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Jamie stirs pot with cooking campaign

Sarah Caden applauds Jamie Oliver's efforts to get us back into the kitchen where we can start tackling obesity
By Sarah Caden
Sunday October 12 2008
Source: Independent Ireland

AS is traditional, before Jamie Oliver joined Jonathan Ross for a chat on the TV couch two weeks ago, we saw a clip of his new campaigning TV series, Jamie's Ministry of Food. It showed a young Yorkshire woman teaching her friends to cook the celebrity chef's meatball recipe. The girls revealed to Jamie they didn't know what "simmer" meant; that they'd no idea that water bubbled when it boiled and the Jonathan Ross audience roared with laughter as if they were watching pure comedy.
And then, on came Jamie, resolutely not laughing at honest efforts of people willing to reveal their ignorance to millions. Further, Jamie's seriousness acknowledged something more, that there's a danger of the can't-cook-should-cook campaign becoming about the middle classes laughing at the poor, all the while failing to address their own inabilities, glossed over by the fact they can make a couple of the celebrity chef's dishes for dinner parties and that they can afford a better class of ready meal for their kids.
We're all on the same road to obesity in the next generation and though some are getting there faster, with faster, nastier food, the sooner we accept a group responsibility, the sooner we fix things for all our kids. With the challenge of accepting some guidance -- as a society and not just the sections at which we tut-tut -- it's easy to bitch about a nanny state, but the problem is massive enough to warrant it. And if we can accept the Government sorting out the banks, surely we can knuckle down to some instruction in how to avert the ill-health and early death of future generations. The point has come when we need to be told what to do in the kitchen, because the fact is most of us don't have a clue.
The easy chair we have settled into regarding the looming childhood obesity epidemic is to convince ourselves it's happening elsewhere, that it's happening thanks to parents who don't care, who are too busy watching TV to cook, who, though nobody says it explicitly, are poor and unbothered by their kids' bulk.
In a nutshell, we've decided there's a section of society -- a large one -- that doesn't love their children like a parent who puts food on the table. It suggests that if you're poor and ill-educated you don't love your kids, and it suggests, to the likes that feel smug enough to laugh at Jamie's Ministry of Food, that if we have the ability to give our kids better than a nightly diet of chip-shop kebabs, then we're life's successes. But those of us who can cook can only do so because someone bothered to show us and, let's face it, there is a huge proportion of middle-class society that cannot cook, but conceals it with the food it can afford to eat.
In a strange way, it is the very fact of being better educated than previous generations which has left us without basic skills. Educated people don't get their hands dirty and educated women, in particular, have missed out on their mother and grandmother's cooking skills because they weren't taught them in the name of liberation and equality. And yet, while we value much of what feminism has done for 21st century women, this is a downside.
Women under 40 devalue cooking because it smacks of the shackles of old. They didn't learn at their mother's hip at the hob because they were being reared to be something better than their mothers. Now, however, as we renegotiate feminism, there comes the recognition that women remain the primary childcare givers but, sadly, commonly lack one of the primary nurturing skills. In truth, the most liberating gift you can give your child -- of either sex -- is to teach them to be self-sufficient in how to nourish themselves. But that lesson has been devalued and, as result, lost, across the socio-economic board.
As with his efforts to improve Britain's school dinners, Jamie Oliver has been attacked from all sides for his Ministry of Food. A Rotherham MP charged that the celebrity chef was casting his subjects as "thickos", but Oliver is careful to patronise no one in the Yorkshire town where he's begun his campaign to get Britain cooking. He's not specifically targetting the unemployed and downtrodden, but he's not avoiding the fact that they're eating the worst food, either. His star pupil, Natasha, is a single mother who admits her motivation to cook was her daughter's assertion that "kebabs come from the floor", due to the fact that it was on the sitting-room floor she consumed her nightly dinner of processed meat and chips. But his subjects come from various walks of life with one thing in common. It's not that they don't care, it's that they don't have a clue.
Further, they're the ones prepared to admit it in front of millions who may well laugh at them. And Oliver's a man prepared to do something, even if it's going to see him slated, because somebody has to do something. It's time we all took a bit of instruction, because our mammies aren't going to be around to dish up Sunday lunches and Christmas dinners forever. Some day, the ball's going to be solely in the court of the young parents of today, and while some of us have as many unopened cookbooks as others have takeaway menus, the end result is the same for our kids.
- Sarah Caden