When did this nation become such a bunch of nasty authoritarian arseholes?
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and England footballer Steven Gerrard are calling on the government to fight obesity through cookery teaching in schools.
Just because one of these two can kick a ball about and the other makes cookery programmes, it does not make their opinions on anything worth any more than yours or mine. And it does not mean that they have any right to demand that the rest of us fall into line with their authoritarian agenda.
What is it about these people? Sure, they might think that cookery lessons in schools is a good idea. They may even be right (not least, given that it has been a subject taught in schools for a pretty long time already), but for flying fuck’s sake, what is it about these cretins that makes them think that their ideas should be forced with the weight of legislation on the whole population?
Just fuck off, will you?
Might cookery lessons put kids off cooking for life, just as PE puts them off sport?
Certainly did that for me!
Well, PE certainly put me off sport for life.
I didn’t find PE to be too bad but absolutely loathed football and rugby. After leaving school I got into cycling, swimming and karate. I think that the difference is that I chose these activities for myself, no-one forced me to do them.
Recently there was a piece on the radio about the current recession and the general belt tightening that is going on. Cue vox pops with poor person lamenting that she could only afford cheap ready meals for her little son. She knew that the cheap ready meals offered poor nutritional value but she couldn’t afford the more expensive ready meals. Surely schools teaching a few basics about cooking must be a good thing, at least so we don’t have parents who actually have no skills other than sticking a ready meal in the microwave.
Something makes me uneasy about that last paragraph, government intervention is rather consistent in bringing about bad outcomes. Commenters, please feel free to set me straight.
She doesn’t want to cook and she doesn’t want to take responsibility for what her own child eats. What she needs is not HE lessons, but rather a course in ethics. Perhaps I should lobby the government for that to be made mandatory.
Saw a bit of that on the news this morn, shouted at the telly… FFS LEAVE US ALONE YOU OVERPAID CRETINS…WHAT THE F*** MAKES YOU THINK YOUR SO BLOODY RIGHT..
Oliver is looking a bit podgie these days, perhaps he should practice what he preaches, git.
As for that cretin that feeds her child ready meals, she’s a lazy slob, probably a big fat lazy slob, don’t start me on that, local news a while ago, local school have set up a bus to take children to school because their mothers can’t be bothered to get up, dress and take them. Cue mother standing on doorstep in nightie, “Well it’s hard to get up in the morning and take the kids to school, I’m so tired (ie can’t be ars**d)”
Needless to say this was met with a lot of derogatory remarks in the local paper.
Ready meals, whether cheap or expensive, are not un-nutrituous by definition. Surely, with increasing prosperity, it makes sense for people not to waste their time on preparing meals from raw ingredients, just as most no longer make their own clothes or spin their own wool. For a bunch of so-called libertarians, there still seems to be a disturbing amount of food snobbery here. Can the poor not be trusted to sort out their own nutrition?
“Just because one of these two can kick a ball about”
Debatable after yesterday. 😉
I say cripes oh lor you chaps! What a bunch of wimps you were.
I was good at sports. Opening bat for our school team, Centre at Rugby, in the swimming team, champion sprinter, long jump, high jump (quite often but for different reasons 😉 ) Javelin and Discus.
And we did Gym in a pair of plimsoles and a pair of shorts only. Friggin freezing it was in there in January too. I had my first sexual experience in the gym too.
Well you see I was pissed off at our teacher always wanting us to do things his way. Remember climbing ropes? From floor to ceiling in our gym was about 25 feet. Well teach wanted us all to the Monkey climb, but I thought Bugger that! that’s strenuous. I had devised a method of wrapping the rope around my right leg and anchoring it with my left foot. All I had to do was haul myself up, lock off and I could stay there all day!
Well this one occasion I thought I’d take the piss out of Teach and took a book up there with me, and was reading it for a while before he noticed. He went berzerk, and ordered me down at once. Well I released the rope a bit too quickly and slid down the rope rather fast, all that friction on my inner ahem thigh and parts, well it left me a little puddle of ecstacy on the floor, with our teacher bellowing at me, “Get up boy, what the hell’s the matter with you?” and me with a very cheesy smile on my face. I was 12.
Nothing wrong with cookery lessons per se either chaps, except Health and Safety nixed that years ago. What children lighting ovens? Gaaaa!
