Jamie Oliver

[Keith Houchen]

Just now, ReturnOfTheMack said:

I have chronic fatigue syndrome and some days get in from work and have to sleep in the hallway because I'm to fatigued to even go upstairs, so fuck off with it's 100% laziness.

 

You can't speak for everyone or everyone's situations.

Exactly. It’s nuanced. 

I do the cooking in my home because my gf has CFS and Fibro. But since I’ve developed a tumour in my armpit, it’s too painful to prepare food. It’s called convenience food for a reason. 

Ive no doubt there is laziness with people but every case is different. 

Also, Oliver is a cunt. 

[ReturnOfTheMack]

Exactly. No doubt there is laziness from a lot of people, and even less doubt that Jamie Oliver is a cunt.

[FLips]

6 minutes ago, ReturnOfTheMack said:

I have chronic fatigue syndrome and some days get in from work and have to sleep in the hallway because I'm to fatigued to even go upstairs, so fuck off with it's 100% laziness.

 

You can't speak for everyone or everyone's situations.

We're not speaking about that at all though are we? 

We're speaking entirely about people using no time or money as excuses, nobody is expecting you to drag your knackered body into the kitchen to knock up a dinner.

Edit: should clarify I mean knackered as in tired in this context, I'm not having a dig or anything.

Edited May 17, 2018 by FelatioLips

[ReturnOfTheMack]

42 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

It's 100% laziness. 

That's what I'm replying to. It may be laziness for some (probably a lot) but it's not 100% laziness, it just isn't. The world isn't black and white.

 

Edit: didn't think you were having a go fella. Nor do I think Mike was, just to be totally clear.

Edited May 17, 2018 by ReturnOfTheMack

[Dead Mike]

Yeah, there's obviously different circumstances & exceptions but I was talking in general terms.

[BomberPat]

Right, so at times when my Dad was out of town for work, and my Mum had maybe two or three hours tops between finishing one job and starting another, it was "laziness" that prevented her from having the time to cook for herself and four kids of varying age and dietary requirement (accounting for allergies, and neither me or her eating meat)? And that's assuming that we have a kitchen stocked full of fresh, healthy ingredients, otherwise she'd have to have driven five miles to the nearest supermarket and lost even more time out of her day.

And she could drive to the nearest supermarket. I can't drive. I'm limited in the amount of grocery shopping I do, when I do it, and where I do it from, by where I can reach on foot or by public transport, and by what I can physically carry. That does mean that I don't get to make it to somewhere like a farm shop, or a decent supermarket, as much as I'd like, and tend to do a lot of my grocery shopping at a garage five minutes from my flat, or picking up odds and sods if I happen to be in the vicinity of a better shop. Which is fine for me - I live alone, in a reasonably affluent area.

 

But say I'm a single Mum with three kids, I don't drive, I live in a council estate in a deprived area. I finish the day job at 5pm, then work a night shift at a pub from 8pm. Let's say, to keep it simple, that the pub is a half hour walk, the day job is half an hour on the bus, so there's at least an hour lost before I even get home. I need to stop off at a supermarket to pick up all the nice healthy ingredients that I need - but I'm on my own, I can't carry all the bags of shopping for a family of four by myself; so either I have to enlist the help of the kids, which means I'm not stopping at the shop on my way home from work, I'm going to work and then to the shop once I've corralled all the kids to lend a hand, which is going to take time. Otherwise, I'm asking a potentially unreliable mate to give me a lift, or relying on a most likely underfunded public transport system to get me from A to B, and just buying everything I can carry - so do I buy a couple of frozen pizzas, or do I buy dough, cheese, tomatoes, peppers, whatever else the kids want on their pizza today, and weigh myself down with it all? Not to mention that I can get a frozen pizza for £1.50, rather than paying for all the ingredients.

That's all assuming there's an accessible supermarket anywhere nearby anyway. Supermarkets look for sales-by-square-foot - so they're invariably all grouped together in relatively affluent areas, and few and far between in poorer areas. So am I going to go through the rigmarole of going out of my way to trek out to a supermarket that could be another half hour or more away and buy a load of fresh veg for tonight's meal, knowing that I'll only have to do the same thing again in a few days' time, or do I go as infrequently as possible and just stock up on simpler, easier, cheaper food?

 

So, no, it's not always just "fifteen minutes to prep some food". Hell, in the scenario outlined above - which is far from unreasonable or hyperbolic - by the time it's all said and done, even finding that fifteen minutes is still a challenge in and of itself.

And that's assuming no illness, disability or injury putting you under even more pressure - and considering that disabled people are more than twice as likely to live in food poverty as able bodied people, and more than half the people in poverty in the UK are either disabled or are in a household with a disabled person, that's a massive thing to overlook when just writing off poor families (and it's always poor families, you don't see Jamie Oliver shouting at fat kids at Eton) as "just lazy".

 

 

Anyway, politics aside, Jamie Oliver is a hypocritical, sneering mockney tosser. At least we can agree on that.

