In which multi-millionaire, Jamie Oliver complains about losing public funding

Yes folks, the very rich celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver is moaning about local councils withdrawing funding for his Jaimie's Ministry of Food projects in Bradford and Rotherham:

The 42-year-old chef maintains projects he set up in cities and towns, including Bradford and Rotherham, were ultimately to address Britain’s obesity crisis, improve nutrition and encourage healthy meals for the younger generation, but added they were difficult to implement because of an “erratic” approach to funding from the public sector.

Now, leaving aside whether these projects actually do any good, if Oliver is so keen to promote his particular brand of fussbucketry, why on earth doesn't he dip into his own substantial bank account to do so? Why expect the council tax payers of Bradford to cough up?

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The 42-year-old chef maintains projects he set up in cities and towns, including Bradford and Rotherham, were ultimately to address Britain’s obesity crisis, improve nutrition and encourage healthy meals for the younger generation, but added they were difficult to implement because of an “erratic” approach to funding from the public sector.

Read more at: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/chef-oliver-says-support-for-his-food-projects-was-erratic-1-8833910

Sorry Jamie but schools don't have the time to indulge your fussbucketry

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Hardly a day passes without one or other lobby group calling for their particular passion to be a compulsory subject in schools - the latest is Jamie Oliver's 'food revolution' which demands that loads of limited teaching time is given over to this chef's particular brand of nannying fussbucketry:

FOOD REVOLUTION DAY IS FIGHTING TO PUT COMPULSORY PRACTICAL FOOD EDUCATION ON THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM.

With diet-related diseases rising at an alarming rate, it has never been more important to educate children about food, where it comes from and how it affects their bodies.

On the face of things teaching children how to cook (I assume this is what Jamie means by 'practical food education') is a great idea - cookery is a really useful life skill. But here's the problem - we get between five and six hours for five days a week across 30 weeks in the year of teaching time. That's a maximum of 900 hours a year in which to teach children how to read and write, add and subtract, read a map, know the basics of history, understand science, learn the rudiments of a foreign language or two, understand culture and religion, experience great literature and a thousand other really important things. And the real figure for teaching time in the UK is much lower - 635 hours/year in primary and 715 hours/year in secondary.

And then lobbyists pop up and say that every child should be taught how to code, manage family accounts, know about STIs, play sport, paint and draw, learn to dance, act, sing, understand the electoral system, know about the courts, grow vegetables, build a table, mend a car and now cook. All fantastic and useful skills. It's hard to argue with any of them.

Except that there isn't the time. I'm not a teacher but I'm prepared to bet that all the zillions of things that might be taught at school have to be whittled down to the ones that really matter. And because most of us aren't ill from overeating (or eating the "wrong" food) lecturing the hell out of kids about diet - often using inaccurate or even downright incorrect information - really isn't a priority. At least not alongside reading, writing, maths, science, geography and history.

The truth of course is that obesity isn't rising - it has more-or-less flatlined over the past decade. More to the point though (and Jamie misinforms us with a ridiculous claim about 'diet-related disease') we are better fed, live longer lives and suffer far fewer diet-related conditions than past generations. It's true that there are too many morbidly obese people but hectoring kids with green peppers isn't going to change this one jot.

Whatever the truth or fiction here (and Jamie's campaign is mostly the latter) the one incontrovertible fact is that, if schools are made to put 'food eduction' into the curriculum, it will be at the expense of something else - learning french perhaps, maybe geography, or cutting back even more on physical exercise. As parents we want schools to give our children the skills and aspiration to succeed in a challenging world. And being rude about McDonalds and waving tomatoes around doesn't meet that need.

So I won't be signing Jamie's petition.

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Jamie Oliver is both a nannying fussbucket and wrong about sugar consumption

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It seems 2015 is going to be the year where that attack on sugar goes postal - we'll see almost daily pieces claiming it's addictive, poisonous and responsible for all the sins and evils of the world. And that the way to deal with this problem is to lump a tax on the evil stuff.

So it starts - with a famous TV chef:

Mr Oliver told the Daily Mail: “Sugar’s definitely the next evil. It’s the next tobacco, without doubt, and that industry should be scared. And it should be taxed, just like tobacco and anything else that can, frankly, destroy lives.” 

Jamie goes on to claim that "68 per cent of every case that goes through the NHS is diet-related" - you know now that he's lost it (if you've any idea where this statistic comes from do let me know).

Of course the thing about sugar is that we eat a lot less of it than we used to - really:

In 1974 the average consumption of sugar per head per week in the UK was  458g - which is a near as it gets to a pound of sugar each week. Today the figure is just 90g per head per week. Sugar consumption has fallen every single year (bar one) since 1958.

How our diet has changed since the 1970s

And this isn't just the bags of white stuff but all that 'Non-milk Extrinsic Sugar' - basically all the 'added sugars' of whatever sort that crop up in our food. For a longer term perspective, here's a graph of UK sugar consumption:

UK per capita sugar consumption is now falling

Source: Czarnikow, F O Licht, ISO, Board of Trade Journal

Now it's true that the UK has a problem with obesity. And that this contributes people getting diabetes, liver disease, coronary heart problems, bad knees and so forth. But the cause of this problem really isn't sugar.

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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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A thought on the death of Bernard Matthews...

You know the guy - the fat bloke who sold all those crappy processed turkeys and such. Who Jamie Oliver didn't like because kids preferred his twizzlers to the fine, healthy vegetables that Jamie & the Food Fascists (now that's a band name if ever there was one) felt we should be eating so as to avoid terrible deaths at a young age.

I have to admit that we don't eat turkey much. Not for any noble reason but because most of it - including Bernard's - is dry, tasteless and uninspiring. But despite this I can still admire Bernard Matthews and will urge others to be more like him and less like the righteous fussbuckets. And, of course, Jamie Oliver is much like Bernard too - made shed loads of dosh from building up a personal brand that has something to do with food.

But mostly with Bernard its the business success that I like. The fact that you can turn 20 turkey eggs and a paraffin heater into a multi-million pound business reminds us that achievement isn't really about exams and degrees and chartered status. It's about hard work, initiative, creativity and probably more hard work on top of that (which perhaps explains my relative lack of success). Plus flexibility:

Refusing to give in, he tried again – on a much grander scale. In 1955, backed by a £2,500 loan, he bought Great Witchingham Hall, a dilapidated 80-roomed Elizabethan manor outside Norwich which had once been the home of John Norris, man of letters. Matthews reckoned that, at 5p a square foot, it was considerably cheaper than the 30p a square foot he would have to invest to build his own turkey sheds.

Apart from the bedroom in which he and his wife Joyce lived, he turned the house over to turkeys, hatching them in the living room, rearing them in the bedrooms and slaughtering them in the kitchens.

So when we're thinking about student loans (£2,500 was a load of money in 1950 and Bernard paid it back without a quibble and without protection or discount) and the end of jobs for life in the public sector let's spare a thought for the Bernard Matthews of this world. For without their ideas, creativity and hard work we'd still be a poor country. It is enterprising people like Bernard Matthews that lie behind all the good things we have (as well as turkey twizzlers).

We should celebrate them more.

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