comes from that you you can make the story up.
Really, the classic 1 is a mindful Raisin super one Raisin.
I've done that. Have you done it?
Yeah. And one Raisin then feels like
instead of eating a whole handful of raisins in one go,
you savor 1. For 10 minutes.
Have you done the taste changes as you do it?
Yeah. It changes while you, while
you're, while you're, while you're chewing.
The texture changes and you discover more about yourself in
the process. But it's a hard thing to do to,
to, to ask people to eat mindfully all the time.
I mean I I forget it sometimes it.
Is really difficult. I mean, it's really interesting
you bring this up straight away because I, I went on one of
these, you know, healthy, healthy eating retreats where
they taught us about eating slowly and savouring your food
and how much more enjoyment you get out of it.
You do it for a bit and then, you know, I just had lunch and I
bolted it again. You very, very quickly get back.
I eat really, really quickly. And I don't really know why,
because when you are, when you do actually do the expert and
I've done that Raisin thing where, where it, it totally
changes its intensity as you eat it and, and you come away
thinking, yes, I should definitely do this with all my
food. Yes, but it's not as simple as
that. No, I, I forget quite a lot and
I realized after I bolted it down, I realized I bolted it
down and it's almost, if you need an alarm clock to trigger
before you start eating, but it, it doesn't, it does make a
difference. Like I, I suppose I when you
mentioned about my, my bipolar, when I came out of hospital, I
was on the medication, I put on a lot of weight and down to the,
the meds I was taking, which is quite common.
Apparently I've started to lose it, which is good.
But I've that's when that's when I applied mindful eating more
more than I've done before. And and have you?
I don't hope you don't mind me asking.
I mean, have you, are you using the jabs to lose weight?
Yeah. Are you?
Using the jabs which also help, but I realise that they could be
very damaging to the restaurant business.
Yes. Well, I mean, you, you've got a
sort of a mindful menu. Yes, the fat dark, yes.
What you know, what do you think that really works?
Because isn't the whole point of the jabs that it stops you
wanting to eat? You eat less and I think it
affects different people in different ways.
Has it taken away your enjoyment of food?
That's what a lot of people fear.
No, I pick less. I mean, chefs are classic
pickers. It's because they're used to
working on their feet. So you just rather than sitting
down and eating or pick. So it it it stops?
Well from my experience it stops me picking.
But you still eat a full meal. Less, less so now, but for a
four meal at home and a four meal out.
The trouble is if you go out, sometimes very lovely people in
the restaurant send out extra food and I I feel a sort of
guilty to it because I don't want to offend them.
But you don't want to. If I don't, I don't.
Want to? But I mean, so much of your food
experience is about all the senses and all the feelings that
you get with food. Do you still have all of that if
you are on weight loss drugs? Yes, still have a sense of
smell, sense of taste, sense of sight, sense of sound.
And pleasure and enjoyment I. Prefer if I can share.
So my wife and I will often share a starter so there's less
food on the plate. Yeah.
And then I can enjoy it more. And, and how are you?
I mean, you know, you've been very frank and open about what
happened a couple of years ago. You know you you effectively had
a breakdown with sections. Yes.
How are you now? A lot karma.
I made a documentary for the BBC, My Bipolar and they showed
me a clip of ABBC program BBC Click and the presenter asked me
a question, how are you? And I gave him 45 minutes of
diatribe. Basically 45 minutes of how we
learned to speak, how our ability to to control our vocal
cords was influenced heavily by cooking.
When you look back at faster than you were.
Yes, that that that clip. Yes, you click.
What do you think? Oh.
My God, one. I couldn't believe I thought
that quickly. I got so much information in my
body movements, everything was chaotic, chaotic.
But what I was saying I still meant.
It's just the rate I was saying it.
How how how linked to you know What you now know is ADHD and
bipolar. Yes.
Disorder was all of that to the brilliance of your creativity?
I think because I've thought about this before, I think it's
a mixture of things. It's a mixture of bipolar, ADHD.
