This book takes Jamie Oliver's campaign for better school meals as a starting point for thinking about morally charged concerns relating to young people's nutrition, health and well-being, parenting, and public health 'crises' such as obesity. The authors show how these debates are always about the moral project of the self.

In the UK in 2002 the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver set out to transform a group of unemployed young Londoners into enterprising, passionate workers. Their struggles, and those that train and manage them, to develop a passionate orientation to work highlights many of the challenges we all face in the globalized labour markets of the 21st century.

This collection uses the concept of 'story' to connect literary materials and methods of analysis to wider issues of social and political importance. Drawing on a range of texts, themes include post-colonial literatures, history in literature, old stories in contemporary contexts, and the relationship between creativity and criticism.