Jamie Oliver is killing us...

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...or maybe it's Nigella?

In the latest piece of New Puritan dribble (published - where else - in that bible of fussbucketry, the British Medical Journal) we're told that those famous TV chefs are pushing an unhealthy diet:

The paper, 'Nutritional content of supermarket ready meals and recipes by television chefs in the United Kingdom: a cross sectional study', by Simon Howard, Jean Adams and Martin White, compared nutrient contents of supermarkets' own-brand ready meals with recipes from four TV chefs.

The celebrity chefs' recipes were found to be more unhealthy in terms of energy, fat and fibre content. Their recipes all have higher fat, saturated fat and calorie contents per serving than the supermarket ready meals. They also tend to have less fibre per serving than the microwaveable offerings of Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's.

Not surprisingly the wonderful Lorraine Pascale (who in case the authors hadn't noticed makes cakes) scores worst. But overall it's a reminder of how the health fascists want us to eat carefully measured diets - doubtless under expensive medical direction and planning - that provide no pleasure, no joy. Just a soul-less pap sufficient to keep us alive to do that purposeful work that the New Puritans demand of us.

Sadly, Jamie's response is to display piles of guilt - rather than telling the writers of this ghastly drivel to go take a running jump, our favourite cheeky chef says:

‘We welcome any research which raises debate on these issues and in fact Jamie’s most recent book, 15 Minute Meals, does contain calorie content and nutritional information per serving for every dish.

‘We will soon also be re-launching the Jamie Oliver website with nutritional information on the recipes. However, we would regard the key issue to be food education so that people are aware of which foods are for every day and which are treats to be enjoyed occasionally.’

Jamie just reinforces the New Puritan message with their low salt, low fat, low pleasure diet. Rather than stick up for exciting, innovative and varied food - for eating as a pleasure - Jamie opts for the safe, approved, mea culpa approach.

I do not want to live in a world where we're only allowed to eat things approved by doctors, where our diets are picked at and criticised and where the New Puritans tell me that eating a glorious, fat-laden sausage sandwich is a sin. It is sad that Jamie Oliver - who started out telling us that ordinary food could be extraordinary - has morphed into some sort of New Puritan poodle unable to tell the fussbuckets to go away and leave us to live our lives as we want to live them.

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