Also, I was in a tiny kitchen, which made me look more the
science of cooking, how I could, how I could control the
precision and the consistency of things in such a small space.
I was working 20 hours a day so I was exhausted.
I think all of these things together have have made a
difference, but I don't know if you look at particularly ADHD
and bipolar. I do remember once licing A
blowtorch, going to lighter blowtorch to caramelize the
lemon tarts. So lemon tart, sprinkle sugar on
the top. You like the blowtorch and you
caramelize the sugar. So I sprinkled the sugar on the
top and then I went to to get the blowtorch.
I turned the gas on and I went to the tap, the sink, and I
turned on the hot tap. And I remember thinking, I can't
possibly like the blowtorch with cold water, has to be hot water.
And then realized what was I doing?
It's like a proper Alice in Wonderland moment.
Brain was scrambled. Yeah, scrambled so.
So, but what I mean is like, do you, do you think your brain had
to be running at 110 miles an hour for you to think about the
things that you thought about as a chef?
Yes, I think so. So, so, so, so, so there's a
positivity. To it definitely.
Your life has benefited hugely from that neurodiversity.
Yes. Someone asked me if you had a
button that you can turn on and turn off.
So if you could turn off your bipolar, would you use it?
I said, oh, if I could turn on again, because there's a bits,
bits of bipolar fantastic. And other bits are dangerous to,
to to me and they can be to people around me.
And the other side of it is, is also dangerous to when you get
through big depressive phases. But the middle bit is fantastic.
Did did you always have the, you know, the classic shape of
bipolar, which is manic periods and depressive periods?
Because obviously you've had a very high public profile.
Yes. And you've been on TV and you
know, no one would have known if you were in some sort of
depressive trauma. No, well, I, I wasn't aware.
It's only now looking back over the years, I can see I had, I
had this more and more examples of symptoms of bipolar when I
looked back over the years, remember I just, I had the
depressive periods of time when I looked back at them, but I
didn't, I didn't look back at them as being depressive before
I was hospitalized. And it might be because because
I've changed my, my, I speak slower.
I can sit longer in silence. It's given me more time to
contemplate. And that contemplation has led
me to realize there were I had depressive periods when I when I
was a teenager, late, late teens, let's say.
So you weren't actively covering it up, It's just because you you
weren't aware of it. I was.
I wasn't aware of it. Can we go back then to sort of
early days, You know what, what, what do you remember about that
first, sort of first of knowledge, First for knowledge
around cookery, wanting to learn, wanting to create.
We used to go as a family. We used to go to Cornwall for
summer holidays and one year my dad, his company made, made a
bit of money and we'll go abroad.
So my sister and myself, my parents went to France and he'd
read about this three Mission Star restaurant.
They, they'd never been to 1 Mission Star restaurant and then
alone 3. And of course my sister and I
didn't even know what it what that meant.
So I had this experience in this restaurant in Provence which
sent me down the rabbit hole with inquisitiveness regarding
food. And I remember sitting outside,
there was the noise, soft noise of the crunching gravel under
the feet of the waiters, intoxicating smell of lavender,
the sound of the crickets. There's a cheese trolling the
size of a chariot, wine lists like a size of a billboard.
They're pouring sauces into souffles, carving legs and lamb
at the table. And that's it.
I was hooked. So how did you decide to pursue
it? Well, after then, so I was about
18, then 17, something like that.
And I bought a couple of French cookbooks, The Great Chefs of
France, but I couldn't speak French.
So I translated the word word for word with the French English
Dictionary. And then I started cooking out
of them. And every year I'd go to France
and I'd save up, save up money and blow it on say 3
restaurants, 6 months of saving. And then I'd have more books and
I would do more cooking. And I would take one dish like a
vanilla ice cream and have in my mind the most enjoyable vanilla
ice cream I've eaten in one of these restaurants and try and
replicate it. And at the same time, there was
a book out by an American guy called Harold McGee, which is
about the food and cooking science and all the kitchen.