Ah, that brings me back! Hockey lessons in the freezing rain and – on a couple of occasions – snow! Now, it’d be ‘Lessons cancelled. ‘elf n’ safety, innit?’
Oh, I dunno, while my peers were kicking balls about, I was planting arrows in targets from 100yards away. When I wasn’t doing that, I was putting my opponent on the judo mat – when he wasn’t doing the same to me, that is 😉
So, I take your wimp charge and pass it back to you with knobs on 😀
But I did all that too LR. Plus Golf (my best handicap was 9, my dad’s plus 2)and shooting shotguns and .22 (lots of farmer cousins). If it could be thrown, hit, kicked or shot, I’m your man! 😀 And of course Algebra is useful Stony, that’s why I said I had mastered it by the end, but in the beginning it made about as much sense to an 11 year old as kicking a ball about in the driving rain.
Tried golf, but found it rather dull, I’m afraid. I did enjoy cycling and was generally fitter than most of my peers. A sixty mile round trip not being unusual for me.
There’s a theme here – for the most part, I prefer solitary pursuits. I am not really a team player. But wimp, I ain’t.
@Curmudgeon
It wasn’t really ready meals themselves that struck me about the interview. We use convenience foods sometimes at our house, sometimes you just want something quick and easy to fix. It was first that the focus was on austerity and that food made from basic ingredients is likely to be cheaper. Second, it appeared that the concept of cooking something seemed to be completely alien to this person. The choice in her world seemed to be between cheap ready meals or expensive ready meals, she didn’t seem to be even aware of any other option.
@RAB
I don’t see why loathing school sports makes me a wimp. I think it was more the assinine stupid pointlessness of moving a ball around a field that got me. Going out in a horizontal sleet storm in tee-shirt and shorts is also something only an idiot would do unless someone made him do it.
Come come Stony, you must know my style of writing by now, my tongue is almost perminently planted firmly in my cheek, but there is always a solid core of truth in what I write. Truth with humour is my Credo.
I have found the world to be absurd from an early age, so sports in a blizzard was no different from learning Algebra in the pointlessness stakes of things you were forced to do at school. Besides I was bloody good at sports, if you’re not, well that changes your outlook immediately doesn’t it? I eventually got pretty good at Algebra too. 😉
Algebra is needed for things like designing electronic circuits so it has its uses. When I think about it, moving a ball around a field isn’t really pointless when there are millions of people prepared to pay to watch you do it.
Yes I was rubbish at field sports but had some success at the sports that I chose to do for myself.
That bit always got me, too. Stripping half naked in the middle of winter. Madness personified.
Is food made from basic ingredients really cheaper once you build in the time value of acquiring, preparing and cooking it? As I said, as society becomes more prosperous, people will increasingly choose either to eat ready meals or – perhaps more importantly – to eat out. Cooking yourself from scratch will become an artisanal indulgence rather than a cost-saving measure.
To be honest, comparing the ready meal with other mass produced goods that no-one would even think of trying to make themselves is a new idea to me. I actually enjoy cooking but, as you say, I can only indulge in it when I have enough free time. The same thing applies to gardening, if I didn’t get a buzz out of growing vegetables there is no way that I could justify the time and effort involved.
I’ve not done the maths as it were, but ready meals and convenience ingredients tend to be more expensive than the basic ingredients. Knocking up a quick meal using, say, some pasta, mince, puréed tomatoes and a pinch of oregano isn’t I suspect that much more onerous than buying a ready meal using the same ingredients and, is, I suspect cheaper – even taking into account the time, given that the source is the same supermarket, so we are only talking about a few minutes extra in the preparation. And, frankly, something I produce myself tastes better, so the trade off is worth it for me.
You know what’s really stupid about the campaign these two have cooked up (pun intended). There isn’t an obesity crisis. Nope. Nada. Zilch. No. What is changing is the measurement of obesity. When healthy children are classified as obese because some stupid clerk in the NHS uses the wrong BMI* scale then you can see how easily the stats are skewed.
* Don’t get me started about how crap the BMI system is at deciding if someone is overweight or not.
Don’t understand most of this food stuff. I’m a bit old fashioned and think that all food is good for you on the simple basis that it keeps you alive. Apart from the poisonous stuff, of course, that we found out by trial and error.
Don’t think it matters what it is. It’s food.