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!

it costs a needle, thread and scissors to fix something - surely cheaper than replacing, if you cost travelling to the shop etc.

Sewing buttons/darning is useful. I've sewn up lots of socks in my time.

Dackyduddles throws up

There really needs to be a 'I'm going to be sick' emoticon.

SDT - I would rather Jooles lay back and thought of England rather than enjoyed shagging JO.

that is nasty.

I'm thinking fixing things rather than making things with regards to the sewing.

I've seen my niece throw something out because the button came off. But replacing a button, zip or hem could save people a fortune.

And the last thing I bought from Primark disintegrated in the washing machine on the very first wash. I'd rather buy something from the charity shop and fix it or slightly alter it than shop there. If people had the skills they would probably use them and do the same.

Thanks TeWi. I'll save your details and Pm you hopefully at some point. Would be a great contribution and she'd have complete control over what is recorded and kept.

Limited The Mass Observation study has a wealth of information on wartime social/culinary habits which can go hand in hand w/ health morbidity and mortality statistics top provide a good picture of how choices impact over a medium term period.

I'm sure I have read that Rickets, scurvy and such conditions are increasingly being detected by primary care teams because of dietary deficiencies whatever the underlying cause.

Thing is JO is part of this vast food machine that exists on a global basis now. He has taken the Sainsbury's pieces of gold, sold his products mostly in large supermarkets including some pretty poor food items and now attacks the people who have brought into this model for whatever reason.

I have an old shopping bag where I put clothes for fixing when I can be bothered. at the moment it contains:

1. black leggings
2. coat that needs gluing
3. dress that needs re-hemming above where I ripped it

DH sews and embroiders. It's an addition to his job and as such, of added value. It's self-taught.

My father, who was a real '50s and '60s mans' man, liked to embroider too, because it appealed to his artistic nature. Though he kept it quiet, though he did go out on a limb and push a pram every now and then.

I had sewing lessons at school. It was that kind of school. I have banana fingers and for the good of DH's business, he asks me and my stabby bloody fingers to keep away.

We both agree that unlike cooking lessons at school, that I also had, but he didn't, it's not an essential skill.

with sewing as another poster suggested you can alter charity shop finds or buy off ebay etc. I think primark can be a false economy as the quality is bad as is alot of the high street these days.

interesting to hear about dh who sews. my paternal gps were tailors and gd had sewing room with cottons etc.

I don't know that the urban poor in Britain have ever eaten well tbh, particularly post-Industrial Revolution. My working class family have passed down cooking skills which mean I can cook well, but I suspect part of the reason for that is that they learned to cook well because so many of them were in service and they came from the countryside anyway. I'm not sure that the urban poor have ever had much access to fuel and facilities to cook - most of them would have relied on public bakehouses or bought street food, the pre-20th c. ready meal.

Having said that that is no excuse for some of the shocking defeatism on this thread. JO is not saying 'let them eat mussels.' He's saying that an awful lot of people are disconnected from traditional ways of cooking, which is causing them to spend more money and have poorer diets in the long term. Which I think is true.

During WW2, nutrition in Britain actually improved for most people despite extreme shortage of food and the fact most people were working, because people were forced to eat more veg and fish and rationing was calculated to give you all the nutrients you needed. The same problems of poverty and access to food must have existed then too, but enough people must have managed it somehow, or there wouldn't have been this massive societal change. All of which suggests that it is possible to radically change food culture in quite a short space of time if people are motivated enough.

BUT - the unpalatable thing is that you need very drastic intervention from government to achieve something like this, because most people just won't make those changes for themselves. And they will only tolerate intervention such as this in extreme circumstances like wartime.

My mum treasures a hanky embroidered with her initials by my dad in the run-up to D-Day. She sent him a rosary which is lost, though he came back.

Don't know why I'm saying that, except I'm sure my dad would have considered Jamie Oliver to be a weapons grade cunt

an awful lot of people are disconnected from traditional ways of cooking, which is causing them to spend more money and have poorer diets in the long term

I agree with you fairphyllis. However, I don't think Jamie Oliver is saying that. Or if he is, he's not saying it very well,

I don't think it's fair to lambast someone trying to make a positive impact on people's lives just because the solution isn't easy or workable for some. Why spend so much energy criticising someone's efforts? Total crab mentality.

PMSL @ Harry. He is doing this for money. He is paid very, very handsomely for this, not to make a positive impact on peoples' lives but to make a positive impact on his purse. He's not doing this out of the kindness of his heart but to flog his book for £12.

Yet it's fair of him to lambast an entire group of people when he gets paid millions to design a range of the very foods he lambasts the poor for using?

He's worth £130m, I'm willing to bet his accompanying book will the be the number one bestseller till Christmas time. His coffers will be nicely reimbursed for his saintly acts.

AndHarry, why is he concentrating on poor people though? Why not Eric Pickles or Phillip Green or Dawn French - people with an awful lot of money and resources who choose to stay fat.

Or middle class people who are fat from guzzling too much wine or pate?

As I said on another thread, when it's the poor he views it as a moral failing. When people accuse him of being a fat fucker it's apparently 'hurtful' and a result of age or 'living well'.

Hypocritical tosser.

Ok, so there is no winning. Anyone who has any money and tries to do something good is a hypocritical do-gooder who should f off back to Wiltshire or Notting Hill or wherever it is they live.

'Anyone who has any money and tries to do something good is a hypocritical do-gooder who should f off back to Wiltshire or Notting Hill or wherever it is they live.'

How is he doing something good? He's doing this to get people to buy his book. It's a giant advert.

If he donates his entire fee and the profits from his book to a suitable charity I might believe he wants to help. The only person he is helping is his bank manager.

JO is a hypercritical tosser.

AndHarry. You misunderstand. Bob Geldof, for example did a lot of good and made a lot of money. But they were separate enterprises. He made lots of money for Band Aid and had a TV production company which he sold.

That is quite a different concept from using do-gooding as a guerilla tactic for flogging your cookery books. He has never just done something purely for it's own sake. There has always been a money making motivation in it for him.

I'm really looking forward to the webchat.

Thursday, is it? It's a date, fatboy.

Is it? I'm booking my seat for that.

He gets on my nerves too but I don't think he's wrong here. The poorest areas are usually full of takeaway shops. I've never really understood it because takeaways are expensive.

This might explain it for you Vincettenoir -

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/27/jamie-oliver-poverty-ready-meals-tv