Topic
Brit TV chef saves working class moms from fast food! Why the bad taste in my mouth?
St. Jamie and one of his flock.
Jamie Oliver wants to change the way all Britons eat. He wants every single one to learn how to cook. And St. Jamie is comin' 'atcha though the cable box with a big marketing machine behind him. Look out, North America, you could be next.
He's not the first celebrity to preach the gospel of health food and home cooking. In fact, it's getting kinda hard to tell the difference between ordinary food enjoyment and foodwashing with the number of mainstream and cheffy celebrities endorsing recipes, cooking shows and stainless steel pots, Jamie Oliver included (more on him in a minute).
Food has long been another way to prove you're a person of means and influence, as with the fashion or art worlds. ("I so prefer morel mushrooms to pine mushrooms in risotto.") But it's also the health, social and eco movement du jour, with more reach than most -- I mean, unlike clear-cutting, homelessness, or the issue of yoga versus pilates (yes, a stretch issue, I know), every single person eats every day, so already has a... err...stake. And because of that reach, it's the newest pop-culture darling, securing for its advocates status points that are sometimes as blatant and obnoxious as SUVs a decade ago.
It hasn't always been this way. Sure, an expensive restaurant meal proved you were movin' on up, but not health food. Health food used to be for hippies. Remember the Moosewood Cookbook with its wobbly handwritten, often high-fat recipes, overloaded with cinnamon? Back in the '70s and '80s when I was growing up, shopping at the health-food store instead of Safeway, and cooking vegetarian food could easily smear you as a pot-smoking commie: not exactly the status most suburbanites were lining up for.
Yes, there have always been mainstream or celebrity people who ate healthily, but quite often they have been a little odd. In Truth or Dare, Madonna's 1991 "documentary," about her Blond Ambition tour, Madonna ate colorless and seemingly tasteless food from a plastic container three times a day. It was a big thing for her. In my mind, at the time, her willingness to give up taste and pleasure in order to achieve physical perfection and financial success spoke to her vanity more than anything else, and marked her as a little tragic.
On the other hand, my mom always had a veggie garden. She loved it, and we ate really well, but she didn't proselytize or rave about it. As household chores, we vacuumed, weeded the garden, did the dishes. It wasn't a thing.
Food, the 'ultimate class badge'
Now, of course, Michelle Obama's neo-Victory garden on the White House grounds has earned her almost as much media attention as her biceps (and the garden attention has all been positive). And Ivy League kids are jostling not for internships in e-banking in New York, but on organic farms, clutching dog-eared copies of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.
"A few hope to run their own farms," writes the New York Times. "Others plan to work on changing government food policy. Some are just looking for a break from the rigors of academia... a summer on the farm provides respite from grim job hunts and as much bohemian cachet as backpacking through Europe. But for many students, farm life is a way to act on the growing enthusiasm for locally raised food and the increased concern over food safety and the environmental impact of agriculture."
Healthy food is the ultimate class and even fame badge. In her weekly e-newsletter, Goop, Gwynneth Paltrow often writes about how she eats almost purely organic food, and cooks for her family every day. And also about how because she loves to eat, she works out with a personal trainer six days a week in order to stay thin. Those are the three magic ingredients in the food class pie right now: healthy, often organic ingredients (expensive); home cooking (time and expertise unattainable for most); and thinness and external physical beauty (unattainable for an increasing number of people).
Tasting 'Ministry of Food'
So I watched the first episode of Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food (which airs June 5th) jadedly, and rolled my eyes when one of the first voice-over lines was "Five-year-old Kaya has never had a home cooked meal."
Millionaire Jamie Oliver pulls up to Rotherham, a working class neighbourhood in his shiny Range Rover (so eco) and wants to help those poor people learn to cook. Sweet... like unrefined, non-fair-trade, unorganic sugar.
Yes, I know he did the school lunches campaign (and, yes, as a former teacher I was totally wooed by that, having witnessed post-lunch sugar-induced psychopathy), but the religion of food, preached through new ministries every day, has been starting to seem obscene.
