Of the various things written in the aftermath of TV chef Jamie Oliver’s recent comments about nutrition and cooking habits among poor people and families in Britain, I eventually found perhaps the most reasoned analysis at The Telegraph.
Joanna Blythman writes:
I make a point of trading up with food, buying good quality unprocessed ingredients, and often pay with a debit card. Occasionally, when the bill comes to more than I’d expect, I make a mental note to pay more attention to prices, but a little overspend isn’t a disaster; I won’t end up down the pawnshop.
So how humbling it was to see that that most customers in this store had no such security. These were people – it’s generally women who shoulder the responsibility for the family food spend – who always paid in cash, often a mixture of notes, coins, tokens and vouchers, which they meticulously counted out, sometimes betraying a slight anxiety that there wouldn’t be quite enough. They clearly budgeted by the day, not the week. As for the luxury of stocking up on things that might come in handy at some point, forget it. Their finances were on a knife-edge, and food outlay was a critical factor.
I could have given them a sanctimonious little lecture about spending their money more wisely – in many cases, pet food was arguably the most nutritious item in their trolleys, amid a pile of processed junk – but it would have been monstrously insensitive to do so. If you’re trying really hard to eke out your money, it seems cheaper, and it’s the line of least resistance, to fill everyone up on cheap carbs and low-grade processed meat. And yet, there were nearly always a couple of products in the line-up – some apples on promotion, or clementines, perhaps – that showed a touching aspiration to eat better.
This is exactly the point that I was trying to make in my own comments yesterday. It is easy to make smug and sanctimonious throwaway remarks about how people should take an axe to their broadband internet subscriptions or mobile phone contracts (as if most of us could realistically imagine living without either) before deigning to eat a cheap, unhealthy microwave meal, and many commenters seem to have fallen into precisely this trap.\
Like me, Blythman also gives Oliver credit where credit is due:
To be fair to Oliver, though, his thoughts are more nuanced than the provocative headlines might suggest. If he manages to show graphically how some of the poorest people are routinely ripped off by companies selling products that seem cheap, but that are actually rotten value for money, then more power to his elbow.
Be under no illusion, our large food retailers and manufacturers are making a mint from selling poor people over-packaged, nutrient-light, additive-dense food products, while trumpeting how they are helping them make ends meet.
And if Oliver can help people see how, by buying unprocessed raw ingredients, and cooking more, rather than relying on the sweepings from the manufacturer’s floor, they can eat better for the same, or less money, then that will be a sterling service to the nation.
This is an important area that I somewhat overlooked when I wrote my initial reaction to Oliver’s comments yesterday. In that piece I focused on the three aspects of food preparation knowledge, available spare time and social norms that go into determining what ends up on the family dining table (or, let’s be realistic, our laps while we sit and watch television). But supermarkets and food manufacturers cannot entirely escape censure for their part in making it harder for consumers to choose healthy options through their use of awkward quantity packaging and opaque pricing special offers.
Whether the answer lies with a government enquiry, more heavy-handed regulation of the food retail industry and active subsidisation of local markets and other initiatives, as Blythman seems to advocate, is another question entirely. Readers can probably anticipate my immediate reaction to the idea of another government enquiry and the further empowerment of our controlling, paternalistic government. But yet she does raise some valid points, and so I will give her the last word.
This sums up perfectly the issue that Jamie Oliver struggled to articulate in his controversial comments:
So what Oliver should address is how, when all the pressures in our society conspire to woo people away from scratch cooking of good-quality raw materials onto a convenience food diet, we can help them to resist.
…
Cooking is to food what books are to literacy: it allows us to become the controllers of our personal food destiny. Poor or rich, we’re all just suckers for processed food without it.
Amen to that.
Semi-Partisan Politics 