[Content Note: Food policing; fat hatred.]
Shut the fuck up, Jamie Oliver.
[H/T to Spudsy. Related Reading: Blame the Fatties.]
Showing posts with label Jamie Oliver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jamie Oliver. Show all posts
Here We Go Again
Jamie Oliver: Still the Worst
[Content Note: Child abuse.]
Jamie Oliver is basically a professional bully, who has, among other things, donned a fat suit as part of his eliminationist campaign against fat people, so I'm not entirely surprised that he's publicly bragging about being a bully to his own kid:
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver said recently that he secretly gave his 12-year-old daughter, Poppy, one of the world's hottest peppers in order to discipline her, according to The Daily Mail.That is not "discipline." That is child abuse.
At the recent BBC Good Food show, Oliver said, "Poppy was quite disrespectful and rude to me and she pushed her luck. In my day I would have got a bit of a telling-off but you are not allowed to do that. Five minutes later she thought I had forgotten and I hadn't. She asked for an apple. I cut it up into several pieces and rubbed it with Scotch Bonnet and it worked a treat."
"She ran up to mum and said, 'This is peppery'. I was in the corner laughing. [My wife, Jools] said to me, 'Don't you ever do that again.'"
How spicy is a Scotch Bonnet pepper? It ranks a whopping 100,000 to 350,000 on the Scoville heat unit scale; for comparison, a jalepeño has a score of 3,000 to 6,000 units.
It's an excellent lesson, though, if what he wanted to teach her was that she can't trust her father.
And, totally aside from the gross parenting issue, I'm pretty sure most professional chefs would find it appalling that any chef would want to instill in any child an association between food and harm.
It's bad enough this guy continues to have show after show after miserable show, without the media cheerily passing on his "cute" anecdotes about betraying the trust of his own kid.
The worst, this guy.
On Fat Hatred and Eliminationism
[Trigger warning for fat hatred; eliminationism; references to dieting and disordered eating.]
So this morning I see that professional fat-hater Jamie Oliver has posted a petition which he's asking people to sign in support of his "Food Revolution," and in which he's included the bullshit stat that "obesity in the US costs $10,273,973 per hour" (sure) and notes, in all-caps, "OBESITY IS PREVENTABLE."
Celebrities who have signed the petition are posted in rotation: Jennifer Aniston, Eva Longoria, P. Diddy, Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest, Ellen Degeneres.
It's always nice to see wealthy people with access to the best food, comprehensive healthcare, personal trainers, private chefs, and individual nutritional plans put their names to a petition admonishing the fatties that OBESITY IS PREVENTABLE.
When there are people for whom that is not true, people for whom obesity is not preventable, for myriad reasons, to bray about how their bodies (our bodies; ourselves) are "preventable" is to engage in eliminationist rhetoric.
I will never be not fat.
To get rid of my fat body, you have got to get rid of me.
This is where the fat-hating narrative of "calories in, calories out!" and the universal treatment of every human body like it's a Bunsen burner gets us: It's all just about personal choice and fatties' bad choices, without regard for natural variation among human bodies, including disease and disability, individual histories of fad dieting, disordered eating, and/or trauma, or systemic problems like poverty, racism, fat hatred, food deserts, lack of safe outdoor spaces, corn subsidies, meat subsidies, and an entire industry that makes lots and lots of money off of shaming fat people that wouldn't exist if some people weren't fat, just for starters.
OBESITY IS PREVENTABLE: Except when it's not.
Fat people are not only tasked with finding individual solutions to systemic problems; they are, in many cases, asked to somehow overcome their very physiologies and make their bodies do things that they are simply unable to do.
We are literally asked to be people we are not.
That is eliminationist. Plain and simple.
And the only way to convince oneself that it isn't is to believe things that are simply not true, to pretend that every fat person in existence is just a lazy, gluttonous piece of shit who would totes be thin if only some sanctimonious assholes got together and signed a condescending petition outlining how OBESITY IS PREVENTABLE.
