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.

What's a working class job FFS?!

I'm from a working class background and was on about that at her age.

Anyway: as I said. It was the MC bit so much as the ivory tower that made me ROFL.

You'd have to be pretty effing defensive about your eating habits to think a living off bag of Sainsbo's value lentils is aspirational.

She's edited this particular post by removing the

"Your kids aren?t fat because you?re poor. I could make your kids thinner and you financially better off, but you have to be willing to make the effort to learn?'

and thrown in a fairly defensive comment to boot. Not sure what's caused this, but clearly she is rethinking her position on this.

kiriwawa my favourite treat is frozen sausage rolls. I would have your DS over simply to steal his food.
My points earlier were more about able-bodied parents of children with no SN, who feed their kids ready meals because they assume that it is cheaper, when in fact it is just easier.
It is clear from the way you phrased your post that you have thought long and hard about what your DC eat - is that true of the mother on the TV show that sparked all this controversy?

Aye, well: we're agreed it was ivory tower thing that grated!

I massively take issue with the assumption that a working class person can't be articulate, educated and resourceful, but that's for a whole nother thread and will make me way too cross for this time at night, especially when I'm all out of gin.

Offered, I imagine there are 25 year old plasterers and plumbers earning that kind of money.
But Jack is a newspaper journalist isn't she?

Erm... The whole thing about class is that it is based on your job officially isn't it?

She may well have had 'working class' parents, she may well have had a 'working class' job, on the balance of probabilities I think it is unlikely. At the very least she clearly has skills and attributes and resources that many other people in her situation do not no matter where they came from.

haunted I have two bottles of gin that I got as house warming gifts, you're welcome to them! sips

BESIDES WHICH, if were middle class what the heck's that got to do with it?

"Yes yes, you could barely feed your poor starveling boy, but you went skiing in the upper sixth and know what Glyndebourne is so you can fuck off" ?!

Offred - no, it's not based on your job. What a hilarious notion!

Oo thanks Artemis

Slice of cucumber in mine ta

ice?

Now wondering if all friends think am alcoholic... housewarming presents all of a very certain theme...

I do think it is relevant because it is well recognised that money and class effect mobility, education, attainment, literacy, opportunities, resources, aspirations, support structures...

Although it wasn't my point to start the ivory tower thing I think was directed to that, that it is easier for someone who starts with something to manage extreme poverty than someone who starts in extreme poverty of this kind because they have various cushions.

If you'd be so good. And a light hand with the tonic, there's a dear.

Class is officially based on your job though isn't it? Well the A B C1 stuff is.

Erm I think it is; the type of work and the income you gain are the main criterion, obvs there are some social characteristics but they are difficult to measure, effectively meaning measurable class is highly dependent on looking at people's jobs.

Moomin - I'm a writer with a PhD, but that recent BBC class thingy classed me as 'utterly utterly the dregs of society' No money, no family money, no property, all that.

I was quite proud. AND I like chickpea curry

Having been in the position myself, being able to ask my parents to loan me money for a cot, having started out with furniture and some things of value, having had a good education etc i was in a better position than some others to actually survive the instability/poverty of benefits than many others.

I have literally no idea how I ended up having this discussion again

Yes we were quite posh on that BBC thing. We are working-class-gone-to-university-and-made-good. But you can take the kid out of the council estate......

I was the dregs on the BBC thing - have 3 degrees and a good job but because I don't own a home or stocks and shares...

moomin more the merrier, I have to get up at silly o clock tomorrow so I definitely do NOT want to drink alone!

In my case you can take the kid out of the bedroom full of books and slightly creepy Victorian pictures of naked ladies and...erm...she'll probably stay there.

It honestly is interesting, though - the way the working class is now seen as something to be striven out of ASAP.

In the past - early 20th century for example - no-one would have assumed that working class people would not have an interest in literature, politics, culture - or been thoughtful, articulate, resourceful and clever. DH Lawrence, I hear you cry. Quite right, I reply!

There is a fantastic memoir of a girl brought up in abject poverty in the New Forest during the Depression, and she remembered her father going out to meet the mobile library that came round the villages, and coming home to read to them from Dickens and Karl Marx.

And there's that fantastic scene in Howards End where Leonard Bast goes to the 'Music and Meaning' lecture...

But times have changed. Working class is now an insult, right?

It gives me the SADS.

So true... when I read Lady Chatterly's Lover for the first time (Mrs Craddock also very similar) I remember thinking how radical it was that a working class man could be portrayed like that - in NI where I grew up, we were portrayed as sectarian scum by the media.

Aye. It's sad.

I tend to insist on being working class partly out of sheer mischief (It's prolly not the first thing that would strike you!) and partly because...well....I don't have property, or savings, or assets, or the kind of job where I get private healthcare, and I've never been skiing, and my Dad was kinda born in a slum, really, and my granny was in service. So what if I can play Chopin nocturnes and can recite Tennyson? Doesn't make me middle class. Tennyson isn't going to get me decking and two weeks in the Loire, is it?!