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I recently sat still for almost five hours to have my portrait painted. I wouldn’t have managed this three years ago, before having treatment for bipolar disorder – I used to experience manic highs and would have been frightened to stay motionless for so long. But the experience, on Portrait Artist of the Year, was rewarding. It gave me time to reflect on how having a creative outlet – in my case cooking – transformed my life and how scandalous it is that most children don’t get that opportunity.

I left school with a handful of O-levels and a single A-level in art, and the perennial comment on my report was “must try harder”. But I was lucky that, aged 16, an experience changed everything. My dad, flushed with some success with his business, took us for lunch at a three-starred Michelin restaurant in France and it struck me, “This is what I want to do with my life.”

Even now, I remember the noise of the crickets, the intoxicating smell of lavender, the crunch of the waiters’ feet on the gravel on the terrace, the wine list like a billboard and the cheese trolley like a chariot. I wanted to re-create this multisensory experience. I became passionate about cooking. Up until that point, my definition of a culinary treat was a Mr Whippy and a Cornish pasty – which I still love.

Learning to cook is a form of creativity that has been overlooked for too long. Not every young person who develops these skills will spend three to four years perfecting a recipe
for my famous dish Sound of the Sea or achieve three Michelin stars as I did at The Fat Duck in Bray. But as well as channelling and fuelling creativity, cooking encourages curiosity, experimentation and resilience. It changes your relationship with failure so that you embrace it. If the experience doesn’t go well, you think, “Next time, we’ll do it like this.”

Cooking is a life skill – children should leave school knowing how to cook. Sadly, they’re not getting that opportunity because cooking has been stripped from the school curriculum. It can’t be taken as an A-level and it’s optional at GCSE. Why? Gastronomy is one of the only subjects that umbrellas all others like physics, chemistry, biology, geography, geology, art, history and maths.

This conversation is important to have amid the ballooning issue of young people and mental health. As someone who was diagnosed with bipolar type 1 disorder three years ago, I know that there are no easy answers and the relationship with creativity can be complicated. Now looking back at it, so many of my ideas came to me while I was on a manic high. After coming out of hospital on medication, everything slowed down and I spent months grieving the absence of those ideas. As I’m stabilising, they’re returning.

As well as fuelling creativity, cooking encourages curiosity and resilience

But I do believe that being able to express oneself creatively can be beneficial and there are so few opportunities to do that in the classroom. In the words of Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Creativity, in any form, can change lives. I’ve always been drawn to the visual. We eat partly with our eyes and the appearance – as well as the taste, smell and sound of a dish – influences how we experience it. It’s why I was curious about being captured on Portrait Artist of the Year.

In all those finished portraits, each very different, I saw myself. Every artist saw beyond the surface, capturing something of my life, my journey and the person I have become thanks to finding my passion. As it did for me, I hope finding an artistic outlet can enrich the lives of younger generations. We just need to give them that opportunity.