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!

Mindmaps I am not doing that (I don't live that sort of easy life, anyway, and two buses and a walk is normal, no?) I am challenging this idea that it's impossible. It isn't. It's difficult and not everyone wants to eat that sort of food, but that isn't the same as impossible or unrealistic, for lots of people (not absolutely every UK citizen).

It's all very well talking about changing the food culture in Britain but we'd also have to change the way our economy set up.

Most households need two wages, even if one's only part time, to be able to afford a decent standard of living. Many people, that's the ones who are lucky enough to have a job, not the benefit scroungers we hear about who sit in front of a widescreen telly, have a long commute.

Maybe when they get home they don't want to rustle up something using several ingredients bought from a supermarket which probably involves spending a good chunk of Friday night or Saturday morning in a traffic jam with all the other people who don't have shops they can walk to.

I live two minutes away from a wide variety of good food shops. When I do commute, it's half an hour door to door.

I like cooking but perhaps if I lived somewhere else I might not be so keen.

Good intentions? I wouldn't be surprised if this new idea if his is followed up by a 'ban ready meals' campaign, followed by a channel 4 series on how to cook a ready meal for cheap, followed up by a book.

He is so out of touch. My kids have had to stop having school dinners as the cost has increased massively, the portions have gone down and there is no seasoning. My kids are fit and active and I don't need his advice thanks. I don't know any parent in RL who agres with anything he says anymore.

That sad truth is that many poor people (but by no means not all) are unedcutated and would really struggle with all but the most basic recipes. Hmmm, i always used to think that home economics at school was a bit of a naff no-subject How wrong was i!! It is down the government to educate people in how to cook properly - this starts at school - maybe HE should be a core subject! and not be about sending folk off to open an artisan bakery or become a michelin star chef - there needs to be more value placed on providing for ones family - maybe tht has been left behind a little bit.

I would love to learn to cook better, although i cook from scratch my meals are a bit uninspiring - what about community based cooking clubs? Something where people can share family recipes? plain and simple ingredients? of course, that in itself will cost money but at least if its run by the community it wont have that patronising air about it?

Er isn't that what the thread is about though Fillyjonk? JO getting a trouncing for trying to educate people? Of course it makes a difference being able to cook, but half of you are saying it isn't worth learning because you can't get the stuff, and I'm saying you have to work at it, but you can.

Yes there are some people with little access to shops etc however, they will not be the majority.

My Mum lives in a very disadvanatged town (ex mining community).
Every Wednesday and Saturday there is a market selling everyhting from plastic tat toys to veg.

Every wed and sat my mum walks into town to buy veg. As she has done all her life. The town is also well served by cheap regular buses.

On both Wed and Sat the town will be packed. Yet many will go home with no cheap produce, having eaten sausage rolls and donuts from the bakers.

This is cultural. And it has to be addressed. It's not fair to just pretend it can't be!

There are many reasons why poor people have poor diets and funnily enough people don't generally respond well to well fed moralising multi millionaires.

Some people don?t have the equipment to cook, they don?t have a saucepan never mind a garlic press.
Some people, many people have never been taught to cook, literally nothing apart from how to switch the oven on or how to switch the microwave on.
Some people live in areas where all they have is a Farmfoods or a Costcutter selling nothing but processed or frozen foods, they can?t afford to travel to the supermarkets.
Many people have shitty lives, living in shitty circumstances on the breadline with extremely limited resources. A kebab gives cheap and immediate gratification.

All these issues will take a lot more than Jamie Olive shaking his head wistfully that the poor of Grimsby Hull aren?t enthused to make themselves spaghetti alle vongole of an evening.

He's got a point, and to be honest I'm not that bothered how he makes it. I was extremely poor as a youngster, but rarely had ready meals as mum would buy cheap core ingredients at the start of the month and was militarily precise in terms of portions. She worked round the clock and had four children to take care of. She didn't use lack of time as an excuse, she made time I.e cooked late at night or got up early. I was taught to help from age7/8 as were my siblings, so we managed between us.
I'm not saying its easy, by any means, but it can be done. I'm not sure why it's such a problem to point that out?

Thauma I live in North Wales. You do realise that not every mumsnetter lives in London.

I live in a semi rural part of North Wales. It costs nearly a tenner to get the 4dc and I to town and back and there are no indian shops there.

Thaumatrope its not the buses but the bus fare and how much you can carry - I'm not saying its not doable if you are organised and informed because it is ! I'm saying the people who need the advice most are not organised or informed and that Jamie Oliver poncing on about TV's is not going to help :)

I just think that child benefit should stop at 4/5 and the money put into excellent free school meals for every child and into cooking classes

Money should be spent on community veg and cooking classes.

Practical real life solutions to change the way we cook and the way our children see food.

Ohh hello Ghost - rural midwales here about 130 miles from nearest 'asian' shop ;)

I think the biggest problem by far is that all these people who are trying to shift food culture to something better, because they know it can be better for more people if not everyone, are annoying middle class men who appear to live charmed lives.

Presumably they have worked bloody hard to get the nice farmhouse and the garden and the restaurant and the book deals and the optional blonde children and optional wife just out of focus and the nice pottery and the proximity to Alphonso mangoes but it doesn't matter because to a man, they all seem to hit the wrong note.

So perhaps that WomanCalledJack is the right person for the job and Jamie should step down forthwith.

But ghost that must have been true two generations ago?

And yet that generation cooked. They had to! 99p lasagnes were unheard of.

It was part of the culture to find cheap ingredients and turn them into somehting half decent.

Oh fgs my comment about London was in response to someone who said she'd not seen a veg shop in London for years.

I don't live in London either

Practical real life solutions to change the way we cook and the way our children see food

I couldn't agree more! The risks and health implications of a poor diet are huge, massive!

He doesn't teach people to cook though, Thauma he has spent years putting poorer people off because of expensive unobtainable ingredients.

And now he's just jumping on a bandwagon, and doing it badly, like his "15 minute" meals that take an hour unless you have a chef's knife skills. It won't teach poor people who can't cook to cook, remotely.

And if you're rural, you're in the 10% of the country that presumably doesn't have as much access to most things as the remaining 90% does

Porcini mushrooms smell like sweaty underpants.

He's right that there are too many people who complain about lack of money but spend a fortune on takeaways and eating out. I know a few people with those tendencies. He does come across as very smug, though.

And, since he promoted it on channel 4 as a cheap cut, shoulder of lamb has been bloody expensive.

So perhaps that WomanCalledJack is the right person for the job and Jamie should step down forthwith.

Absolutely agree with this

limitedperiodonly I think you've highlighted part of the problem by saying that hardworking parents don't want to cook at the end do the day. With my mother and I there was absolutely no way around it, the cooking needed to be done, the kids needed feeding and as we didn't buy ready meals we had to put in the time when we got home. There is a choice in many cases

On the advert he thinks £9 for one meal is cheap That is often less than half a weekly food budget. Education is a problem too. You aren't going to buy a book with recipes in for a fiver or whatever, if you can't afford much. Junk food can be more filling, although not healthy, at the start, and if you don't have much equipment, you can't make much.

It's great that he's going to make further millions from this issue though. Seems there is money in poverty after all.

Oh and surely a knighthood can't be far behind for this portly patroniser?

He is just so smug and annoying people are put off listening to anything he says. In his little millionaire world of beautiful things.

It can be addressed wordfactory. But laziness and a lack of interest in food and how to cook it aren't the only reasons people of all social backgrounds in Britain eat poorly. We need to address those reasons if we're going to make a change.

It's foolish or spiteful not to recognise that. I realise you're not saying that, but some people are.