To think that Jamie Oliver is a Goady goady mc judgy pants personified!

[LEMisdisappointed]

judgey much?

It reads like a clip from the daily mail - actually, it probably is!

Now there are people, i have a friend who can make an amazing meal out of apparently nothing (she is italian though!) in ten minutes flat - although she has lots of those ingredients that are expensive to buy in the first place but go a long way,i would never know what to do with them!

I am such a boring cook, i have a small repertoire (sp) of meals that i cook - over and over again, the ingredients in my cupboard are basic because i can't afford capers and porcinni mushrooms etc. I rarely fall back on ready meals and feed my family healthily. But its boring really and i can understand why some people use ready meals - time, money - So yeah, making your own pizza will be cheaper than dominos or tesco fineset but it is not going to be cheaper than icelands £1 pizza is it? Not from scratch, not from the start - yes if you divide the amount of pizzas your flour, cheese, tomato sauce and anything else you want to put on it by 20 it might be cheaper but those ingredients have to be bought in the first place.

See, I would welcome cheap and easy ways to make my meals more exciting and thankfully we are not on the breadline this month, but im not going to watch that smug little bastard telling me how i can just knock out some pucker tucker out of a packet of anchovies and dust from the cupboard!

I have always thought him a smug twat - this confirms it!

I think there is a difference between having a bag of chips and a few burgers in the freezer and having enough space to systematically bulk cook and freeze in advance.

I agree with you Poppy but we have to acknowledge that people haven't learned to cook. So we need to start from that point. Unfortunately supermarkets don't care and will continue to promote manufactured factory food.

So someone needs to do something. It looks like JO is the only one so far who's doing anything on a national basis.

I never buy baking potatoes which are labelled up as such, far too expensive - just buy a bag of potatoes and bake the bigger ones.

Aris we usually eat octopus boiled in its own water, covered in olive oil and garlic with new potatoes and steam veggies. Or roasted in the oven.

We usually make a stew of squid with chorizo and peas, or seafood rice (paella style)

And I eat very well. And having taught cooking skills to hundreds of my patients over the years, they try to also. But you are applying your experience to the masses. Subjectivity is what leads to cruel statements like Jamie's.

I do think time is a huge factor, I am lucky enough to have a job which means that one evening a week I am home for 4:30 and I have the weekends and school holidays free to teach my children to cook. Most people do not have that luxury.

No they don't; I was simply responding to the idea that a sack of pots is longer lasting and cheaper, whereas Iceland ready meals can be picked up on the way home from work and not stored.

...but not anything helpful.

I don't really get the 'well he's trying' argument. Would you say that if the plumber you'd asked to fix your leak faffed around and just made it worse?

If you are poor and struggling and your issue isn't that you are spunking money on tvs or over priced ready meals, you'd be pretty fucked off to be given advice that doesn't help, wouldn't you?

We have certainly had very tiny budget times and struggled and I would consider myself to be a good cook. Am certainly well educated enough to have calculated the entire calories and nutrition of the month to make sure we were getting enough of everything. I had to top up the calories with cheap biscuits etc because I couldn't bump up the size of meals or portions of veg without going over budget.

If his programme had been on telly then I would have been absolutely raging.

As it is I'm still quite pissed off.

The supermarkets fill their shelves w/ crap, enter into deals w/ local councils that favour them and help put small suppliers out of business. They price particular foods cheaply so as to appeal to people who haven't been taught to cook at home or at school and have limited time, money or resources to do so. The price of basic raw ingredients goes up and up whilst public transport, road costs and petrol goes up making travel to local farm shops and delivery to your home more costly. People become disempowered, deskilled and devoid of opportunities to make changes.

Then we blame those who choose to buy the competitively priced less 'wholesome' food stuffs.

Nice.
Warped.
Smug.

Aris almost everyone works full-time in Southern Europe; I'm also pretty sure we have the lowest number of SAHParents in the continent.

