To have found this blog about childhood obesity intensely smug and annoying?

[MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik]

agirlcalledjack.com/2013/06/13/dont-blame-poverty-for-your-childs-obesity/

Is it just me ... what kind of la la land does she live in, where everyone who is struggling for money lives in a nice house with a cooker and has plenty of time from not working two jobs to bake bread?

What she is describing is the sort of sensible cost-cutting I would expect most people who're struggling for money but not absolutely on the bones of their arses could do. I get what she's saying, I do, but the smug tone coupled with the failure to realize that quite a lot of very poor people don't actually have good enough cooking facilities to do what she describes is getting me down.

Am I being mean?

Plus the 'chicken to feed a family for a week' makes me slightly suspect her of embroidered truth.

kiriawa I have already said that there are definitely sometimes good reasons to use ready meals/pre-prepped food (disability was actually the example I used above).

moomin isn't that a little disingenuous? As an educated woman, are you really saying you are so lacking in resources that you would just resort to feeding ready meals to your children? You couldn't teach them to cook yourself?

If that's true, it's really sad.

That's what my mum did Marion when she went back to work.

I was 12 the youngest was 5. My mum used to cook complicated meals from scratch when she was a SAHM but when she went back to work in 1996 she stocked the freezer with ready meals that we could heat up ourselves while she was at work. She didnt have much other choice.

I was expected to cook the family meal from age 14 which is largely why I can cook but for those 2 years (and after I left at around 16) we lived on ready meals.

And my mother is a doctor. She knows full well about health and ingredients.

Yes of course I am being disingenuous: I have already got the little buggers slaving away for me. (Only joking, my eldest two are in their late teens and perfectly capable of cooking a meal.)
But I imagine there are plenty a lot of people who resort to the crap due to lack of energy. In fact I have a friend with ME who's kids don't eat at all healthily - I wouldn't dream of criticising her.

He's in MS school. None of his schoolfriends know (at this point) and I'm making the most of the fact that he's really popular now because I suspect he won't be for much longer.

Would you have him over if I told you what he ate?

Could I just say that

a) chickpea curry is Gordon Ramsay's favourite Asian dish, by all accounts

and

b) someone (I can't be arsed to check who) saying that an unemployed single mother in shared accommodation (?) in Sarfend-on-Sea blogging about barely struggling to make ends meet and feed her child is "Living in a middle-class ivory tower" is quite simply THE funniest thing I've ever seen on MN.

And I've been here YEARS

offred, at 12 you could have cooked with her at the weekends to fill the freezer?

At that age, I often made supper. And I've taught my kids to do the same.

Their bedrooms are shitheaps though?

Is she unemployed? Anyway, she is quite obviously from a middle class background, I don't think whoever said that was entirely wrong. She, as I did, obviously benefits in various ways from her middle class upbringing in the situation she's in now.

Yes Marion I could and did but there were 6 of us and I struggled to cope with so much responsibility/housework at 14 never mind 12 and I was a significant factor (although there were other factors) in my severe depression, self harm, running away and eventual moving out at a young age.

Kiriwawa
I have a packet of fish fingers in my freezer just for play dates (I think they would be too expensive to feed all six of us on). I wouldn't dream of pushing my lentils onto other people's children.

Often is different to every day anyway.

[frightened of being zapped again]
I said she was educated. I don't know about middle class but I suspect 100 ways of eating vegan food isn't high on the agenda for most people

Sorry am on kindke its painfully slow and I just read yourcposts Offred which render my response redundant!

I have to bow out and go to bed, thanks for a really interesting discussion.

haunted I thought that about the "middle class ivory tower" comment

Not sure what makes her 'quite obviously' from a MC background, but it was the 'Ivory Tower' thing that got me. Satan on a unicorn but competitive poverty has reached new heights when the ability to stir a pot of tinned chickpeas and chuck in some dried herbs constitutes an ivory tower...

This class thing really grinds my gears

Do people honestly think that someone cannot possibly be working class if they know one end of a spoon from another/can string together sufficient coherent sentences to write a successful blog

Working class people aren't baboons, you know.

No, it was her £27k per year job mostly for me tbh.

Thank you moomin - that's really very comforting. I (quite honestly, not pissing around) live in fear about food on afterschool playtime things. I know the other kids are going to realise that he's really pretty weird fairly soon. But at the moment, I'm wallowing in the fact that they haven't noticed. Or if they have, they think it's cool. It's not going to last long though ...

I'd be really very upset if a parent noticed (and used it as a stick) before their child did. I'd probably forcefeed you value pricerite 'burgerzz' :o

Oh I see, working class people can't earn a decent wage. My mistake!

She certainly was job-seeking at one stage in the blog, anyways.

Er she is 25 now and her child is 2. There are no "working class" jobs that pay people that young that well are there?

She had this job, I presume, before she had the baby and in her blog she refers to the things it had enabled her to have which she had to sell when her benefits got messed up.

A 23 year old who is earning £27k, has clearly got a good standard of education, is intelligent and articulate and resourceful, is it really all that much of a leap that they have a middle class background? Either way the ivory tower comment wasn't me and I don't really agree with it either.