Jamie Oliver is a twat!!!

[MrsMertle]

Discuss......

me thinks twat...

He just keeps making more and more money teaching the "poor" how to eat.

He owns the tv company that produces all his series for C4. He mades loads of money out of his "good intentions". Great excuse!

Not sure I believe him.

Like in the previous series, where he was promoting making the poor dinner ladies become chefs for a peanuts salary.

Don't kidd yourselfs eating well in the UK is very expensive. It will be better if we could improve the wages of the lowest paid in society rather than making fun of them on telly.

Just to reiterate, that what pisses me most of all is the amount of cash he makes for himself preaching!

Bah, feed up of the Chris Martin of cookery!!!!!

I LURVE Jamie, i would ahng out with him, i think he's doing a really good book. Yes he's got no experience of what it like livng on benifits but at least he's taking the time to go into peoples houses and listen to them and help them.

I don't think he thinks all parents on benifitd are thick but tbh some of thoses girls on thier last night wern't helping the situation.......... ffs my 4yr old knows what boiling water looks like!

I liked the way that woman was climing she couldn't afford good food yet she could afford takeaways and fags.

(Charlee dives for cover wearing an I heart JO t-shirt)

Im gonna buy his new book, his reecipies are delicious they are not THAT expensive to make and he comes across as very caring and genuine on t.v but i guess its how you see it?

I have all his books/dvd's/cookware. I just think he's someone who cares and is actually got off his arse and is doing something about a huge problem, if it fails it fails but at least he's tryong more than Gordon Brown is doing imo. Would you rather he had the money and did nothing with it or use it to help people?

I can cook well thorugh self teaching but the majority of it came from my family, i will teach my kids and eventually grandkids to cook.

My sister lives on Jack shot and her litttle girl is always cooked a meal so if she can do it every other parent can and should to.

Tooootaaally dittany!

The joys of indoctrinating the masses throught television... love it or hate it!

We are on the same wavelenght...

What about his onogoing contract wiht Sainsburys? Eat for a £5.00. This 2 very similar campaigns,

Eat for a fiver
The ministry of food.

bah, cannot respect him anymore!

What's wrong with eat for a £5?

apparently nothing, charlee, if it comes from a chippy.

Lol Expat!

I'm not going to say my kids have never had chippy chips becuase i personally think every child should experience sitting on a beach eating chips from the paper!

I'm probably bias because i love Mr O and im a chef by nature and in my heart i'm a big foodie but seriously, who lets thier kids eats takeaway everyday! A lazy parent thats who.

I can think of loads of different meals that can be knoced up on a cooker/microwave/hob that have more nutritian and are the same price if not cheaper that take aways.

(Charlee shines halo as she walks off to prepare a nutrituous feast from 'The Naked Chef'!)

I think Jamie believes in what he is doing, I think he really cared about Natasha (as he said). I grew up in Rotherham, but not anywhere like the areas that were shown. It didn't mke me cross, I found the programme quite moving actually (softy!)

I haven't read the whole thread so I'm probably repeating a few people's points of view but if people didn't eat (and feed their kids) so badly then there would be no need for him to do this campaign, and none of us would watch. He's getting it out there onto the agenda.

I'd love to know how those children were weaned - where were the health visitors?

I don't think it represents a geographical part of society but it does represent a sub-culture of people who lack the education to know the most basic of daily living skills.

I used to work in social services and no joke every family I worked with who were on benefits had a HUGE TV and usually a huge dog. Everyone had a DVD player and had the knowledge and skills (and money apparently) to acquire these goods and use them and yet not know how to feed their children. Something has gone really wrong. I'm sure living on benefits making the money stretch is tough but it's no good just sympathising, something actually has to be done to help change the prospect of these childrens lives. So no MrsMertle I don't think Jamie Oliver is a twat, I think he is genuinely passionate about what he's doing and it's too easy to sit and judge from a distance, at least he's in there getting his hands dirty.

charlee, does 'the naked chef' book have that crunchy sweet toffee type ice cream recipie in it? i watched the 1st series ages ago and drooled at that recipie. but cant remenber what its called?

one bit of it showed him driving past lidl while chattering about how much that woman was spending on take aways. i thought oh here we are, great opportunity he'll now show us how to buy ingredients for under £2 or whatever in lidl a nameless value supermarket.

but then i remembered he works for sainsburys so no he won't.

i do agree he should have done more 'basic' recipes first. making dishes they would be more familiar with. but then that's what delia did with 'how to cook' so that's kind of done isn't it.

beans on toast would be boring but something like lasagne is fairly easy but involves certain techniques and great satisfaction at the end having made a proper dish.

