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!

Sarah fresh veg is over rated; frozen is often higher in vitamins than older fresh stock, as it is frozen directly from the fields.

Nobody should feel bad about using frozen veg: indeed it's an ideal way to maximise vitamin intake and economise. Iceland is incredibly useful for that ((and in fact cheaper for frozen fish than my supermarket I notice) but massively affected by snobbery.

If you shop at Iceland and shop well then your nutrition can be high level and affordable, especially if supplemented by pulses etc which can be bulk bought and keep well. Better that than some veg that has been sitting on a market stall for five days and losing nutrients.

Also having a go at people who ate struggling is just never helpful is it?

What's wrong with being nice, and appreciating that their problems don't always have one size fits all solutions? That actually a bit more thought will have to go into coming up with answers than just saying look, here's a recipe, and bitching about the fact they dare to own a tv.

Quite TeWi.

And as for Italy.

Yes it's a different culture and it would be lovely to live that way. I'm sure there are many things that we in Britain can learn from them and they are apparently on average much healthier than we are.

But we won't change everything with pots of herbs on the windowsill (which all seem to die the moment they enter our house. Basil especially seems to wilt within minutes )

It's an old telegraph link but it discusses how Italy spend £2.00 per head on their children's school meals while we spent 40p on ours.

At the time of the article being published Britain had the longest working hours in Europe with an average of 43.6 hours, while Italy had a limit of 38.5.

So that's just over five hours difference, giving them a lot more time to cook properly and then sit together to enjoy eating together.

So that's two things right there that we would need to change about our culture in order to better emulate theirs and benefit from it. Increasing the amount of money the schools spend on better dinners and reducing the long hours people work so they can spend more time cooking proper meals etc.

The article is a little contradictory as it does say that most Italians drive home in their lunch break and nap (lunch hour seems to last 2-3 hours) but then says that the Italians walk for most journeys. Which of course helps with the healthy lifestyle.

But again, that's only possible if you have the time, so my walk to the farm shop 90 minutes away while still needing to get back before the end of school is still out of reach for many local parents here. Three hours of your day, every day, walking to buy a courgette would drive most people to the local Iceland for frozen chips instead.

But my point is that to change one aspect of British culture we have to do more than tell people how many tomatoes they could have bought for the cost of their flat screen TV, we would have to look at many other aspects too, including working hours, accessibility to farm shops or markets, better and cheaper local transport, local schools and much more.

And if we are not prepared to make changes to all of those, not much else is going to change either.

The problem is that if nobody dares to give solutions, precisely because one size can never fit all, then sod all gets done.

There's a long list of things which will help ameliorate food poverty, all do-able for some but never for all. We should see it as a positive that there are ideas out there!

Problem is that if the people 'helping' claim to have it all solved, and shift the blame onto the people who are struggling then there is less motivation for other people to look into it and try and come up with answers of their own.

A proper inquiry into food poverty and average nutrition might come up with ideas like as a random example I like: the government forcibly reducing petrol/public transport, fuel and healthy food costs for example.

But if everyone thinks 'ah well, but jamie said you can manage if you are careful' then no one will bother to look into other options.

One aspect of British culture that has a terrible impact on family life is the huge distances people travel from home to work and school. I live in Paris and people expect DC to walk to school, to go home for lunch ( unless both parents work) and many adults also work nearby. The UK has a dreadful commuter culture.

when I left home my mum gave me this this which she got off the milkman and I still use it now, it's very good. I recommend it if you are clueless, it tells you everything from cuts of meat, how to make white sauce etc

I find it a bit weird someone who makes a living from being on tv would start crticising people for owning and watching them!

And none of that is to say that he's wrong to want to try.

At least he is pointing things out, and I think his school dinners campaign did have some effect, made some people listen.

But if he's talking to people about buying six cherry tomatoes and half an aubergine from the local market but they are miles away from the nearest one with no car, expensive transport and a family life that requires them not to hike for three hours every day because they are needed back at home in one hour, they're not going to listen to him.

Peachy you are right about the frozen veg too. DS would live on frozen garden peas and they are a godsend to my freezer from the man at the frozen food shop

no government is going to solve this problem:

labour wont criticise their voters or spend money
conservatives wont spend money

personally if I were affected, I would be glad someone was raising the topic. the alternative is nothing as we all see the rest of the time.

bonsoir, i think that issue has a direct correlation to the extortionate housing costs too, either to buy or rent in certain areas

I think labour were doing something tbh in the home start/ sure start section, it's all being disbanded though

If everyone sold their TV's and bought healthy food then nobody would have to listen to his witterings.

Yes I totally agree with you there TeWi

However in the interim I think we, the consumers, are going to have to take responsibility for re-organising how we access food and what we do with it, since nobody in power seems motivated to think creatively about it.

