The full text of my article in The Independent, August 2013:
By JACK MONROE
Tuesday 27 August 2013
“Jamie Oliver has created a publicity storm in the run-up to his new television show Save With Jamie by bashing the food choices of some of Britain’s poorest families. He claims that struggling families could eat so much better if they stopped spending their money on chips and television sets, when they could be buying mangetout and mussels. Yes, really.
Speaking to the Radio Times to promote his new book and series, he made references to a “mum and kids eating chips and cheese out of Styrofoam containers, and behind them is a massive TV. It just didn’t weigh up.”
Jamie’s stint on the television series Ministry of Food does not qualify him to talk about poverty. He is a poverty tourist turned self-appointed tour guide, and his comments are not only out of touch but support dangerous and damaging myths that “poor people are only poor because they spend their money on the wrong things”, rather than constrained by time, equipment, knowledge, or practicalities.
Try cooking a budget fish pie, when you only have a single plug-in hob, or a microwave, or a disability that means you need to buy your vegetables pre-chopped, sending the cost soaring.
He goes on to claim: “I meet people who say I don’t understand what it’s like. I just want to hug them.” Those people were right, he doesn’t understand what it’s like. Popping into a struggling family’s home to shoot a television programme does not qualify you to talk about how people should spend their money, especially when you have a £150m fortune to go home to (made, ironically, off the back of promoting the supermarkets and ready meals that he is now turning his back on).
When I was living on £10 a week for food, because of mistakes with housing benefit payments, I didn’t need a hug. I needed a fiver, just to have a little bit more to eat. I didn’t need to be teleported to Sicily to see how the street cleaners ate, I needed someone to point out that the 21p can of kidney beans could be the staple ingredient in a nutritious meal. I needed practical advice about what to do with the tins of food given to me by the food bank.
As I said in an earlier blog post: “Try it. For a month, or two, or five. Unscrew your lightbulbs, turn off your fridge, sell anything you can see lying around that you might get more than £2 for. Missing days of meals, with the heating off all winter, selling your son’s shoes and drinking his formula milk that the food bank gave you. Stop going out. Walk everywhere, even in the pouring rain, in your only pair of shoes, with a wet and sobbing three-year-old…
“Drag that three-year-old into every pub and shop in unreasonable walking distance and ask if they have any job vacancies. Get home, soaking, still unemployed, to dry out in a freezing cold flat. Then drag yourself to the cooker to pour some pasta into a pan, pour some chopped tomatoes on top, and try not to hurl it across the room when your son tells you that he doesn’t like it… You’re full of rain and heartache and anger and despair and it’s starting to seep through the cracks…”
This person does not pop down to a local market and smile sweetly at the stallholder for a handful of gourmet vegetables. This person throws whatever is in the cupboard into a saucepan and prays that her child will eat it.
That “massive telly” that everyone is so obsessed with? The ludicrous slur that people can’t be poor if they own a television set. In modern-day Britain, a family’s status always comes down to the size of the television set. If you’re rich, your home cinema is a sign of your success. If you’re poor, even the most meagre television set arouses suspicion. Does anyone think to ask where it came from? I’ve never bought a television set in my life, but I’ve sold three that were given to me.
Many of today’s 13 million people living in poverty in the UK are the “hard-working”, the “strivers”, underemployed and underpaid. But there is a common fantasy among the self-appointed poverty experts such as Oliver that all struggling families are eating chips with cheese on top, reclining in front of their massive television sets.
Oliver raised some good points about food education and culture, but they’ll be lost among his assumptions. With three food banks opening in the UK every week, it is time to tackle the causes of food poverty, rather than glossing over it over with diversions about chips and Sky boxes.
Why aren’t we looking at the real issues, such as bedroom tax, subsistence wages, lack of jobs, underemployment, and little cooking education? Why are we being encouraged to measure someone’s value by the size of their television and the type of carbs they eat?
There’s definitely an urgent need for people on low incomes to be better equipped to cook healthily on a budget, but the reality is that half a million people in the UK are at a point where they cannot afford food at all, let alone chips in Styrofoam containers, to eat in front of their “massive telly”.”
Jack Monroe. Follow me on Twitter @MsJackMonroe. Find me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/agirlcalledjack
A Girl Called Jack is available to order at Waterstones: https://m.waterstones.com/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=10013935 or on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Girl-Called-Jack-Monroe/dp/0718178947