I'm sorry - but how more basic than frying a piece of fish in some oil can you get?!

i mean basic as in making things they'd be familiar with. so how to make a pizza for example. a lot of people aren't familiar with cooking fish. a lot of people don't like it or the smell of it.

for that group of people it would be better to get their mates round and show them how to make a pizza as a starting point.

I also think Jamie Oliver is great and has really changed the way some people think about food. But I do think that he has an unrealistic view on what is an easy recipe. To him meatballs are really easy to make, but if you have never cooked before they would be a really major meal to make. Why not encourage people to make jacket potatoes, omelette, mashed potato, plain old chicken drumsticks etc, which are cheap and healthy but do not require recipes, and you can cook them with screaming kids in the room with you!

Didnt see the programme but think JO is great. What is it about this country that people always criticise and moan and groan about those that actually stand up and do things and take action? What he did about school dinners and helping disadvantaged kids train up in his restaurants was fantastic I thought.

And the comment someone made about people not helping themselves rings true. The Surestart scheme in the disadvantaged area near us is really underscribed, as was the one near us in London. So sometimes the help is there but not taken up.

I admit to being though when the mother started to say she just couldn't afford x, y, z and had sold things - while she had a at least two earrings in each ear, necklaces (plural!!), rings AND she then took a drag on a fag.....

i love jamie and his recipes are great.what annoyed me was that woman saying she didn't have the money to buy the ingredients but then lit up a cigarette.to me my kids health and what i feed them would be more important than cigarettes.also takeaways are more expensive than basic meat and veg.

I don't think smoking has anything to do with it - eating kebabs 7 times a week or whatever it was; takeaway every night for a family of four is DEFINITELY going to cost more than a weekly shop at Asda/Lidl

It is.

I can feed a family of four on £50 a week - she was spending almost double that .... so I don't agree whatsoever with "I can't afford it"

I'm on benefits - I afford it. It's about education, life skills and breaking habits - I think that's what Jamie's trying to do

edit - £50 a week or less even

I'm not sure there's enough recognition of how hard breaking habits can be when you are living a shitty miserable life anyway. If you have a limited food budget, you are going to be worried about spending it on stuff that some condescending outsider has told you is 'better for you' but which takes effort and organisation to cook - and there is the likelihood that your DC won't eat it and will demand junk food instead, so there are going to be many days where you give in to their demands because you can;t see the point in cooking food they will refuse to eat.
I am not saying that no effort should be made to educate and advise people on budget cookery and nutrition, just that caricaturing them as lazy thick slobs isn;t very helpful.
Suzanne Moore wrote a good piece about poverty and diet years ago: can;t link to it as it is not AFAIK online but she pointed out that it's harder than comfortably-off people think to shop, cook and eat healthily when you are poor, living in a sink estate, car free etc.

But the woman in the programme lived in a perfectly decent house. She wasn't in a high-rise flat on a nasty estate. Many people would have killed for her garden. And as for her kitchen...

As many have said here, it's EXPENSIVE to eat takeaways all the time, never mind about their nutritional (lack of) value. It is fifty times cheaper to open a can of beans and shove some bread in the toaster.

It's just about priorities. When you're free and single you have every right to spend all your money on booze and fags, but when you have children it is your responsibility and duty (unpopular words, there) to ensure they have a decent, healthy start in life.

I think it is easy to underestimate the very negative feelings of depression etc when stuck in tight budget.
What she saidthat resonated with me was the logistics of actually getting to the supermarket and lugging it home. When i first moved to London I had enough for a shitty flat and that was it. Cooking was difficult, shopping with no transport was hard and after work I was so tempted to just pick up something fast.
The feeling became quite overwhelming as I became more and more lethargic - not least because I was eating shit. It became a never ending circle of being tired and miserable and then too tired to get organized and enthused enough to plan buy transport and then cook.
Of course I think when we have kids it tends to become more important but the mind set is hard to break.

Having said all of that I think anyone can choose to interpret what he is doing as smug and patronising but I think that itself is pretty smug when all you are doing is sitting on your arse and criticising. At least he is interested enough to try something.

Haven't read all this thread (too busy chopping up mountains of soup veg to read whole threads ) but, yes, he's a twat!