"The key to this is everyone has to take f-ing ownership, it's about the home, it's about neighbours, it's about family," enthuses St. Jamie. "It's the holy grail to transforming whole country to be healthier, live longer, have a better relationship with food." Oh brother.
He talks to Kaya's mom. "We get take-away sometimes three times a week," she confesses.
"Does that mean four?" asks Jamie. She nods and they both laugh. It turns out it's seven.
She says her mom didn't cook, she didn't learn how to cook in school, and doesn't know what to do. She's clearly guilt-ridden about it and stressed. The veggie drawers in her fridge are full of chocolate bars. She's on social assistance and spends the whole thing on fast food. She says her kids are unhealthy. And though I'm jaded about food's link to celebrity, it's suddenly pretty impossible not to be moved by this young mother's situation.
In the cooking class, which Jamie holds, all reveal they're afraid to touch raw meat or fish. None have scraped a carrot. A few have never turned on an element on the stove ("a hob" on "the cooker," to use the British speak -- which add humors to the show for those of us on this side of the water).
A critic converted, like rice
Jamie Oliver clearly lives in a bubble (several people in the show tell him this outright which pleased me) but his efforts are still somehow endearing. One woman in the show repeatedly tells him people won't keep cooking because they can't afford the ingredients and he seems to get it.
"Why are people who are lost and vulnerable and eating f-ing shit in a tray and on the right track to dying young, and their kids... why can't a few little lessons solve that?" he wonders aloud, in one of his frequent, earnest, reality-TV-style soliloquies.
At one point, he talks about how hard it was to fly the first spaceship but they did it. And at that point, I almost turned the show off. But then he says "But Christ, this is just cooking. It's not rocket science." Um, well, OK then.
Jamie teaches them a few recipes (meat based), and Kaya's mother says she felt glee when she pulled it off. She says she got an adrenaline rush, butterflies in her stomach, real joy.
And I have to admit, watching, I did too.
She says she figured her kids would be overweight and unhealthy, and for the first time, she has hope. Jamie goes back to the young mom's home and helps her cook a meal. The voice-over says "This will be her very first home cooked dinner."
Jamie asks her daughter "How does that taste?"
"Lovely," says the five-year-old.
"Did she say lovely?" asks Jamie. The mother is beaming. Like a grinning fool, I realize I am too, as I'm staring at the screen.
Good living in difficult conditions
It's not all roses and pancakes. There's more than a slight gender problem with the show. Sure there are a couple of men in the eight-person cooking class. But it's really about the social stigma of working-class, single mothers feeding their kids junk food and, in response, a man rides in from the city in a silver SUV to show them the way.
It's also clear part of the premise of the show is whether those junk food moms are un-savable, lazy poor people, or just noble poor people who need saving.
It turns out, the main single mother on the show is smart, very capable, very determined to do well, and totally trapped.
"What do I do -- pay for bus fare to go buy a bit of meat? Or do I pay my electric [bill], buy clothes for my kids? I've got nothing left to sell. When I worry, I can't think straight, and then I can't cook," she says with a restrained, British-style tear.
Until those and other real problems are addressed, providing one missing link -- lessons on how to cook healthily and cheaply at home -- may be socially ridiculous, mired in class politics, done mostly for show, and totally obnoxious, but perhaps the best plan there is.
Related Tyee stories:
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G West
3 years ago
Unlike most
Unlike most of the food pornographers on Food Channel, Jamie Oliver at least 'gives' a shit.
It doesn't make him a saint but he's not a porker like Mario Batali or a football hooligan like Gordon Ramsay.
VivianLea Doubt
3 years ago
Food is the heart of human culture
As a professional chef I occasionally fill in at the local high school cooking program and offer free classes at community kitchens - and I find that teaching people to cook is amazingly powerful. Perhaps it is "socially ridiculous" and "mired in class politics", but people get it, that power...and Jamie Oliver has been a big part of that. His recipes are both simple and excellent and well thought out.
