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...