Edited May 17, 2018 by BomberPat

[Chest Rockwell]

Probably veering into a different discussion, but if you can't afford the time or money to look after your kids maybe you shouldn't be having them...

Where disability and illness is concerned, it speaks to a failure in the infrastructure provided for those issues

- tbh this discussion is pretty unfocused, and there's a sprawling mess of different factors here that need to be at least even identified individually to even stand a chance of addressing them. I don't even have the time to begin, so I think best of I stay out of it.... But it's pretty frustrating to watch the conversation leaping about incoherently.

Edited May 17, 2018 by Chest Rockwell

[Astro Hollywood]

9 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

Probably veering into a different discussion, but if you can't afford the time or money to look after your kids maybe you shouldn't be having them...

Except that circumstances, and the economic climate in general, can change severely at the drop of a hat. I'm sure there are plenty of people who were perfectly capable of providing for their children when they were born, but lost jobs or benefits or couldn't cope with rising childcare etc.

Edited May 17, 2018 by Astro Hollywood

[BomberPat]

6 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

Probably veering into a different discussion, but if you can't afford the time or money to look after your kids maybe you shouldn't be having them...

Circumstances can change. You might be doing alright, lose your job, get fucked over financially - you lose the money, lose the time, you've still got the kids. Again, things are rarely as cut and dry as "if you can't afford kids, don't have them".

Quote

Where disability and illness is concerned, it speaks to a failure in the infrastructure provided for those issues

Absolutely. But none of these issues exist in a vacuum, and all of this just illustrates how Jamie Oliver et al's narrow focus on "make crisps and fizzy drinks more expensive so the plebs can't afford them" has everything to do with demonising the poor, and very little to do with addressing a genuine health crisis.

[Carbomb]

When I was born, my family were not poor, but we certainly weren't comfortable either. My parents were originally from poor backgrounds, but both worked, and made sure I had plenty of fresh food to eat, alternating with the odd tinned dish when they just had no time at all.

But it's important to note: they were first-time parents at the beginning of the 80s, when everything was proportionally much cheaper, salaries were much more in line with the cost of living, and also, almost as importantly in my case, my mum had grown up in Yorkshire during rationing, in a UK that still had the Ministry of Food putting out loads of material on how to cook well for cheap. And even more significant: the supermarket and commercial food industry weren't as big as they are currently.

We're living in a much different age now. The average salary doesn't get you what it used to, meaning people on the lower end of the scale have to work longer. The supermarkets and food industry have made pre-prepared, processed food cheaper against a timeline than fresh produce. And most cooks and chefs on TV are putting out fancy recipes for how to cook stuff that takes time and more money than most - maybe I'm watching the wrong TV, but I don't think I've seen a programme on terrestrial that shows how to cook quick meals for cheap.

The problem with Oliver is that he doesn't start from a position of trying to help people to solve their problem. Of course they'd want their kids to eat healthily more regularly, who wouldn't? But he starts by basically criticising and demonising them, using obnoxiously emotive terms, and only gives them half a solution, which doesn't help anyone.

At the end of this ramble, the main thrust of what I'm trying to say is: however they feed their kids, they're people just trying to feed their kids, and make sure they can continue to feed their kids. They don't need some rich bloke yelling at them that they're doing it wrong; I don't think they'd mind if someone could compassionately and helpfully give them some tips on how to get the absolute most for their money, and if the government could make more of an effort in making their lives easier to do it. 

Edited May 17, 2018 by Carbomb

[Chest Rockwell]

Yeah. All spot on. I think the problem in the discussion itself comes from trying to address it on Oliver's belligerent and narrow level.

[Sphinx]

3 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

Probably veering into a different discussion, but if you can't afford the time or money to look after your kids maybe you shouldn't be having them...

 

2 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I think the problem in the discussion itself comes from trying to address it on Oliver's belligerent and narrow level.

 

[Cousin Jim Bob]

I was made unemployed a few months back. I've found the cooking book A Girl Called Jack by Jack Monroe incredible. She wrote most of whilst unemployed herself with a young son. It's full of very cheap, tasty, easy to make food which don't use a ton of ingredients. 

I've also got Save With Jamie by guess who. The recipes are all 20 ingredients and buy a 2.5 kg lamb joint or 4 salmon fillets. I don't think Jamie has a fucking clue how much some foods cost or how poor people (which I'd class myself as atm) have to spend on food. The book doesn't even work for his middle class crowd as these are not particularly "Money saving meals" as the book claims. I guess he is not telling us how to cook it all in our huge outdoor wood ovens with veg from our huge vegetable gardens though.

[Guy Bifkin]

I'd definitely back Keith Floyd in a bare chested knife fight with Oliver.

That's how it's done.

[wordsfromlee]

Got in from work today and the first thing my girlfriend said to me was how Jamie is trying to ban the 2-4-1 Domino's deal. She said that he needs to, and I quote, "get fucked by a rake". Seems fair.