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!

its nothing to do with Germany. its a general term.

associating it with Germany is the racist bit.

oh the Germans cannot do anything right either. even though half of Europe owes them for not letting their banking system fail.

I have also worked w/ people who have serious social problems too not necessarily to do with MI. I also work with plenty of people who are not deemed to have MI per se but other problems of functioning.

As I have already said (and some posters seem to have skated over) I do not deny that there are plenty of people who feed their children rubbish and who are selfish as opposed to impaired by the system.

However these nuances do not come into play when statements like JO's are discussed in the media. Everybody gets tarnished w/ the same brush and these celebs just do not learn to measure what they say. The same old stereotypes get trotted out and nothing actually changes then because of course 'these people' get what they 'deserve' regardless of the broken, ugly and conditioning of our social system.

Faster Oh my Dear God will you listen to what I am saying. It was German media that this was written in and German teenagers who said it and laughed at her, not Icelandic or Irish or Polynesian. My Brother lives in Germany. My nieces are German. She did not say all Germans do it. said it has been written in the German media. My Brother confirms he has seen it too when I asked him.

Good on the Germans for doing well. I visit Germany all the time (My niece was born w/ severe brain damage there two months ago) to visit family there. I empathise with the understandable resentment they feel at baling other nations out.

Don't be so knee jerk w/ the accusations of racism because you diminish the very real racism that exists here, there and everywhere.

mignonette - the term is used widely in the UK media. surely you know this?

Faster

A Spanish exchange teacher told me (with tears in her eyes) that these nations are called PIGS by some people in Germany

My original post ^^.

Racism would be saying that some people=all people in Germany. There is nothing racist in my post and I take Great offence at you suggesting there is. Great offence.

If JO is so interested in getting us all to cook on healthy diets etc, how come his range of food is uber expensive? Completely out of the budget of the average family? huh? huh?

mignon - take offense if you like.

but PIGS is used by many people worldwide.
so why are you talking about Germans?

and its nothing to do with pigs.

as in BRIC is nothing to do with brick or anything else.

faster

You really are not listening are you? I said 'Some People'. I also said that the original term had been distorted by her students and some elements of the media as a term of abuse. These people were in her classroom in the country of Germany. Hence the use of 'Some People In Germany'

She is not exposed to the British media at the moment but I will advise her that whenever she is abused in the future, she must google the term to check where else in the World said abuse is actively being used so as to be certain of not being accused of racism by an overreacting person who does not properly read what a MNer has written.

There is so much 'stop sneering at people' on this thread.
I actually have seen very little!
I think pretty much everyone knows it is harder for some than others, not everything will be possible for all people, the causes and results of poverty and lack of education are complex, etc.

But how else is anything going to change if advice and ideas aren't targeted at the people they involve?

Nobody in power gives a shiny shit that people are going hungry, in fact they love it right now because it makes their core voters feel virtuous about themselves. Every institution we have is corrupt or incapable.

All we have is ourselves. I think JO is going about this the wrong way, and I'm saddened that he will make money from what should be being handed down with pride. But honestly: this is where we are at. People on telly meaning well and getting it wrong. I think we as a population need to wake up and take what we can get right now.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask people to question their own choices. As far as store cupboard 'layout' goes - well things last a long time so in theory you should only need to buy one thing a week for a few weeks to have a good stock. The poor maligned capers are less than £2 for a jar. Olives are less than £1 per jar. You can't really argue that you can't afford that level of outlay if you are also spending blocks of cash on things that are nice to have - which is Jamie's point I think. Bottom line is sometime people make bad choices out of laziness, ignorance and stubborness Doesn't really help those people if we all adopt a 'whatever goes' attitude.

Yes we need to address the corporate takeover of Britain that has led to the demise of local shops in many areas.

this is a very good point. when Tesco claim to be creating jobs, they are just switching the jobs from the smaller shops that will inevitable close or reduce costs.