Myself, I make a risotto - minus either morels or pine mushrooms - that could make you weep. Whatever else food is,it most surely is at the centre of life, and life's celebrations big and small, and family, and community...I suspect it may well be that bridging that missing link is the most important work there is.
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
Beware the Celebrity Chef!
Some good points G West.
I myself, have always been partial to Julia Childs, even though she did work for the CIA.
At any rate, Jamie et al. are being well compensated for caring, swearing, paring and being daring. On the other hand, I shall tip my hat to those who labour away in the downtown East Side trying to put a bowl of "something" into the stomachs of those who do not have the luxury of worrying about getting fat.
By the way, I tip my hat to Governor-General Michaelle Jean (shouldn't it be Gubernatrix-General?) for partaking in the Inuit culture. I would have done the same .
G West
3 years ago
For years
For years one morning a week at about 6 am I've showed up at a soup kitchen in the crypt of a local church to prepare enough fresh nutritious soup for the 100+ souls who show up there each morning at 8 am for a meal of soup, coffee or tea, day-old bread or buns and whatever else the volunteers have collected from local merchants and cafes. Many of these people also need a lunch to take with them to the casual minimum wage or piece work day jobs they have around the city; many of them, especially in the past two years, come to the soup kitchen with wives and children..many of them are disabled or damaged in some profound and troublesome way.
These people need homes, they need jobs, they need to feel part of the community - a community for the most part that averts its eyes from the reality on our streets.
Jamie Oliver, through his celebrity, may be able to help out at a certain level but I'm afraid the real problems of the poor and the disabled and the homeless need somthing that is a little more concrete...and a lot less like a handout.
I think Michaëlle Jean is a jewel...unfortunately she's going to be made the centre of a shit-storm over this.
Moonbug
3 years ago
The guy's an entertainer,
The guy's an entertainer, but it seems like there is some attempt to reach out in a positive way. I wish we could be less cynical, just a bit. Being cynical just feeds the crap we don't like.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
3 years ago
Okay, Moonbug--I'll be less
Okay, Moonbug--I'll be less cynical. Not fair to him to identify him principally as an entertainer: I think he's probably motivated to encounter and tame pressing early experiences of overwhelming disorder, but there's a lot of love in him: his readers/viewers will experience this, that he actually gives a shit about them, and it'll help.
Charles Campbell
3 years ago
James Barber
James Barber taught mothers on welfare how to cook without inviting a TV crew along. On his Urban Peasant show, he made cooking approachable, more than any other cooking show host I can name, and he did it without layering on spectacle or guilt. He talked about simple, fresh, local ingredients without ever treating them like a prop in some trend or fetish or (in the case of things organic) religion. He just showed people how to cook with cabbage because it's cheap, or how to make a gourmet sauce with peanut butter because it's what you've got. And he did that well since, oh, about 1972. I like Jamie Oliver well enough, but this stuff is old hat around Vancouver.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
3 years ago
Good call, Charles Campbell
Yeah, I liked James Barber. Nice guy. Really approachable, as you say.
Countrytype
3 years ago
Peasant food
Amen! James Barber knew how to make simple, healthy, affordable from scratch food tastily, quickly and easily. My brother learned to cook watching the Urban Peasant after school. It's time for people to realize that it's quite possible to cook well on a shoestring and quickly, and without long trips to distant shops barring some drastic food-allergy related need for a special set of ingredients.
I realize that in Vancouver we are blessed with a wide variety of produce markets well below the national chain prices and well above their quality, and that in cases like those of the single moms visited by Jamie Oliver access to good produce markets may be difficult. Still, the payoff of making one tough trip to buy lots of produce over spending the same on cornerstore junk food is huge. (The best corner stores have freezers with hamburger and frozen veg in them beside the ice and ice cream for parties!)
