"they ate fast food and junk food but had splashed out of a plasma TV."

[ConfusedPixie]

This comment just came up on the radio news, supposedly said by Jamie Oliver about one of the families he was working with in his new TV show.

AIBU to wonder how the fuck what you eat relates to what TV you have?

Surely this just reinforces stereotypes of the people likely to have bad diets through lack of education on the matter? What a bullshit statement.

really food is being held hostage by the middle man who is making his fortune - that's the problem.

Some of these arguments are a bit like the; "DP went away on business for a couple of weeks and I coped just fine with my 2 children, being a single parent doesn't seem that difficult" point of view.

There is a gulf between eating tinned tomatoes and pasta because you like it and eating it constantly, feeding it to your DC constantly andfeeling unable to see a way out, unable to treat them ever (until you get a big fucking TV from Brighthouse and buy the children chips and cheese to eat in front of it as a lovely treat)

(and they hold it hostage so fucking long it's nearly rotten by the time it gets to the shelf)

i do love chips and cheese sadly ds wouldn't eat them - he's a olives, pasta, fresh prawns and nice baby veg kind of boy sadly with a good side portion of sweets and biscuits.

Well, i think thats what JO is trying to do ubik, isnt he? In trying to highlight all the different meals that can be made quick & easy & cheaply.

by pretending they can be made quick and easy and cheaply he rather misses the point.

so swallowed - what do you consider a 'normal' meal?

i don't think there's any such thing as a 'normal' meal. you can eat allsorts over the course of a week and get your nutritional needs met. you can eat your chips and cheese in front of the telly once a week if you like, you can have your manky tomato and onion pasta, you can have eggs and sausages and baked beans, you can have meat and two veg or a casserole, you can eat whatever the hell you like and can afford as far as i'm concerned so long as you're not telling anyone else what to eat.

it's variety. most people do not want to eat the same thing day in and day out and clearly eating the same thing day in and day out would not be healthy.

I think it's fine for him to make another cookery programme - he' a successful chef, why not show people how to cook nice food?

But to turn into some crusade about 'educating the poor' and attaching value judgements to it about large TVs just buys into the media's current obsession with blaming folk on low incomes for their circumstances. the sub-text is that if they were just a bit more thrifty(like the middle classes with their chicken keeping, foraging and mussel eating) they would have nothing to moan about.

My mums family were working class growing up in London and they kept chickens, ate cheap cuts of meat and drank the cabbage water etc etc but they lived in Camberwell in a house with a garden. These days they would be in a high rise because those houses cost £1.5m.

Good post twelve. I saw the programme, too. AFIR, he taught her to make pancakes, which went down a treat. All the ingredients measured by the mug, so she didn't need scales.

Now the haters can spend x pages saying pancakes are the pits, how can you make them without a frying pan etc etc.

Obviously, not everyone is in a position to be able to use all his ideas, but at least he's trying- not like how to cook a sea bass on Masterchef. And when he worked for Sainsbury's, he wasn't plugging ready meals. It was the How to feed a family on £x recipe cards.

Save the invective for someone who doesn't give a toss.

swallowed but you have just been telling me what i eat is unhealthy....

you can eat whatever the hell you like and can afford as far as i'm concerned so long as you're not telling anyone else what to eat.

by your rules you should not be commenting!

because you were saying that was a sustainable diet for anyone and cheap and blah blah. i'm not saying that meal is not healthy as a meal but to eat it every day is not sustainable. you were telling other people what to eat re: see what you quoted and therefore why i commented.

Nothing middle class about chickens and foraging. Theres plenty of child poverty in the country as well as the city where you dont have windowsills/gardens/hedgerows. Cornwall is particularly notorious for it.

because you were saying that was a sustainable diet for anyone and cheap and blah blah

yes - i was inviting comment by talking about what i do & why i do it.

however if someone says 'i cannot afford to feed my children a healthy diet' clearly many people who say that will be correct. but not everyone.

so to talk about what you do & why you do it, is inviting comment.

no i don't think i qualify as mc anymore and i keep chickens. outside of cities council houses often come with large gardens with room to keep chickens and grow veg if you had the energy. veg is beyond me and i wouldn't like to think what would happen to my water bill either.

Yes Empress, you are right. I have only ever lived in the city where the equivalent of foraging is going to Southern Fried Chicken

Mt MIL grew up very poor in the countryside - her father would shoot rabbits and grow his own veg. They had a reasonable diet although were hungry alot of the time. on Friday's her mother would fry slivers of potato and put them hot into a thickly buttered roll for tea. It was still shite being poor though, according to her.

Soverylucky - I Never said it was a complete meal for regular eating (That would be mad)

(Its delicious but clearly variety is needed)

As the human body requires a diet constructed of approximately 60% carbohydrate, 35% protein and 5% fats with a variety of fruit and vegetables to provide the variety of vitamins and minerals required to sustain a healthy body I would hazard a guess that a continuous diet of onions, carrot and lentils would not satisfy an adult's daily nutritional requirements.

oh look - you have chosen to ignore some posts to create a straw man.

that's original.

no one said theyd be a continuous diet, just an example of a meal. Other very cheap veg I use for meals would be tinned sweetcorn, frozen peas, potatoes...

I am just doing my food shop and onions are 90p a kg and that is in Waitrose. I have googled and the average onion is about 100g, so about 9p an onion.

Thanks Arisbottle! In waitrose - what I had assumed was the most expensive supermarket. Now people might believe me that in my local shops 9p is a fair price.

onions are a staple in India.