The Ministry of Food
Another Oliver campaign: ‘The Ministry of Food centres on a similar subject but focuses on where I see my project grounded, within the realm of cooking, skills and education. Explored through a documentary TV series, Jamie visited the homes of a number of homes within council estates spanning the country. The series painted a powerful portrait of the socially excluded, it revealed an enduring truth “that our diet today is as much about class as it always has been and it will undoubtedly take more than this programme to change that. What it has done though is open the nations eyes to how certain social categories within society are nourished and how”.
“The programme it self was undisputedly a provocative piece of political documentary. In it or by accident Jamie had revealed the domestic life of a British town and captured a snapshot of a towns health. The result is an indictment to the current political system, as disturbing as any ideological tract, food and the real experience of it is all about class” (October 1st 2008, The Guardian, Felicity Lawrence).
The programme revealed a dark side to the diets of some within certain areas of the country. In one case study he revealed one particular example, a female who fed her children takeaways on a daily basis, never having experienced a meal eaten at home. During the programme they sit on their living room floor, eating shavings of donner kebab with all its accoutrements out of polystyrene containers with their fingers, draws and cupboards are bulging with sweets, crisps and chocolate. Of her £80 benefit cheque, £70 goes on junk food, her children have already lost their teeth to decay. Despite her eight hob cooker, she just seems to have little idea what to do.
“Disciplined and well organised eating is interpreted as a reflection of general governance of life, just like a tidy home” (cf. Schmidt & Kristensen, 1986). The emphasis on ‘good’ eating is understandable because it indicates self-control and it is in this portrait that gruesomely the opposite is highlighted. The notion of the limit separating the ‘pure’ from the ‘impure’ nature seems to be the focal point of many modern discourses of eating. The ‘pure’ represents either the culturally controlled or the unpolluted, non-artificial ideal type, whereas the ‘impure’ is either the uncontrolled or the culturally contaminated, depending on the discourse in question. The various difficulties in drawing this limit are manifested for instance in the vegan or living foods discourses of eating. This concept is in part, part of Claude Levi Strauss’s culinary triangle (quote fro his book) (http://www.sifo.no/files/makela_arppe.pdf)
Class, a topic that is frequently now avoided is the root of this dietary problem, one needs only to look at George Orwells documentary piece written in the 1930’s, The Road To Wigan Pier to see that Jamie Olivers findings are not too dissimilar from 70 years past.
… the English palate, especially the working class-palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year, and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea would much sooner have tinned milk… p.92
…The basis of their diet is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes. Would it not be better if they spent more money of wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread?" Yes it would he answered, but "no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots ... A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita, an unemployed man doesn't ... When you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull, wholesome food. You want something a little bit tasty. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea!...
With these case studies in their plenty firmly Jamie embarked on an epic mission to attempt to lever these people from their current situations and introduce them to basic cooking techniques, which is essentially the crux of the programme and he does so through the design of a number of strategies. Many of the strategies employed within the programme are replicated as the title of the programme suggests from the Ministy of Food, set up during the Second World War with the purpose of educating the masses on ways to cook efficiently and be thrifty with the rations that they were supplied with. Jamie consequently devised a manifesto which highlighted the following points for implementation:
Manifesto:
Cooking ought to be taught to primary school children at school
Food centres to open up all over the country with professionally trained cooks to support them
Cooking skills to be taught to adults
Incentives for employers to teach cooking skills within the work place
He also asserts that government money should be used to do the following:
Set up a food centre in every town which should be staffed accordingly
Put cooks out in the community
Support businesses to pass it on
Invest in mobile food centres for deprived neighbourhoods
Promote cheap food with neighbourhoods
Fund adult cookery classes
Get kids cooking properly
Support the ministry of food
I have paid a lot of attention to Jamie’s campaigns as they are very of the moment and carry considerable clout, due to his sheer determinism aided by his nationwide and celebrity prowess. His campaigns bear the essence of what it is I would wish to achieve in my project. Taking people from marginalise settings and using food as power alleviate, enrich and manifest identity and pride to educate and inspire, many of the projects I have previously mentioned all achieve in fulfilling these aims. It is within these environments that interest and enterprise can make a difference but there of course a plethora of things that I need to be sensitive towards.
http://www.jamieoliver.com/jamies-ministry-of-food/
http://www.jamieoliver.com/media/jamies-manifesto-171008.pdf
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