In the 1990s, I was trapped for a year on a poor-planning student budget of $30/week for all my food. Needless to say, junk food took a back seat to getting maximum calories and vitamins on the cheap, as oatmeal, peanut butter, flour for making bread, lentils, and large bags of carrots and onions became my only groceries. These are the cheapest things you can eat without starving, and live on $30/month per person. Dull, yes. But frozen lentil stew with a side of toast re-heats well on busy evenings and fills you up and your hair won't fall out. James Barber was a real step up for me, and I didn't realize that anyone took gourmet celebrity chefs seriously until much later in life.
I think Jamie Oliver might want to explain about lentil stew or help to set up some bulk buying clubs in the neighbourhoods he visits, so that the poor mothers can buy meat without having to choose between it and clothing, or at least learn how to substitute it sensibly. Nava Atlas has a great book out called the 5 ingredient vegetarian gourmet. The ingredients are usually run-of-the-mill, but the recipes are delicious. Maybe some inspiration there?
Other poor students and neighbours I've known have avoided cooking from scratch and lacked the skills to move beyond the corner store or fast food. Many chose beer or junk food instead of food, and fashion rewarded them then with reflections in celebrity diets and lifestyles before foodies became popular. One friend claimed that he shared with his girlfriend a brown bagged beer and a large milk bone dog biscuit, the essence of punk lunch. My cooking was an oddity, based on parental health food preference but lacking pot-related sociability or weath.
The best thing Jamie O can do is to make it cool to cook on the cheap. I'm not sure that only meat-based meals will meet that goal, but they are a definite start on television where audiences are in societies where steak still denotes affluence, and viewers may be critical of pushing veggie ways on the poor.
ME2
3 years ago
Kudos
You got this one right Vanessa!
Very good comments, folks.
KevinC
3 years ago
Context
It's important to keep the context in which Jamie Oliver is working in mind. You can't really take the British situation and transfer it 1:1 to BC.
The British are especially addicted to convenience foods, not only take-aways but also ready made meals. Anyone been to a supermarket over there recently? Chalk full of very attractively packaged meals in a box (or bag) which, generally speaking, contain too much salt, fat and preservatives compared to home-cooked food.
This emphasis on convenience is noticeable in comparison with supermarkets in BC, and even more so when compared with most continental European countries.
As for class, this addiction cuts across all classes, but inordinately affects the less well off because they are not able to afford those convenience foods which are marginally healthier and made with higher quality ingredients, and/or to eat out regularly at restaurants with healthier, more expensive menu choices.
Countrytype raises another important point: skill. Identifying what people shouldn't be feeding their kids is the easy part. The hard part is equipping them with the skills to prepare the foods that they should be serving. We are literally talking about a lost generation when it comes to many home ec. skills that used to be considered basic knowledge.
As an aside, do you know why British bread is so crap? More lost knowledge. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/the-shocking-truth-about-bread-413156.html
Yammer
3 years ago
Easy food
Thanks for the reminder about James Barber and the demystification of cooking, Charles.
He really helped a lot of us -- meaning guys with little cooking experience -- get into our own meal prep because he made it look simple and fun, and the results were delicious. A piece of chicken, some in-season fruit, a bit of potato, a small salad: dinner fit for company. The often maligned Rachael Ray and her 30 minute meals is another successor.
As for the link between economics and the inability to prepare own food, I can't quite understand it. If you go to McDonald's, dinner is about $8 per person. You can easily make dinner at home for that, and as for time savings, it takes as much time to put the kids in the car, drive them, eat, drive them back.
Fast food reliance suggests laziness and indifference to quality, too.
Yammer
3 years ago
Maybe not "lazy"
Uh, lack of energy or something.
Bobbi
3 years ago
How to save Cash on Groceries
Well, if you have a family and want to save cash in BC here are some skills/tips:
- 1 or 2 mornings per month get out of bed @ 6 am dress the kids early and head to Superstore or another grocery store that puts yesterday's meat out at half price - get there when the doors open. (yes this means have school lunches packed the night before, kids clothes laid out, breakfast will be toast with peanut butter)
- save up and buy a pressure cooker, it reduces heat/energy use by up to 70 percent and dramatically reduces cooking times (suck it up and buy new for safety, read you manual and look at US websites for awesome recipes and tips, it's a lot more popular down south).