So I bought that. And in that book he said
Browning meat doesn't keep in the juices, which flew in the
face of everything. I've every chef that I'd heard
speak or write down you seal the meat, but you can't seal the
juices in because when you put a steak in a hot pan, it's
sizzles, there's water coming out and a well done piece of
steak shrinks the water's come out.
So once I had I, I read that it's a bit like finding out
father criticism real. I absolutely thought, oh God, if
this isn't true, how many other things that I've read aren't
true? And that's where I've got my my
sort of life motto from, which has questioned everything.
And, and why didn't you decide to go to, you know, down the
normal route of, of either, you know, formal cookery school or
going to, you know, work for, you know, the sort of the list
of restaurants that chefs normally do?
I did one week at the memoir with Raymond Blanc and decided
that what I wanted to do was make money 1st and then and then
then get myself a restaurant. But as the years went by, I did
various jobs from from selling photocopies to a working for my
old man on on accounts basic bookkeeping.
And then it became evident that I wasn't driven by money.
So rather than having the restaurant that I could imagine
I wanted and looked for, we sold our cottage, moved in with my
parents and started looking for a site and found this old
rundown pub in Bray, borrowed some money from Old Man and then
got a mortgage from the bank. My friends helped me do the, do
the, the, the, the refit of, you know, painting the walls and
just polishing up the floor. And then that was it.
In fact, that was open in 1995. And.
Why did you feel you didn't need to learn from the greats?
Was it, you know, were you already convinced by that stage
that you wanted to do something different?
Yes, but I still learnt. I learnt from the greats, from
their cookbooks and going and eating in their restaurants and
I think that was a really big thing for me, being able to go
and eat and observe and then you and then then read the book.
How do you feel about the sort of the elitism around food?
I mean, you know, you say you have to save up six months to go
to three great restaurants. Yes, In France, you know, top
restaurants are the preserve of people with money to burn these
days. You know, you're talking 2,
three, £400 a head. Yes, in a lot of places.
I mean, it's just kind of absurd money.
Is it, is it necessary? Is it worth it?
And is it? Is it right?
Well, firstly, it depends on the restaurant.
Is it right the cost of producing.
So it's like, let's say the Fat Duck, we do 4036 to 40 covers
customers and we have a team of 70 to serve those people.
So if you Add all of that up, plus the food costs, it's
expensive. Yes, it is.
And it's it's not somewhere that you'd go to once a week or once
a month at all. But however you've had something
handmade for you completely, and hopefully it'll be lasting,
lasting in your memory for a long time.
It's sort of a lifetime experience for some people.
Yes, yes. And we, we get, we get the
surprising amount of younger people coming in that, that that
must save up as well. Yes, I mean, it was a thing.
I mean, I went on my wedding anniversary.
Did you? And, and it, you know, it was a
great experience, but it's one of those things where it's sort
of it's an experience for for a one off, you know, for life.
Yes, it's not. It's not meant to be, as I said,
a weekly and. And but I mean, obviously it's
out of, it's out of reach for most people, isn't it?
You know, do you, do you think, do you think that's right?
Is it? Is it, you know, do you, do you
think it's possible to bring some of what you do and create
to the masses if you like? Well, we've got next door to,
we've got the Heinz Heads, the pub, the pub which has a
Michelin star and there's, there's snippets of the Fat Duck
in there just so you can get a little, just a little taste.
But the sheer cost of producing the the food and the dishes that
we produce in the dark, you can't.
You can't replicate that without unless unless you get a little
robots, which I still don't think would do the job.
And how, how much is the sort of the raw material and how much is
the, is the is the people cost? Because obviously raw materials
are going up as well, aren't they?
I mean, food costs are going up and they will going up this
year. Massively you're looking at,
you're looking at probably people cost being the is the
biggest by far the the the biggest expenditure.
And do do you feel now, particularly now that you're on,
you know, you're on the medication, do do you feel like
you're as creative or has it changed you that much?
