Aibu to think jamie oliver can't win??

[MOTU]

You'd think this would be his key demographic what with people vociferously shaming people who dare give their child squash or a sprinkle of sugar on their weetabix; but every time he speaks out about public health, people seem to erupt with indignation that he dare criticise our diets and accuse him of patronising poor people.

The latest one being that his suggestion of a sugar tax on sugary drinks is penalising poor people but allowing wealthy people choice.
Actually I think the tax would mostly just differentiate between the sugar added drinks and others, making it a more obvious choice across the socio economic spectrum and if you're so poor this would price you out of the market then you really couldn't have been afording these drinks to start with, their not exactly the cheapest option.....

As a non-drinker I will pay a tax on a sugary drink if restaurants supply a nice variety.
If you drink alcohol and go out for a nice meal, you expect a nice wine list to complement it and choose some thing that's maybe a bit more expensive because it's part of the treat. All too often the soft drink selection is a juice (j2O) or a coke or similar. Nothing particularly treat worthy. It depends on where you go but many restaurants don't even do, say, elderflower which isn't exactly daring anymore.
I would also like to have a decent drink as part of a meal and would pay a bit more but an extra tax on coke? If that's the range of your soft drinks options the bugger off! It's not a treat when I go out, it's the best of a poor range of choices.

Parents have the right to put whatever they like into their own kids. So what if they end up toothless and obese? The most important thing is that this crap food and drink is cheap, so freeing up the household budget for the more important things.

That's right, isn't it?

I really like him.

Hes done a lot for school meals, I like his cooking programs, I like his youth chef thingy he has got going on in restaurants, I like his truffle oil fried chips and most importantly I like that he stands up for whether believes in.

He hasn't just been lobbying about tax on sugary drinks he did campaigned about the gmos and poor quality meat the gov have been trying to get in the country.

cloppysow is that what they sat about his restaurants? So Italian people don't drain their pasta properly, overcook their chicken and like rock hard poached eggs do they?

I asked for vinegar for my dry chips and was told patronising that they don't serve vinegar but they did have balsamic. I said that would be fine since it IS vinegar!

we are so thick, so unenlightened and unwilling to change yes agree completely.

YY Goat ^^

FWIW - I have met JO (outside of a TV scenario) and he seemed a really nice guy. Also met Jimmy Doherty and he was lovely too. Both decent blokes I think.

I really don't like the fat shaming that people do about JO though...being bigger/chubby whatever has bugger all to do with sugar etc....and you can be pretty fit despite carrying extra weight. I'm overweight and I'm still the fittest out of all my friends...

I like him. He's brave enough to raise the very important issues of diet and added sugar- he is right and he's forcing the issues out into the open . I didn't realise Mumsnet hated him!

I really like jamie oliver too.
He's worked really hard to try to change attitudes to food and I really admire, and appreciate now I have kids at school, what he's done to change school meals.
I use his recipes a lot and have loved everything I've tried.
I don't like his 30 minutes cooking as it's not really 30 minutes, and who wants to spend an hour washing up all those pots and pans and gadgets you end up using?
Apart from that, I think he's got great intentions and seems like a decent guy.

My view is that at least he's trying to highlight the problem and make everyone realise that obesity is a major problem. Yes, he's become rich in the process but he's worked very hard for his money. Nobody else has managed to achieve what he did with his campaign about school dinners so I admire him for that.

He isn't suggesting that sugar is completely cut from all our diets, he just wants it to become more limited in our diets.

Also I left home with very poor cooking skills and from a freezer food culture. I bought his early recipe books, adapted a number of the recipes and am now proud that I feed my family almost exclusively home cooked food. I have jamie to thank for a lot of what I can do!

I wonder whether the money wasted on treating adult obesity caused by eating massive amounts of sugar will be outweighed by the savings on benefits cos they won't live nearly as long?

One way to deal with the ageing population and welfare burden - if they want to poison themselves, let 'em. More money in the pot for the rest of us.

I like him a lot too.

At least he's trying. More than most famous cooks.

The people who (by and large) need his help can't identify with him because of class / cultural differences ?

The man is trying to do some good! If you watched his programme about sugar recently, and the cost to the NHS of children with appalling teeth because of their sugar intake, surely you can see that he is trying to educate people?

It is the true big businesses you should be angry with who load their products with unnecessary sugar, not a guy who has consistently tried to balance education with his own career. His new book has really educated me about cooking with more vegetables. If he makes a few bob then so what?

By offering alternatives in his book, he is helping people to have a choice of what to drink or eat, and they are healthier alternatives. He actually says in the book that he tries to make a healthy choice 7 out of 10 times. Many people don't know how much sugar is in a glass of coke or whatever, or how bad for them that sugar is.Sugar is addictive. The soft drinks industry is as bad as the tobacco industry from what I have read.

I think this is all down to the lack of Home Economics being taught in school, the most misguided decision ever. It is costing the NHS billions because people are not taught basic nutrition any more.

If the only insult you can throw at him is that he's ' fat' then God help you. He is not fat anyway, he has recently lost weight, and was never fat in the first place.

