"Watching the first part of Jamie Oliver’s new series, Ministry of Food, on Channel 4 last night I was, in turn, thoroughly depressed by the state of our food culture and heartened to see him using his cheeky chappy, chippy persona to try and do something about it.

Predictably, some coverage of the programme in the media has been sneering; cynical of Jamie Oliver's reasons for getting involved and the impact the campaign will ultimately have on our cooking and eating habits as a nation.

But aren't they are missing the point? By rolling up his sleeves and trying to persuade the people of Rotherham (and the UK as a whole through the campaign) to learn to cook and pass on their culinary skills, Oliver is making a valiant effort in starting to tackle our unhealthy food culture.

But it is only a start.  And individuals and organisations with a stake in the issue need to take advantage of that start and commit to the long, slow, difficult challenge of creating genuine behaviour change.

Luckily, there is a precedent provided by Jamie Oliver himself. His school dinners campaign made for great telly but did so much more, galvanising government to pledge £500 million to transform school meals for the better. Jamie Oliver can provide an inspiring, populist voice to crack open the debate, and make space for others to follow.

Nearly two-thirds of Britons are overweight or obese, yet experts believe we’re more malnourished today than we were during World War II.  If the ‘Ministry of Food’ campaign can alert us to the urgency of our dietary crisis - and the scale of public response needed to address it – then the organisations wielding the power and holding the purse strings may be spurred into taking action.

But what action should they take? While there is no one route that will provide the solution, it is worth pushing the case for social marketing being a central element. Within the public health sector, faced with the daunting, seemingly intractable problem of trying to change people’s behaviour,  to persuade them to make practical positive changes to their lifestyles, many organisations are turning to social marketing and beginning to see positive results.

At its heart, social marketing identifies the barrier or barriers to change, and develops a set of interventions to overcome those barriers, to turn negatives into positives. This is probably not language Jamie Oliver would recognise, but his campaign contains a classic example of a social marketing intervention in the shape of the Ministry of Food shop he opened in Rotherham, offering practical cooking sessions for locals.

At the moment, social marketing is gaining most currency in public health campaigns, but its principles and approaches can be applied to a much broader spectrum of issues. As practitioners of social marketing, Forster is very excited by the possibilities this creates, and campaigns like the Ministry of Food will only help to push it further and further up the agenda.