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Wednesday 1 October 2008

Ministry of teh Food [Slim]


Caught the first episode of Jamies Ministry of Food last night. It's a revival of the government drive to get people cooking at home at the start of the century. Jamies mission is to target chavs who can't cook and eat takeaways and ready meals and teach them some meals, and then get them to teach their mates, and make a happier healthier country.

It's a noble cause, but why is it even required? How did we get into the situation where people can't fry an egg? How can anyone on benefits afford to eat a takeaway every night? The producers probably did this intentionally, but there's one scene with a young mother in tears because she can't afford to bus it to the supermarket to buy food so has to go to the chippy, a moving scene that's punctuated by her dragging on a fag to the background noise of her massive flat screen TV. How have people reprioritised food out of their lives in this way?

One thing I'd add to his campaign is that that people also could do with learning to use leftovers more. We do at least one soup a week with leftovers that would normally go in the bin. For a family of five, that's a fair ole bit of dosh saved.

What I don't get also is the skills issue central to the show. I can understand this from a convenience standpoint, you can't be arsed to chop veg, you'd rather just heat it up. But if you can heat up an Tesco ready meal, you can heat up a raw spud and make it into a baked spud. Cover it with cheese and salad and you've got a meal. How is this in any way challenging?

1 comment:

  1. As the media tells us all the time, "we lead busy lives", "we are time poor", and many families with two earners don't have time to make meals.. and yet 10 million people watch Eastenders 4 times a week. Get some fucking priorities!I didn't see the programme, I'll try and catch up with it from box.bz or somewhere, but there was a sob piece on the local news last week with a brutish young fella saying they couldn't afford to eat and he often went to bed hungry... whilst his Sky+ box sat blinking in the background.I think the reason most of us have lost the skillz are because of my parents... well, y'know, parents of the 60s and 70s. I was having an argument with my mam about it during my last holiday, she never passed on any of the offal cooking/eating skillz that her mother had. They all got swept up in the consumerist, instant-whip-white-hot-aspirational lifestyle and forgot how to cook, or rather didn't forget, it just went out of fashion.Forty years on and we're paying for it with obesity and people with no cooking skill at all.

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