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!

He's had a go at British workers today, saying they're lazy!!!!!

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2403575/Jamie-Oliver-Why-I-rely-Brits-staff-restaurants.html

Right, so he's insulted British workers and poor people, I wonder who it will be tomorrow

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2403575/Jamie-Oliver-Why-I-rely-Brits-staff-restaurants.html

The Middle Classes are now getting fat at a faster rate than the poor. Giles Coren is another 'fat basher' whilst being very very portly himself (have seen him several times in his not inconsiderable flesh) making him a self loathing hypocrite.

I have no issue whatsoever with people who are overweight. Indeed plenty of other conditions cost the NHS more (think sports injuries for a start) but what i do have an issue with is people making moral judgements based upon appearance. Not that far removed from the castigation and identification of Jewish people based upon a moral value being ascribed to their looks.

I said upthread that the French, Italian, Greek, Portugese and Spanish were all suffering the consequences of their young increasingly choosing to not cook and to eat less fresh food and of the effect of poverty upon diet. I got sneered at over my example of rising consumption of sweet breakfast cereal in France when in fact this is just one example of what is happening and is part of an insidious trend. Just as it was here too. Darkest I agree w/ you and at least your partner has his eyes open to what is truly happening in Italy as opposed to the promulgation of the idea that they are all still eating 'Nonna's' fresh food. Yes, many do. But increasing numbers do not for reasons of poverty, changing demographic patterns such as migration for work, change in family living patterns, more supermarkets.

In fact my Father lived in France and visiting him over the last 30 years, I have seen supermarkets creep across the country slowly filling their shelves w/ convenience foods and crap. The changes have been very apparent.

I feel bloody sorry for all of his British staff who work thier socks off for him!

Oh FUCK OFF Oliver.

last time I saw A Girl Called Jack being mentioned on a MN thread, she was being slated and posters were saying that she did not understand poverty, was faking it, her recipes were gross/unhealthy/expensive, and tens of other negative comments.

so now she is a hero?

really whatever the wrongs of someone presenting food advice, I would consider it with an open mind, because............

...................what other help do you really think is going to happen in the future?

not what should happen, what you would bet your own money as actually likely to happen? I would bet what happens, is just more of the same.

mignonette The Middle Classes are now getting fat at a faster rate than the poor do you have as reference for that?

She's no fake and those MNers should hang their heads in shame. The post below has been taken from the replies on A Girl Called Jack's blog in response to Jamie Oliver-

"Good morning , I am replying to your post from my desk in a coastal town near Barcelona in Spain and indeed I agree totally with you and your initiative. Here, in the village, the Town Hall has started putting land to the disposal of the elderly members of our society and on a small pension so they can grow their own vegetables; I hope the same might be the case for other members of our society since in these times of crisis and lack of resources it would be a great help to families. Some of us are trying to start what we call the ?0 kilometre? movement and buy only from local producers and farmers and it is possible to buy much cheaper fruit and vegetables from our local farmers on the street market that takes place twice a week; they are also much fresher than the supermarket ones.
I would also like to add that such movements tend to create much stronger social links and encourage people helping each other when there is the need."

That is what our local councils need to do. Allotments are not enough. As already said, JO took millions from Sainsbury's, makes millions from his range of high salt processed, packaged foods from the supermarkets then dares to lecture the public and insult them?

Faster it was all over the press a few weeks ago. I'll have a look.

Here is one that triggered the press avalanche. Giles Coren referred to it.

A big part of being able to eat economically is having the time, the energy and the option to shop carefully, to look for the bargains in the different shops and to find the best deals.

Can you do that if you are restricted to public transport? If you only have one shop within walking distance? If you can't afford the petrol to visit three different supermarkets? No, you can't.

And if you haven't learned or been taught how to look at a selection of ingredients and work out what to do with them (as opposed to buying the ingredients for a particular recipe), then you may struggle to make use of the bargains you do manage to find in the reduced cabinet or wherever.

For me, education is the key - teaching children how to budget, how to plan meals, how to adapt their plans to suit what they can buy, and how to prepare and cook the food. At least if you can do that, you can make the best use of what is available in your convenience store. You may not cook every night, but if you go in and happen to see a chicken in the reduced cabinet, you will have the confidence to pick it up and make something with it. And then maybe it becomes worth slowly (and as economically as possible) building up your storecupboard staples.

I do think we have lost a huge raft of practical skills. I go to a knitting group once a week - and women there talk about learning to knit in primary school - and knitting a pair of socks in the final year of primary (admittedly this is in Scotland, so they would be aged 11-12, not 10-11, but still). I learned sewing and cookery at school - we all did, boys included (and then we all went on and did woodwork and metalwork too) - and that meant we learned the basics, the grammar and vocabulary of cooking, if you will, as well as the basic skills. It is no use giving someone a cookbook if they don't know how to finely dice an onion or what it means to saute it, once diced. Yes, it is probably very easy to find out what it means, and to find a YouTube tutorial on how to dice the onion, but that will only happen if the person hasn't been demoralised and put off by the fact that they can't understand the recipe.

I mend clothing - and I have taught my dses to mend their clothes too - it is not always beautiful, but if a pair of jeans or tracksuit bottoms is only going to be used for their paper rounds, they don't care that the mend is not invisible, or that the fabric is puckered - but we have saved the money it would have cost to replace them. I have prolonged the life of so many pairs of school trousers, by taking up the hems, or restitching the seams in the crotch (for some reason these seams seem to fail with alarming regularity), and I have saved favourite garments of my own from the bin too. Dh usually does his own mending.