I still have my creativity. Before, I was interrupting
myself with ideas, which wasn't necessarily that beneficial
because things wouldn't get done.
Well, because there was so much going on in your head.
So much going on in my head, yeah.
If you think back, sort of, you know the bacon and egg ice
cream, then you know what? What was the story behind that
creation and how long it took? OK, right.
You ready for this? We'll give you the truncated
version. OK, first take.
Imagine making a cup of coffee with one coffee bean and a cup
of water. It'd be, but you grind the
coffee bean, cup of water, drink it, it'll be insipid.
If you have the cup of water, drink it, but take the coffee
bean and crunch the coffee bean. You're going to get a much
bigger explosion of coffee than you would do if the coffee bean
was ground. So that I called flavour
encapsulation. So you get little globules or
little pellets of flavour that burst.
So bank, bank that to one side. I was looking at making vanilla
ice cream where I found ice creams to be eggy quite often
and I didn't want that eggy taste in ice creams.
So I looked at what was happening and you in in
traditional cuisine, you're told to cook the custard until it
coats to the back of a spoon and you draw your finger across it.
But that's 80 something degrees. And egg yolks coagulate at 70.
So you have overcooking the egg yolks, which means the egg, the
egg egg yolk proteins form clumps, though you can't really
see them. So you get bursts of egg.
And that's why it takes egg. So we reduce the temperature of
the ice cream, cooking the ice cream.
So lost the egg in this. Then I thought what happens if I
scramble eggs, puree them and make a custard.
So I make a custard with scrambled eggs and it tasted so
eggy. It reminded me of breakfast.
So that was that was basically where the where the egg and
bacon and then bacon follows naturally.
And how long did that whole process take?
Couple of years. And that's quite the norm for
for a lot of your ideas, isn't it?
A couple of years, yeah. So what's now that everything
has slowed down for you now, you know, how long is a Heston idea
going to take? Is it going to take longer or is
it the same amount? Maybe even longer at the moment.
I mean, I'm fascinated by that microbiome.
So what the effects that the food has on on our our
well-being. And I'd say that I'm in the
business of emotion. I just happen to use food
cooking as a, as a mechanism or medium for that and triggering
memory, nostalgia, things like that, playfulness, maybe
adventure, discovery, those, those sorts of emotions.
There's lots of research been done on what we eat, how it
affects our microbes and how the microbes then affect effects our
mood and the effect they can have on things like bipolar.
But also works the other way. Your, your emotional statement
you eat has an effect on your microbiome, which also effects,
effects your mood in turn. So if you eat when you're angry,
you eat when you're sad, you eat when you're happy, it has a
different, completely different effect.
So I'm looking looking at that. That's going to give a whole new
meaning just to the idea of a Wellness menu, isn't it?
Yes, but it might take some time.
But I feel it, it feels like we don't, we're just beginning to
understand what you're talking about, that actually the guts
affects your physical and mental wealth, you know, well-being,
yes. You know, when we, you know,
people started taking, you know? Enemas.
Well, no capsules full of bacteria to try and make
themselves feel better. And it quite often works, I
think. Yeah, but but we don't really
know why or how to control it. You know, it's a very
uncontrolled experience. You just pop a pill and hope.
Yeah, there's, there's more. There's more bacteria in our
guts than planets in the universe.
And do you think you could like start to identify what makes
what? What influences different
emotions or feelings? Not yet, not yet, but it will
happen. And is that your aim or or or is
that? I'd like to be part of it.
Is that beyond beyond cookery and is more science?
That's it's more, it's more science, but I think it's the
convergence of the two things that interest me.
What do you feel about things like mushrooms and psilocybin?
There's been a lot of research recently on micro dosing and the
impact on mental health in particular a lot.
Is that something you're interested in?
I am. I've read, I've read a bit about
it, I've seen some Ted talks on on it and it's meant to help
with a lot of things, I think depression and stuff like that.
Anxiety, OCD, all of those sorts.
All of those sorts of things, yeah.
