The Jamie Oliver ‘Naked Chef 2′ leaked book hoax

“Cook book = £20. Ingredients = £10. Getting sacked for ‘accidentally’ releasing the book to the entire planet before it even hits the shelves = PRICELESS!”

Thus reads the introduction to the ‘leaked’ new Jamie Oliver cookbook, Naked Chef 2, which goes on to claim that the book was sent out by someone working at Oliver’s publishing company, from where it’s been “flying around the web at a rate of knots”.

I received the Word doc from a friend by e-mail last week, but it was only today as I bothered to look at the file that I got suspicious. The book is in a plainly styled manuscript format, except for the cover, which is included as a JPEG and depicts a young looking Jamie Oliver in an oddly familiar pose. A search for Jamie Oliver books on Amazon doesn’t reveal anything, but widening the search shows that the cover is actually a copy of a the Jamie Oliver - Naked Chef 2 DVD.

The purportedly leaked book is also composed entirely of recipes, which is unusual of a celebrity cookery book, as there’s usually several pages of commentary to put the recipes in context.

So the book is a hoax. The recipes have simply been copied from other sources. It’s quite an obvious hoax when you stop and think, but I guess the idea of having a leaked book is enticing enough for people to believe, and forward on, without thinking too much. The timing (just before Christmas) probably helps too, as it has for the Thresher’s 40% off voucher (which I also received by e-mail last week, and which predictably went crazy and made the news).

I guess the big question is who made this fake book, and why?

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