Monday, 25 August 2008

Jamie Oliver Speaks Sense

In an interview with Paris Match magazine, Jamie Oliver suggested people in the UK cared more about getting drunk than they did about eating well. "The people I'm talking about have enormous televisions - a lot bigger than my own - the latest in mobile phones, cars and they go and get drunk in pubs at the weekend. Their poverty shows in the way they feed themselves."

From the BBC News website

Usually when Jamie Oliver comes on the television either as 'celebrity' - I use the term loosely - chef or advertising some supermarket or other, I immediately reach for the 'off' button on the remote control. The Essex boy is one of many people in the media who irritate the hell out of me and I don't normally give a Jonathan Ross what he says. But in the article in the link to this rant, Oliver does speak some sense.

80% of British people don't sit round a table for dinner. When I was a child back in the late 1960s/early 1970s, one of my jobs when it was meal time was to set the table. Now I wonder how many people actually have a table. How many people sit with a takeaway in a foil carton on their lap slouched in front of a plasma screen watching endless rubbish on satellite television? And then head to the pub to get 'pie-eyed'?

It's somewhat ironic given the ever increasing number of cookery programmes on television that the art of cooking a healthy, nutritious, well balanced mean appears to be dying.

Perhaps those who appreciate good food in this country have had their chips...

3 comments:

Colin Campbell said...

Now that brings back the memories, setting the table and washing the burned chocolate pudding pan. Delights. I must be some kind of new age guy. I cook a family meal almost every day and feel lucky if my family offer to set the table and clear up. It is such a hardship for them to rinse plates and put them in the dishwasher.

I often feel like Cinderella.

MrsAshleyPascal said...

We have dinner at the dining table almost every night - and we actually cook real food as well. I feel bad for those children that will never have that - shame really.

Melissa

June said...

Yes, I remember my brother and I had to take turns in setting the table. It was a good family bonding time when I was little. Even though I am by myself now, I've decided to stop eating dinner in front of the TV and set my own little place setting on my new little dining table and slowly enjoy my well-balanced meal.

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