I mean, you've done a lot of the science by yourself.
Doesn't seem like we have a infrastructure that that
actually brings together the thing that we all do a huge
amount of which is eat and the science around what it's doing
to us. That seems like a massive sort
of gap. It is in fact the TV stuff that
I've done. Most of it has given me access
to research centres and been able to tap into.
For example, we did a program on chili con carne for the BBC
years ago and wanted to know why.
Why is chili addictive? We put my my head chef at the
time I couldn't, I couldn't go in the machine's MRI scanner
because I just had a back operation with the Met.
The metal hadn't embedded in to my back.
Yeah. And he volunteered to go in the
scanner and we drip fed him to the oil and scanned brain
scanned him. And what happened was the part
of the brain that controls pain got lit up, and then when the
chilli hit went down, the part of the brain that controls
pleasure that lit up. So everyone has their own chilly
thresholds. It's when it comes down below
the when the pain is bearable, your body releases a lot of
endorphins. So you get this, this rush, this
hit of pleasure. So that's to get access to an
MRI scanner. To be able to do that experiment
without the television program would have been very difficult.
I mean, there are other people now doing what you've done.
I mean, you've kind of changed the way people think about Food
Research in in many ways. I mean, are you aware of who,
who is doing the most exciting work?
Who's kind of taking on? No, not yet.
And, and how and how much do you want to do now?
You know, has your life changed dramatically in terms of your
sense of ambition and drive, or would you still feel like you've
got a lot to do? I feel like I've got a lot to
do, but I don't know yet which direction to go in.
So on the the research side, with anything sensorial, so
multi multi sensory, you know how, how what you see can affect
what you taste, what you hear can affect what you taste and
how the senses influence each other, which I think is
fascinating. I like, I see myself as a
walking experiment. So the idea that how do I feel
when this is happening? Obviously I need to be aware in
order for that to work. Can you give me an example of of
of where that's triggers people? Yes, quite a few.
So for example, if you're drinking a cup of coffee with a
bit of milk or a glass of wine, you write the word coffee or
wine depending on the drink. Write it in balloon letters so
everything's rounded. There's no, there's no corners
or, or or sharp, sharp edges. Coffee and then write coffee on
another piece of paper in sharp, really sharp letters.
Do the same wine, the same hand, have a sip looking at the, the,
the, the coffee or the wine written in soft round balloon
like letters and then have another sip looking in sharp
letters. And it tastes sharper when you
look at the sharp letters. It's it's a great experiment to
do you think you think? You can do it yourself.
And and so do you think you know
the ideal restaurant experience is visual, sound, smell?
Yes. A a completely curated
experience. Yes.
Is that the ideal one? I'm not sure if it's ideal, but
it is. It's a wonderful experience.
Does it exist? No, there's bits at the duck.
So the sound of the sea where you listen, you listen to the
waves lapping up against the shore.
Why you're eating something that looks like waves lapping up
against the shore. Who?
Who does that work with? Because some people, I'm sure,
sit down and they hear the sound of the waves and they say it
doesn't do anything for me, but other people will will be very
moved by it. Yeah.
Do you have any sense of why it affects some people and why not?
Well, everyone's relationship with food is unique and sound
and smell are the biggest trigger of memory.
So most people have been to the sea in their lives and will have
a memory about it. If you have waves crashing,
crashing waves with a foghorn in the background, it's going to
It's going to trigger some memories for some people, not
others. But if it's just a generic waves
leaping up against the shore, most people will have a memory
about that and it will transport them back to the to their own
memory. And had you had you sort of
experimented with large groups of, you know, had you done a
sort of a clinical trial type thing so you know, before doing
that or was it just it worked for you?
I. Did some trials with Oxford
University, a guy called Charles Spence and we did.
We did the bacon and egg ice cream.
We've got two groups of people and one group, they were both
served the same bacon and egg ice cream, but one group
listened to chicken clucking and the other one listened to
sizzling bacon. And the group that listened to
sizzling bacon, the bacon flavour was higher.