I love the idea, mooted up-thread, of giving households a starter pack of storecupboard basics - herbs, spices, stock cubes, flour etc. I would add a starter sewing kit to that - pins, needles, different colours of thread, and a selection of the most commonly-used sorts of buttons - with a simple, easily understood leaflet showing how to sew on a button or take up a hem that has dropped.

Sorry - that turned into a bit of an essay.

Well said SDT. We consider it vital to teach the 5 children we have between us to cook, budget and understand where their food comes from. Each child was taught then given a home made book made by me w/ recipes handwritten (family ones) and scrapbooked recipes and food articles from the press/magazines/internet. We include conversion charts, info on fairtrade, where to shop cheaply, cuts of meat and how to shop for a weeks meals etc. They all use them. I even gave one to my Daughters then BF when he went to university and he mentioned to her last week that he had finally (four yrs later) started to use it.

Blaming children who grow up deskilled because of what their parents have not done is awful.

My DD sews beautifully but I'm not responsible for that. Her gran gave her a sewing basket aged 6 which she still uses. She is a wonderfully practical girl.

JO is a cunt of Daniel ODonnell standards. (DOd is my cunt benchmark- not that he is offensive in his comments in the same way but to me he is offensive nonetheless) He forgets that while working silly hours he is taking home vast profits and the staff are taking home likely minimum wage. If he is pissed off at the regulations for a 48hr working week he should take it up Mr Cameron and not slagging off his British staff.

I do't have a garden because like many people in London I live in a flat. I do have a patio though.

So to do a few pots of herbs, I have to get two buses to the nearest Homebase (no garden centres in my borough), buy pots, trowel, seeds, watering can and soil. So probably £30 minimum. Then it's about £20 back home in a cab.

Back at mine, I have to bung the cabbie a fiver to carry the soil from the cab to my patio because I'm disabled and can't carry it myself. Then another one because he realises there are steps. I'm a ghastly poor like Jamie hates and I don't know anyone who can afford to drive me.

Then I spend my time and small amounts of energy potting them, even though things like dill, parsley and tarragon are difficult to grow from seed in pots and prefer the ground.

I can't even have them on my kitchen windowsill because I don't have one and the only one in my whole house is north facing and in the bathroom.

So yes, I find the whole my herb garden is free thing to be infuriating. Almost up there with those so called frugal bloggers who price 1 tbsp of flour and tell you they are so poor they have to sell their blood, but put the oven on to cook sag aloo...

mignonette

The Middle Classes are now getting fat at a faster rate than the poor

1. the research is only about children in a small area of leeds
2. your NHS link says "On its own, this research is not strong enough to prove that the current way of thinking about the link between deprivation and obesity is wrong. However, it does give pause for thought, and highlights the need for further, more focussed research."

Lol at the outrage at the suggestion that the middle classes should be getting fat.

Are getting fat - sorry typo caused by excessive chuckling.

aris you are seeing what you want to see.

i recently checked the figures for weight v. income and knew the overall trend was not as mingnonette was saying.

its a bit pointless debating with incorrect information. a complete waste of time.

for women as income increases, weight decreases.

Yes the mc are getting fatter. I blame JO's overpriced ready meals myself. Oh and let's not forget his pizza restaurants so beloved by the mc.

There is more research Faster. I've highlighted the one the media picked up on because it is NHS led and they tend to snap at that. Have a look.

Yes to outrage that the middle classes are getting fat Aris.

Check out the research in Canada, Norway, America, France, Italy.

It is out there in various online journals. If you go to your local library you can access some of it free too.

Carluccio's JO deli's and their ilk are like Disneyland- they do not reflect RL eating in the country they purport to represent.

Talking of growing your own stuff. I cant do the allotment thing but usually grow tomatoes and herbs in my tiny garden. Its the end of August and my tomatoes are still tiny green balls. If we had to rely on those for a healthy meal we'd all frigging starve! And there's about 6 so not enough for green tomato chutney either. bastard things. Usually there's loads.
The only herb that has grow is mint.

Well - I am middle class and hugely fat, so maybe I have skewed the figures, all on my own - picture me sitting on one end of the weight-statistics-seesaw, and everyone else on the other end, high up in the air, and you will have the correct picture.

Faster I am not denying that obesity, CV disease, NIDDM is more prevalent amongst the poorer but that this demographic will change and research worldwide shows that happening. This article is interesting in a gerneralist way in that it shows the misconceptions surrounding what are seen as 'healthier choices' including many Quorn based products. The rise in luxe ready meal sales is not a demographic that features the poor yet these M&S and Waitrose cook chill meals are often full of salt and nutritionally unbalanced. The rise in childhood carb, palm sugar and corn syrup plus fat intake is responsible (research says) for childhood obesity yet the restricted fat/.carb intakes of some childhood 'middle class' diets (Gwyneth Paltrow style restrictive diets which are not right for children) is also harmful to healthy development.

We have it all so skewed. We really do.

Twisty My allotment tomatoes are only just ripening despite being under glass. i have had a lot of berries and stone fruit this year but to supply my family w/ all the potatoes, green stuff, salad vegetable and onions we need I would need three acres! We get through five lettuces a week as it is so what I do is buy those 'living salad' trays that cost @ £1 and break them up. I then replant the many (over 100) minute lettuce plants in tubs or in the ground and keep them well watered. I have got some of my patients doing this and it saves a lot of £££ on lettuce and prevents frustration at low germination rates for some of them.

I am not middle class but certainly as I have earned more I have struggled to keep my weight down. As a child growing up I was skinny because we could barely afford to eat and we walked everywhere. All the way through university I was a size 8 for the same reasons. A growing income has enabled me to eat my way up to a size 12.