Christ you really are not comprehending a perfectly simple explanation are you Faster? PIGS= acronym used worldwide. PIGS= acronym used in an abusive manner to insult a Spanish teacher who happens to be from one of the PIGS nations. PIGS as an acronym also translates to PIG the animal perceived erroneously as being inferior/unclean whatever. If another country uses this acronym perjoratively then she wouldn't be aware of that because she was not living in that country. Nor did he/she ever say all Germans

Can't argue with stupid. Why am I bothering to flog this dead horse?

And I suppose now that somebody will come on here w/ hysterical accusations of animal abuse after my dead horse comment.

Twistyfeet - you'd have a point if his range of foods was all healthy. Have you seen the amount of salt in his jarred pasta sauces? I normally have no problem with a good quality jarred sauce, but the M&S one I buy is half the price for half as much again and has near enough half as much salt per 100g. His bacon is nice, but it's hardly aimed at the value market. I consider it to be expensive and I usually buy the sainsburys taste the difference or the M&S outdoor reared equivalent. I can get 2 packs of those, on offer, for not much more than one of his. If I'm going to pay those prices for bacon, it'll be for the really delicious stuff from a nearby organic farm. (And if we weren't so comfortably off, I'd not be paying those prices in a million years - I'd be buying bacon bits. Reluctantly and infrequently, just to add flavour and protein to otherwise meatless meals. But I'm not his target audience)

mignonette your comment regarding the dead horse was offensive and racist... Are you insinuating the horse deserved to die?

Princess

I didn't have any issue with providing my child with a healthy menu before Mr Oliver and I don't have now.

Yes he is live -changing lol

Not read all the thread.

He's got the sort of liver lips that stick to windows and make me go Bleyrgh.

That aside, he's very smug. When I was at home looking after my kids, I had a valuable commodity: time. I was able to push them in the buggy to the cheap market stalls, and buy cheap cuts of meat, and spend all day stewing them slowly. I prepared everything cheaply, and yes, healthily. This summer holiday i've done the same, as I am lucky enough to work term-time only. I'm able to pop to the butchers. Today we got a load of pork, lovely carb free sausgaes and veg enough for 3 meals for £6.75.

HOWEVER: during term time, the nearest supermarket is miles away, the local shops shut before I can get to them, and I shop at the weekends for the rest of the week. This means that the veg isn't the freshest by the end of the week, and I have to plan everything like mad to get a decent meal out. Plus, I have to do it all within milliseconds of getting the very hungry kids home after school and work. So, yes, we do fall back on canned food, what my kids call "square fish" in those packets of sauce, and fishfingers. I don't make my own bloody flapjacks anymore either. So what? Joolz, Jools or whatever you spell it as has planty of dosh and time, lots of women don't. Working mums, shift working mums, working dads, carers, people with a ton of kids who all eat at different times, whatever, sometimes a couple of days of fishfingers and waffles IS OK. END OF.

I can spend ages making a macaroni cheese to my traditional familial recipe with loads of veg and pepperoni in, but the kids will always, always, prefer it out of a can. And sometimes, it's better for me to plonk that on a plate with some square fish and frozen peas and sweetcorn, and actually spend the times I would have spent cooking, with the kids instead. So there, Liver Lips.

Yes Oury. Sell bottled packaged crap to the masses and then slag them off for it. What an honourable business plan. Kind of trashes any credibility really.

I think that his problem is like a lot of celebrities.
Once they have gone a long way from their roots, their perspectives get out of kilter, and they rarely find their way back again.

A shame really.
I think his heart was originally in the right place.

Maybe he could collaborate w/ Gwyneth Paltrow? After all he did go to her house to teach her how to cook his Duck Ragu.

She's got her feet on the ground too, that one.

"Yes we need to address the corporate takeover of Britain that has led to the demise of local shops in many areas."

what has that got to do with anything? Tesco sell carrots!