- visit the bulk food store and buy beans, lentils and other stuff, take a Saturday morning if necessary, legumes cook super quick in the pressure cooker
- use the pressure cooker to can in season fruit and veg and send the fruit to school for lunch snacks
- PLAN - for goodness sake write it down and don't buy or make it if it isn't on the list
- For one month take your menu plan and cross reference it to your grocery receipts and then add up the cost of each meal, the results should affect and help future planning
Some attitude changes that have helped me:
- Resolve to love having your kids in the kitchen with you and walk through every step of the process with them by your side
- Be open to the impact of baking from scratch, once you start making yogurt, mayo, bread, yeast and other stuff from scratch at first for cost, then for nutrition and taste you'll notice a difference in lots of areas
- Not everyone can make a goal with some flexibility, it truly sucks to have decisions forced on your eating by finances, my outer limit is $500/month for 7 people and that number is only flexible if I spent less the month before.Plus that grocery ticket includes things like TP and cleaners and other non-food. It helps to remind myself of 1.) the idea of tyranny of choice -so I souldn't focus on what I can do not what I can't and 2.) the staggering abundance of what BC has to offer food wise. Those two things keep me counting blessings
G West
3 years ago
Are you aware of what the welfare rates are?
I think a quick perusal of those numbers may begin to provide the necessary explication.
It's called hopelessness Yammer.
Yammer
3 years ago
What numbers, G West?
I am looking at this, the money quote in Vanessa's article:
"...she didn't learn how to cook in school, and doesn't know what to do."
Well, yeah. If you can't cook then you have to buy food. Hence the overwhelmedness.
It is a matter of being shown how to cook, so I hope Jamie Oliver succeeds as James Barber did for so many of us hapless kitchen-dweebs.
G West
3 years ago
YOU look them up yammer
Then figure out what's left when the rent's paid...Oh and by the way, most people in that position won't be subscribing to the Food Channel either.
Kitchen dweebs I have little or no sympathy for, not now, not ever.
I'm not your gopher.
southdeltawalker
3 years ago
Support the UBC Farm-From ALR watch
Dear friend of the UBC Farm,
Please join us for this exciting fundraiser for UBC Farm. Acclaimed author Michael Pollan's only tour stop in Canada for the paperback edition of In Defense of Food will take place at the UBC Farm on June 6th!
Michael Pollan has established himself as one of North America's premier food system commentators. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and is a Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. His previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. His most recent essay Farmer in Chief, a letter to the president-elect of the United States, is credited with influencing the Obama family to plant a vegetable garden at the White House.
This exciting afternoon includes a signed copy of In Defense of Food, guided tours of the UBC Farm, live music and hors d'oeuvres. Tickets to this rain or shine event are $45 (includes GST) and are sold exclusively through Barbara-Jo's Books to Cooks. Proceeds from the event will go to support the UBC Farm. For more information visit Barbara-Jo's Books to Cooks website at: www.bookstocooks.com . Please call 604-688-6755 to purchase tickets. The event is Saturday, June 6 at 1:00 p.m.
Please circulate widely!
Thanks,
Friends of the UBC Farm
http://friendsoftheubcfarm.wordpress.com
Dashe
3 years ago
An Interesting Choice for a Negative Article
Why Jamie Oliver?
Why not Thomas Keller? or Mario Batali? Or Bobby Flay, for heaven't sake?
The world is full of "celebrity chefs" these days, and most of them are consolidating their financial positions, and opening venues in Las Vegas. Certainly Jamie Oliver has enjoyed financial success, but he is unique in that he has parlayed that success and celebrity into an attempt to change people's attitudes and habits regarding their choices of food.
I found your article depressingly filled with meaningless and nasty slurs; It's clearly evident to me that you have little knowledge of the worldwide food situation, and even less knowledge of Jamie Oliver and his quest to attempt to change the food situation in the UK.