I would have a lot more respect for him if he banned sugary drinks from his restaurant. Not just raise the price and give a token amount to charity.

At the moment he is like a tobacconist lecturing us about how bad smoking is for your health.

Personally I don't love his TV shows or books, but some of the bile and envy about JO on here is really shocking. His parents were ordinary people, he left school with two GCSEs and has been working since he was a teenager. He's dyslexic and was mocked at school for it. He's worked like a trojan all his life and done really well.

I think the way some people are talking about him shows that for them envying wealth isn't even just those who inherited it rather than earning it, but a peevish desire to drag down anyone who has more even if they got it through hard work.

He's not talking about banning them though is he? He's talking about an informed choice and a tax. Agree he should put the prices up though.

I have a feeling the restaurants are not really his, unlike 15 which I think is. Isn't Jamie's Italian some kind of franchise?

You are right, JO can't ever win on MN. For a start, he's a man, and a rich one and he advocates using the best quality ingredients you can afford, which is of course all relative.

You can't be a rich man and lecture poor women on what they should be feeding their families in order to be a) healthy and b) frugal.

Now Jack Monroe on the other hand, she practically has saint/god-like status on here, because she is a single mum who has been on benefits, even though she's now probably rather financially comfortable, so long as she keeps banging on about how she once had to turn her fridge off and take out her lightbulbs because she had no more money for the meter, she can lecture people on the same stuff as JO and no-one cares.

But her recipes often advocate using the cheapest quality ingredients possible. So she can say 'you must learn to cook lentils and and add a tin of value tomatoes' and she's some sort of genius, whereas JO says 'you must use lentils and ideally some lovely fresh plum tomatoes and a sprig of basil' and suddenly it's 'how dare he lecture us on eating lentils the smug twat - is that the root cause of our poverty then? We just haven't accepted that we need to learn to cook fucking lentils, like millions of poor Indians do every day?'

JO says 'Buy real butter instead of margerine and then buy some fresh fruit instead of a processed sugary dessert' and MN says 'what about all the poor people can't afford a knife to spread the butter or to cut up an orange so they have no choice but spend the cost of a 3 knives on a Big Mac and a Mars Bar instead?'

Nope, JO can't win.

I'm happy for him to make money - I just get very turned off by his posturing as a moral crusader. I don't think he has much grasp of the issues at stake when he pontificates, and his political illiteracy is clearly demonstrated in his praise for UKIP.

I'm sure he'll be writing another book of recipes soon about how not enough people are eating, I dunno, radishes... and then he can lobby about the disgrace it is that poor people don't get off their arses to grow and prepare radishes, and should be taxed for not doing so. And then Jamie's Radish Orgasm In Yer Mouth can be on Channel 4 at 8, accompanied by Radish! retailing at £15.99 in a Waitrose near you....

I don't know how anyone can look at this government, on the same day even their own are getting queasy about their unfairness, and shout about being 'brave' by taxing coke more, and not have some ghost of an understanding about the problems of their own position hosting a show on coke-alternatives later that day!

He wasn't just calling for a sugar tax though- he's also calling for simple labelling of food, which I think is brilliant.

If we knew there are 17 spoonfuls of sugar in some drinks I think people would think twice about drinking it as much.

As an aside he isn't "fat". He's lost a lot of weight recently- by trying to cut out sugar!!

Agree that JO can be irritating, but I think he's well-intentioned and really don't get all the vitriol on here. Yes he's done well for himself, but since when has success meant you can't take a public stance on something? As others have said, he could be sitting counting piles of cash in the Cayman Islands or somewhere by now, but instead he's chosen to intervene in something he believes in.

And sugar is a massive problem. Allowing the food and drinks industry to self-regulate hasn't worked, and neither has relying on people to take personal responsibility for making healthy choices - I've taught in many schools where well over 2/3 of the pupils have been obese, and by no means all of thise have been in economically deprived areas. Many of the 5 year olds I've worked with in some schools already have a mouthful of silver fillings! It's unsustainable and putting a real strain on our health services.

I think one of the problems we have is that as a country we are obsessed with cheap food - we spend a lower proportion of our income on food than anywhere else in Europe and the food health debate always centres around keeping prices as low as possible - 'value' rather than quality. We seem to have less of a 'food culture' in this country, less inherited knowledge in families, less nutrition education in schools and probably less time for cooking too. His strategy may be flawed, but at least JO is trying to help. I say good luck to him!

I dont care if he has a squillion quid in the bank I really dont i enjoyed his cooking programmes before he started getting rich and more famous off the back of preaching about this that and whatever the new in thing is I am sure he is passionate about food but a pp is right he makes money off the back of his crusades I look forward to his radish series

He is irritating.Having said that, he is right about things like sugar in fizzy drinks. I'm not sure about increasing tax on them though, because there's always going to be a group of people who carry on drinking them, just like there's still a significant group of people who carry on smoking. People can be very stubborn about their choices.
I don't think there is an answer really because as long as these things are in the shops people will go on buying them.

And no, not privately educated - pretty normal comprehensive, albeit in a fairly leafy/rural area.