Food 'n' Class

[john eden]

My daughter's class did school assembly today about healthy eating and she got to play a fat kid (with a pillow shoved up her jumper) who became healthy through good eating and exercise.

 

[crackerjack]

He's not really a 'mate', then, is he? More a sort of 'person you let hang around you to make you look cool by comparison'.

There's deeper meaning behind it than an interest in dry stats. He's a working class inverted snob and food is his battleground. He's pissing diet Coke into your Innocent smoothie.

 

[nomadthethird]

One thing I think is kind of ironic about Whole Foods disciples--not that I care what the fuck they chose to eat with their money-- but, for example, I can think of tons of people I worked with who would eat granola bars and drink smoothies several times a day because that was "healthier" than the bag of doritos the rest of us got out of the vending machine. What they didn't realize, though, was that granola and smoothies have very little nutritional value (unless the smoothies are made of yogurt and fresh fruit ONLY) outside of empty refined sugars and saturated fat calories, and they certainly have tons more calories than a vending machine bag of chips (that's also made with enriched corn flour so it has a little iron, calcium, etc)...

Sure doritos are gross but in terms of total damage done to one's diet, I'd go for 200 calories of chips a day over 800 in refined sugars and saturated fat. The granola eaters could never figure out why some of us never gained weight while they were constantly trying to "diet"...

 

[don_quixote]

if you really wanna diet it's all about lentils, chick peas, rice and long walks

 

[Mr. Tea]

if you really wanna diet it's all about lentils, chick peas

^^ Only recommended if you're single or have an extremely well ventilated bedroom.

 

[don_quixote]

i see your point, but they are the fucking boss

 

[Slothrop]

Yeah, I like the stuff and I'm not on that big a budget, but surely if he wants to get poor people eating more healthily then surely it would be better to show them how to make good food from cheap ingredients. I mean say for instance we went to sainsburys, we can get creamed coconut for 35p; basics sweet potatoes, peppers, onions and chillis; rice and buy some spices (which obviously can be used for future meals) and you can create a filling, tasty meal for well under a fiver.

If we look at a lot of cuisine from round the world, there's plenty of examples of food that are actually part of the diet of the indigenous poor which are not only cheap to make but also good on the taste buds. It's important to have food that excites the mouth to get people to view cooking as something other than part of the drudgery of survival, and this can be done quite cheaply with a bit of thought.

Jamie Oliver does seem like a slightly random person to be doing this sort of stuff as far as his actual cooking is concerned - most of his stuff that I've seen seems to be aspirational Italian with lots of expensive imported ingredients. Whenever I've had to survive on the cheap I've got a lot more mileage out of various sorts of european farmhouse cooking (including traditional british stuff) and middle eastern / far eastern things that can mostly be done using cheap cuts of meat and a big bag of veg from the market...

 

[Numbers]

Jamie Oliver does seem like a slightly random person to be doing this sort of stuff as far as his actual cooking is concerned - most of his stuff that I've seen seems to be aspirational Italian with lots of expensive imported ingredients.

Yeah, that's true though. As I stated before,I don't have much problems with his will to learn the nation cook. But I do have a little problem with the kind of cooking he insists on. If you really want to cook Italian, do it properly (/= using expensive ingredients). Or just don't. What's wrong with British cuisine, anyway?