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!

What I should have said was "any law that benefits individual and small company growers/traders is swiftly lobbied against by the large multinational corporations". Fact is, they are very powerful and a lot of the accounts of what happens make terrible reading.

This is why I love food journalism and have started my own oral history research into how people maintain their culinary traditions when they migrate to the UK. Early days yet but it fascinates me.

however fairtrade banana sales grow every year so del monte at al are not all powerful.

Jamie seems to imply that this book/tv show is aimed at those who live on ready meals and don't or can't afford cook from scratch. Well if they can't afford to cook then they can't afford his book and will they bother to watch the show if they don't like cooking anyhow. I think the reality is that it will be watched by Jamie fans who already cook for their families and are feeling the pinch or those looking for new ideas. I wish he was just honest about this rather than implying that he's trying to save the world.

Faster I think you might need to read up a little on Del Monte and similar organisations and their influence over Washington.

Then read up on Fair Trade and their total sales. Plus also a lot of Fairtrade comes from non Caribbean sources and Del Monte has its power base in the Caribbean.

Seriously, just because Fair Trade are doing well doesn't mean that 1) multinationals are becoming less powerful and 2) that they aren't having to fight a rearguard action all the time.

Fairtrade will provide you with plenty of information about the activities of multinationals upon the fruit and nut trade.

We are becoming better informed about what we buy. That is where Fair Trade have been particularly effective.

I still have that book MrsDeVere. Its a bit out of date now!

Also of interest is the powerful meat industry lobbyists-slaughterhouse owners, ranchers, processors who have an enormous influence upon the way meat is farmed, sold and protected by laws 'paid for' by powerful industrial moguls.

Fast Food Nation was the first to mainstream explore this.

I think my mum was telling me about that book MrsDV. She said it was written ages ago but all the stuff in it about how and why it's hard to be healthy when you are poor is still true now.

Mignonette - I'm an immigrant family, I was think about it earlier, because we are kiwi a lot of our food is very European anyway. But my parents ate a lot more fish and seafood than we do. They didn't teach us to cook mussels etc, because they didn't think British mussels were very good or worth the money! It was the 80s when we came here anyway, so they loved ready meals.

mignonette - I agree with some of your last post. but you don't paint a balanced picture. and you need to read up on economics.

What I am seeing on this thread is a huge amount of knowledge and experience of feeding a family on a budget in the real world.

So bugger letting JO et al write the books, why don't we do it? It could start with a thread on here where people can share their budget family recipes - the sort of recipes that don't require a huge selection of expensive store cupboard ingredients, can be made with easily and readily available produce - with an approximate cost per head.

Also bring back home economics, teach kids basic cooking skills, nutrition, hygiene and safety in the home, basic first aid , domestic finance and budgeting. These are all life skills and just as important as swimming lessons and bike safety. All the money the government put into healthy eating promotion could be put to better use in schools for this purpose. Jamie should shut up and campaign for this instead.

My Mum's most used cookery book is still The Poor Cook, she has had that for decades.

He's a smug twat

Yes!. Spot on, shebird!

Have read plenty of economics especially w/ regard to the global economic model, the influence of hedgefund speculaion upon food commodities. Yes I know that is how the capitalist model works along the lines of what i call economic Darwinism but I'm arguing that it is wrong. And too many people are unaware of the journey made by their food. Yes, I have much still to learn but I do know about the very ugly practices of corporate food production in areas such as banana/other fruit and veg growing and also the effects of flower growing in countries such as Kenya with the use of carcinogenic pesticides and dangerous working practices. Same again in the production of our lovely Egyptian cotton sheeting. Children of six working in the fields being poisoned by pesticides and toxins.

i just try to do the best i can.

And yes, to a MN campaign thread and advice SDT.

Te I'd love to interview your family one day as part of my oral history project. Antipodean culinary experiences would be a new education for me as relatively under represented in the culinary media.

Zengardener, what's wrong with your friend's choices in what she grows and raises? Surely her choices are her own?

I'm sure my mum would love to talk to you. Just PM me with details whenever. As I say though, food is not that different, but the change from somewhere where you HAD to do everything from scratch to somewhere you didn't was a big thing.

No, my point is that she does these things for fun or because she likes the image not for necessity.

I think these days living "The Good Life" is such a middle class thing and so expensive and cooking from scratch can also be seen as such a middle class thing (especially if you use Jamie Oliver cookbooks) with expensive and hard-to-find ingredients.

It needn't be though. People can grow/buy staples cheaply. Good British cooking doesn't need loads of things in the store cupboard. You don't need Peruvian fairy dust to make things like casseroles, soup, stews. A stock cube, bit of salt and pepper, bag of veg and some cheap meat. It's easy.

That's why I am curious as to what kind of recipes he will have in his new book. If it is things like Bolivian goat curry with Passionfruit ice cream then forget it. If it is good, simple cooking that doesn't need 10 different pots and pans then I think he may be able to make a point.

I'm interested in what you say mignonette about nutrition and growth.

During the First and Second World wars there were bantam regiments in Britain composed of men who were 5ft 4ins or under.

My uncle would have qualified. Because they were brothers, he volunteered for the same regiment as my father, who was four years younger than him and eight inches taller because by that time they'd moved to a country with better nutrition.

But there's no consequence to living on on bread and potatoes .

shebird I agree with you there. Those are all life skills that would benefit everyone, along with basic sewing skills.

Completely changing the subject back to original post, but personally I think JO is rather fit. I definitely would. Twice. And wouldn't kick him out for toast crumbs either

I await my supply of free JO goodies. In person preferably! :)

can we all agree the previous post is the most disgusting thing ever on MN?

But who can afford to sew these days? Material is so expensive and people can pick up clothes in Primark for a few pounds.

Unless duckydaddles is actually outing herself as Jooles Oliver? It is probably OK for her to fancy him, no?