The group that listened to the chicken clucking is the eggy
flavour was higher. That's amazing.
Which is is, yeah, quite, quite a strong effect as well.
And. And in terms of what you want to
do now as well, I mean, I mean, you said at the beginning of
your career you discovered you weren't, you weren't as driven
by money as you thought you might be.
You know, the business of restaurants is tough.
And, you know, and we, we've seen, you know, dinner, the
restaurants in central London is, is, is shutting down.
Yeah. Do you find the business side of
it, you know, engaging? Do you want to do that, or do
you really just want to cook? I want to cook and.
But what I mean is in terms of, you know, where does that leave
you as a, as a chef and as a, as a businessman?
You know it's it is difficult to do both, isn't it?
Yes it is. I've always run to take the the
duck if I've within reason, if I've if I've wanted or needed
something, buy it and then work out how to pay for it
afterwards. Which is not the way an
accountant would do it, but it has.
It's happened to have worked and.
What about in London? I mean, there was a story
recently in the Guardian about the shutting down of the
restaurant. I don't know how much of it is
true or not, but how, how difficult is it as a business to
keep things on the on the road and to keep people, you know,
famously chefs and it's a matter of drama and legend.
You know, it's an up and down business.
Tempers flare, people fall out. Does it have to be that way?
No, no it doesn't, and I'd like to think it's changed a lot in
kitchens over the last few years.
There's a lot less shouting and flaring up than there used to
be. Were you shouting in the
kitchen? No, no, no, I was exhausted and
not, but no, not shouting. And in the Mandarin, the article
in the Guardian wasn't correct. In the Mandarin, we decided that
our our term of we're a tenant in the property was basically
expired. So we've extended it for six
months and we've had a great relationship with the hotel.
We couldn't have actually had the success of the Mandarin
without that relationship. But do you want to do another
one like that? A big, glossy restaurant in
central London. I don't know yet.
We've got some some potential offers, but I'm I'm not sure.
Isn't it an exhausting thought? Every everyone I've ever met,
whoever run restaurants was sort of right on the edge all the
time. Is it?
Yes, it's exhausting. Doesn't sound very appealing.
What? What do you say to people who
who have the dream of doing that?
Well, I, I had a dream of doing it then when I opened the dock,
it was my first paid job as a chef and I had no idea it was
going to be so tough. This is where being self-taught
is a double edged sword because on the one hand I didn't, I was,
didn't have the, the, the confinements of the traditions
of classical French cooking, for example.
But on the other side of things in terms of organization skills,
the ordering and stuff like that, I didn't have a clue.
So that's why it took me, it took me longer than, you know,
chefs that have had training to be able to get, get it out to
speed, have it run in an organized fashion.
So had I have known how hard it was going to be before I did it,
would I have done it? I don't.
I don't know. I mean, it's easy to say sitting
here now and yes, I would have done, but it was horrendously
exhausting. But I mean it, it was an
enormous achievement as well, because the success of the Fat
Duck led to your public profile, led to TV, yes, led to the
spreading of this whole idea around science, led to loads of
people buying blowtorches and, and trying to do creative things
in their kitchens. That's a you know, do you have a
sense of how you've influenced? Only since my when I came out of
the hospital for bipolar, I had a chance to reflect.
And I realized I could say this now.
I could never have said it before because I thought about
it before that I did change the world of cooking from this
little, little contained kitchen in Bray.
But I didn't, I didn't realize I was doing it at all.
So in terms of to looking back as it's 30 years we've been
going, so having a everyone has a legacy, but having a legacy
that that that had that impact, has it been worth it?
Yes, I have to say yes. And how do how do you feel about
that legacy? I mean, is it, you know, is
pride something you feel or? I feel more proud now than I
have done before. That's very qualified, yes.
What's your ambition now at this stage in your life?
Do you think you can still have a big impact on the way we think
about food? Because what you're looking at
now is like it's, it's another big.