Owllady - "I think labour were doing something tbh in the home start/ sure start section, it's all being disbanded though."

I agree. From a healthy lifestyle point of view our Sure Start centre used to offer cookery classes for cheap but healthy food, had a vegetable garden which you could help in and take home from, offered a food bank and so much more. In the holidays they would hold 'cook and eat' for the children so they could make a meal together and then eat together afterwards. They even provided a kitchen so that families on contact visits could cook a meal together even though they didn't live together.

Place is almost empty now, they have no staff and no money to offer any of this. It's very sad to see how things have changed, and how quickly.

owllady - I agree, and being preached at by St James of Oliver doesn't make the constraints people live under disappear.

I ate capers yesterday in a panzanella made with stale bread, squishy tomatoes and a bag of Sainsbury's value peppers.

Yay me!

However, I have a 31" flatscreen. Is that an acceptable size or is it too big? I worry constantly about what St Jamie of Oliver might think. On the plus side it's sometimes tuned to subtitled things on Sky Arts.

It won't be tuned to his show or I might be forced to throw a tin of corned beef through it.

Food co-ops and clubbing together to cook in bulk are also options.
It's the things which involve some sort of larger social group that are missing, isn't it?
We used to cook with two other families, eat together then divvy it up to freeze. Hugely cheap and sociable. I can't imagine doing that now for some reason.

The way Jamie Oliver talks you'd think Southern Italy was heaven on Earth

I think one of his biggest mistakes is assuming that it is poor fat people who are eating and buying ready meals. This is a myth perpetuated by people like him.

I volunteer with families who live off value range pasta (25p), cheap tinned toms, value bread etc. they cannot afford £1 ready meals which feed 1. Where I shop the biggest purchasers of ready meals are those who are better off but don't have time to cook. And we all know that the weight watchers/other diet company meals are purchased by well off possibly overweight people. We grew up poor and every single meal was cooked from scratch. Including breakfast. I cook from scratch myself.

Poor bashing has tagged itself on to benefits bashing. Very sad.

Well Thursday should be interesting. I hope he answers usualsuspect's question

I think he's right.

I'm not British and I'm often shocked with the diet in this country.

The countries in Southern Europe have much worse economies than the UK, the salaries are lower and the vast majority of households have two working parents as very few families have the luxury of living on one salary alone.

All the working parents come home and cook from scratch every single bloody day. It's really not rocket science and we don't even have "Home Economics" lessons at school. You just learn to cook because it's a life skill.

To be fair, there's very little offer when it comes to ready meals in the supermarkets anyway, but that's also because there's very little demand.

I also think there's a lot of patronising comments regarding "the poor" - as if people under a certain income can't be criticised and are too stupid to know/do any better and therefore must be protected. I think it's insulting.

I think that JO is idealistic but not realistic.

He needs to go and spend time at home with some of those people he is demonising.

So many posters have pointed out that those on the breadline often live in places where access to good food can be difficult, i.e. when you only have a convenience store nearby, no car and have to drag small children on a trip to the closest supermarket in town it becomes quite difficult to lug a lot of meat, fruit and veg home on the bus.

When you are quite poor I think food can become a treat. It is so demoralising to constantly think and say we can't afford this and that, therefore a trip to the kebab shop down the road becomes the one treat you can afford for yourself and/or the kids.

I think that lack of space and equipment also becomes an issue. If you live in a flat or cramped house there is often not the room for a larder full of ingredients or a full complement of kitchen utensils. Also if the oven or microwave breaks down it is not easy to replace these without access to credit [or bank of Mum and Dad], so convenience food from local chippy becomes necessary.

I also wonder about the emerging predominance of zero hours contracts for those on minimum wage. Essentially those on these contracts have to be available to work whenever their employee requires their services and have their days off when not... not much, if any, advance notice given. Often couples on minimum wage both need to work to support family. So who takes responsibility for cooking a nutritious fresh meal a la JO?

Finally, his comment about the Sicilian street cleaner and mussels and spaghetti seemed pretty ignorant to me. That's great for someone who lives in Italy, near the coast, with an abundance of cheap fresh seafood.... but really a working class family on low income in the middle of England somewhere? Fresh mussels? From where?
And what does having a large screen TV have to do with anything? They are not exactly expensive items these days and for some people may be the only form of entertainment they can afford, I imagine looking at the pay per view cost they would work out quite economical in the long run compared to say going to the theatre or out to see a film.

I sort of get that JO means well but heavens above he is so darn clumsy and patronising in expressing it!

He would do better if he educated himself a bit about the issues the less well off face... admitted that he's a bit out of touch but that he would like to find a way to help using the contacts and expertise he has.

Yup, bakingnovice it's not only the poor who are eating shit food. Fattening food from Waitrose is still fattening food. Are the weight differences between working class/middle class people really that marked?