I could, in fact, write a lengthy essay disputing many of your repertorial statements....(you do claim to be a reporter, don't you?), but I think that I'll rebut your lightweight, nasty, fluffy gossip piece at length, and right now I have to cook dinner.
Yes, I have my priorities in order.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
3 years ago
Feel free to dispute away,
Feel free to dispute away, Dashe. I'll be coming back.
VivianLea Doubt
3 years ago
Please, Dashe
Me too. And what did you cook for dinner? I don't have the food channel...
southdeltawalker
3 years ago
Constipation clinics
..now that i have your attention, i watched Jamie Oliver for the first time recently.
He was tryin to get healthy food into English schools.
The area he picked was The "unhealthiest" part of England".
The children's diet was so bad that the local hospital had to open a constipation clinic for children as they didn't go #2 for weeks on end.
They ate no fresh veggies or fruit or grains-just chips, fries, and candy and some horrible hot dog thing called turkey twisters.
He open some of their lunches and found candy bars and chips.
He was trying to get children to eat roast chicken, fresh veggies and fruit. He was trying to make food tasty and fun for children.
Most of the children responded and loved it after initial reluctance.
He maybe a superstar and drive a fancy car etc etc but what he is doing is a service. He is emphasizing why we need to save farmland and value farmers.
Oh BTW-Bill Clinton showed up at his restaurant with an entourage. Jamie muttered something about celebrities and went out the back door to avoid him. Ha ha.
VivianLea Doubt
3 years ago
#2 and...
Some 20 or so years ago I was writing a book on the phenomenon of food banks (then relatively new) across the country. Many depressing things came to light in my year of research, but a couple stand out here – that people were being given food they didn’t know how to cook, or that they didn’t have the facilities to cook. Fast forward, and all the data shows that even fewer people know how to cook from scratch now…with all the attendant consequences falling mainly on the poorest.
The problem of poverty has been clearly and firmly linked to the lack of affordable housing for some decades now – i.e. if you spend 40 % or more of your income on shelter you will live in poverty – eloquently characterized in another thread as “rent or food, rent or food, rent or food?”. We know how to solve poverty – but we don’t. Teaching people to cook, in my view, does demonstrate that we “give a shit” in a profound and visceral way; cooking and eating together is the most fundamental of human activities, and in spite of cynicism, a way of drawing people in to the community and thus helping create it. If we cannot create/recreate a sense of ‘social capital’ or communal life, or re-engender that link between the producers and consumers of food, how will we solve any other worldly problems? Food pornography is yet one more diversion for a certain set, I suppose. But let’s give credit that “caring, paring, and daring” (very nice, Dr Alexander) might actually have a larger purpose.
RickW
3 years ago
G West
You think the reason for the coming fallout over the GG is because it's a seal heart -- or because it was raw?
G West
3 years ago
Jeez Rick
Who can say. Not so long ago the neocons here at Tyee were attacking her because she is:
1) a woman;
2) a black woman;
3) because she once had French citizenship;
4) because she was allegedly a separatist;
5) because her husband was allegedly a separatist;
6) because she kept Stephen Harper waiting for an hour in the snow...
Now they're going to diss her for eating heart tartare and sharing an Inuit rite...
Seems to me it's pretty much a dart board for the GG - doesn't matter what she does she'll be the butt of some ridiculous criticism.
She's a figurehead...who cares?
VivianLea Doubt
3 years ago
rather funny though
... the GG said it tasted like sushi.
RickW
3 years ago
True enough, Garth!
But I suspect it's the raw aspect -- not at all like eating caviar, steak tartare, and other "civilized" offerings......
HawkEyes
3 years ago
southdeltawalker
...has given us some pretty ghastly figures. Maybe Mr. Oliver should be knighted.
Love the clinton snub.
southdeltawalker
3 years ago
thanks HawkEyes
The amazing thing is that he showed the Gov't. that healthy food could be provided to the children within the paltry food allowance for each child.