Term. Yeah, it's, it's a good question
because I didn't think, I never thought I'd have an impact.
And even when I even when I was sort of, yeah, those, those,
those periods of exhaustion years ago, I thought when I
opened the, the dock, I thought maybe maybe one day I might,
might get a Michelin star. I had no idea about 3 stars.
So I sort of jumped in feet, feet and feet and hands 1st and
just cooked. And then once I started I was
stuck. I was stuck and had I have had a
choice that time to get out of the kitchen, I probably would
have done a bit more than a bit earlier than than than than my
levels of exhaustion, if that makes sense.
Yeah. I never thought that I would
have this effect on the world of food and cooking.
Having known that I've had an effect makes it more difficult
to have that as an ambition. Yeah, because you've already
done something really big. I've already done something
quite big. Yeah, yeah.
I. Mean you're, you're also now
involved, you know, as you've said in in talking much more
about bipolar and you're involved with bipolar UK.
Do you have? Do you want to do big things
there or is that? I want, I definitely want to
help with the stigma, the people, the process of diagnosis
and the stigma that's surrounded by bipolar and the people that
live with people with bipolar because that's, that's something
that that people don't don't get.
I mean, one is understanding bipolar itself, but the loved
ones around that person, they all get affected and it takes up
to I think it's nine years for the for the NHS to get us a
diagnosis. At least once you've got a
diagnosis, you can do something about it.
But it's multiple times more likely for people to end their
lives when they have bipolar and a mix of bipolar and ADHD.
So it's a big chunk of the population in Britain.
Some people find that you know that the person who has called
the police and the hospital, you know, done the sectioning,
signed the paperwork, you know that that relationship is very
difficult to mend. How how were you able to see it?
You know more as. Well, it was my your.
Wife saved your life? She, she saved my life and I, I
had no idea how bipolar never occurred to me.
And so when I she, she, we had this discussion not that long,
long ago, actually in her head when she thought I it's it needs
it needs sectioning, couldn't do something about this in her
head. She thought he might then speak
to me again. So that was a really big concern
fact when I, when I got diagnosis, I was surprised.
I was saying intrigued. Then I started reading about it
and, and it and it always sort of made sense.
And I don't know if it was getting worse as I was getting
older, I'm not sure. How?
How do you remove the stigma when you say that's what you
want to do? By talking about it, the
response we've got from the documentary that I made was
massive people with bipolar, people that live with people
with bipolar and you start to talk about it.
There's a lot of people that have bipolar or, or have a
relative with bipolar that don't want to talk about it.
So if you can start talking about it and, and some of the
things that you know, in the manic stage, our toe can be
tokeningly funny. I mean embarrassingly so.
So you can share that with other people makes a difference.
So what? So what would your advice be to
people who might be friends, might be family, neighbors,
about how they should handle it without treating it as something
around which there's a stigma? Contact Bipolar UK because they
have a helpline that that that would be a start.
My sister was told she was bipolar but she she she refuted
it. She said no she didn't agree
with it. If my wife my wife hadn't have
had me sectioned then I wouldn't be here today.
Because the the hospital told you you were.
Yeah, I was a couple of days away.
Days away from death, Yeah. And I suppose, I mean, do do you
think it's your sort of scientific brain that has helped
you? Embrace it if you like.
I think so. I think so.
I've done curiosity, curiosity. I think I've I've done a lot of
research and definitely the the medication has helped, although
at the beginning, but one, when I put on a lot, a lot of weight.
Secondly, my balance. I'm just going to get Vertigo.
My balance started to go, but then monthly visits to the
hospital to be checked up on and then the medication gets tweets
and tweets and tweets. So things they're getting better
and better. So do you feel yourself now?
Well, that's a good question because I don't know what myself
is. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm still me.
I'm just a less manic version of me, I'd say.
That's good. I think so, yes.
It's good. It's good.
Aston Blumenthal, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you. Thank you for joining us.
You can watch all of these interviews on the Channel 4 News
YouTube channel. Until next time, bye bye.