Parents arrive home late and cook from scratch and children grow up seeing it and learning it. You don't necessarily give them formal lessons on how to cook a meal. It's just expected you'll learn or starve because there are no ready meals for sale in supermarkets

I agree with the defeatism comment, Starfish.

Surely you can not be convinced that the UK is worse off/works harder/has less resources than most countries?

Star I work w/ people with serious serious Mental health problems who are not defeatist. They cannot work and even if they could, who the hell wants to employ them?They have somebody to help them learn to cook if they are able. But many simply are not but need to eat on the little money they have.

Not everybody is defeatist. Not everybody has the same chances. Yes, I take on board your point that there are some lazy selfish parents who don't bother to feed and clothe their children adequately and they come from all the social classes, believe me. But it is becoming an ugly and acceptable form of benefit bashing when the real criminals (in my eyes) are speculators, multinationals and supermarkets chains who do not give a damn about their customers other than the continued passing over the counter of their £££

I don't find defeatism on this thread. People are pointing out that it is simplistic and presumptuous to draw a comparison between the food people eat and the size of their TVs, especially when it's related entirely to poor people.

Not to mention hypocritical if you make most of your money appearing on the telly.

but not everyone who eats crap food has MH issues, lives too far from a cheap healthy food etc etc.

most people need to help themselves - whatever the rights and wrongs of that situation - because that is their best and only option.

Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece have some of the worst unemployment and children there are increasingly leaving home without learning to cook although the two are not necessarily related.

A Spanish exchange teacher told me (with tears in her eyes) that these nations are called PIGS by some people in Germany Portugal, ITaly, Greece and Spain because of their deficits and unemployment. I rather think those Sicilian fishermen have to toil all the hours god sends for a diminishing return....

mignonette you actually just reinforced my point - we have some of the worst unemployment figures and on the whole we're still eating healthier meals than your children. What does that say?

As as for your argument, I call straw man.

Nobody has even remotely implied that people with disabilities/mental or physical health problems fit that category.

In fact, I think what most people are reiterating here is that there should be more education around food and nutrition, so you're just arguing alone, really.

It's like saying "I'm sorry but I believe all children should be fed" erm... so do we, so what's your point?

I know it's completely out of fashion to take responsibility for your own life, but that's what we're discussing here; you have 8GPB to spend - do you buy chips from the corner shop or cook a nutritious dinner for your children?

"And children there are increasingly leaving home without learning to cook."

No, they are not.

In fact, if anything they're leaving home much later (if at all) these days because they can't afford to.

mignonette they are termed PIGS but not by Germans. that's your teacher being racist.

its the general economic term for those nations.

as BRIC is for Brazil, Russia, India, China. don't be so anti German.

True. Weren't they even the PIGSI for a while, when it included Ireland?

I think Ireland is still considered a PIG

I think Ireland was the I in PIGS before Italy. V dubious claim to fame.

There's a weird sentence

I take plenty of responsibility for my own life and I also work at the sharp end with many people people that some posters would sneer at. Easy to say from the comfort of your home really.

As for eating better, they aren't. Increasing concerns over the amount of young Italians who are rejecting home cooking and eating processed food, the rise of chain restaurants, coffee shops etc, the rise of processed foods in stores and increasing spread of supermarkets in rural areas-just look at France where the traditional breakfast has been replaced in many middle class homes by sweet cereals not sold there fifteen years ago because they are seen as 'cool' and unusual. So Poppy, you are talking idealistica 'let's go to Tuscany and eat lovely simple food' nonsense spouted by so many people who see one side of life even if they live there as expats or immigrants. Your experience is always going to be clouded.

Faster my friend stated that what was once used as a valueless economic term has now crossed over into a term of abuse. She meant no racism, merely reporting what she has read in more scurrilous German media and heard from people there whilst living in Munich teaching.

PIGS was used as a term of abuse to her when she told some pupils where she was from. She was very upset by it and as a language teacher weho speaks five languages fluently and also has an business degree (with translation skills) she is well aware of its original meaning. Do not throw racist accusations about.