When the science eventually catches up to the reality that fat people who are not fat as a result of disordered eating already know, the people who are putting their faces and names to this campaign will be ashamed that they ever supported such naked bigotry, such rank hostility, such victim-blaming garbage. Paul Campos, who has written extensively about the OH NOES Obesity Crisis! and debunked many of the myths surrounding fat and health, has observed that the science, conventional wisdom, and cultural narratives of obesity closely mimic the science, conventional wisdom, and cultural narratives about homosexuality a generation ago, and has pointed out parallels between the gross "reparative therapy" touted to magically make gays straight and the gross "reparative therapy" touted to magically make fatties thin.
Once upon a time, most people thought not being gay was just an issue of willpower, too.
That's where we are with fat acceptance. And one day, people will look back at this revolting petition and wonder how the fuck such unapologetic hatred was popular enough that celebrities were tripping over each other to sign their names to it.
They'll say, "Oh, we didn't know back then." But they could know now—if they'd ever bothered to speak to any of the fat people they're so keen to help, from a safe and patronizing distance.
[H/T to @fatheffalump.]
"Get Off"
[Trigger warning for fat hatred and discussion of eating.]
So. The fact that I am not a fan of Jamie Oliver and his mission to shame the world into thinness (and his insufferable devotees) will not exactly come as a surprise to regular readers. Which is why I generally try to resist writing about every example across which I stumble of Oliver's increasingly obnoxious crusade.
But this description of a scene from his show Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food, from Dr. Arya Sharma's "The Pedagogy of Obesity Reality Shows" (which I strongly recommend you read in full), is just beyond the everloving beyond:
Jamie returns to Natasha's house to find that she is once again feeding her daughter cheese-chips. "Sorry, I'm just embarrassed," Natasha says eventually. "I don't know how it gets like this. I really try with money, I do."Sharma adds that, in another episode, "another woman explains to Oliver, 'The thing with you, Jamie, is you live in a bubble. You've got no bloody idea what it's like for us.'"
Jamie, looking confused, replies: "Look," he begins, "I'm not going to say to you that I understand, because … well, erm, I don't."
Natasha gets tearful, and explains that during the week she had spent all of her benefit money on bus fares and overdue bills, and had little left to buy the ingredients for the recipe that Jamie had taught her.
As Jamie stands in the kitchen Natasha cries. "Come here," he says, moving towards her to hug her.
"Get off," she says, pushing him away.
Rage. Seethe. Boil.
Leaving aside the three-hour rant I could have about Oliver's manifest refusal to acknowledge people's right to choose to be fat (and/or "unhealthy," or whatever word(s) he would use as if they're synonymous), I'm struggling to find the words to sufficiently convey the profundity of my contempt for his continual insistence on admonishing people to take individual responsibility for systemic problems.
Oliver is hardly alone in sanctimoniously lecturing individual people to eat in a way that every aspect of their environment conspires to prevent them from doing, but he certainly has one of the loudest voices.
And the true absurdity of Oliver walking into people's homes and lives with the confidence that they will reverently follow his empyrean advice, then getting miffed when they don't, is that he is frequently asking them to change things about their lives over which they have no control, which he hasn't bothered to learn.
Yet, even appearing to be completely oblivious to the reality that his expectation entails their being able to overcome poverty, food access, and time constraints, and casually abandon the eclipsing, importune comfort of cultural tradition, he scolds them about how easy it all should be, which is some fucking chutzpah coming from a bloke who can't be arsed trying to understand the basic facts of a life he wants to change.
The privilege is suffocating, even to contemplate. "Get off" indeed.
For many people, changing one's diet is not difficult. For others, changing one's diet is incredibly challenging, whether because of external circumstances, emotional concerns surrounding food, or some combination thereof. That's not a moral failing.
The irony is that Oliver, and those who share his outlook, want individuals to solve systemic problems, and yet he refuses to acknowledge those people as the individuals they are, with individual circumstances and individual perceptions and individual needs.
All of the individual responsibility; none of the individual respect.
Of course, if Jamie Oliver respected people, he'd publish his cookbooks and eating guides and trust that people would use them, or not, in the best way for them, instead of treating people like gormless blobs of embodied helplessness in need of saving.
"Now with MORE unwanted hugs!"
[Jamie Oliver: You, sir, are no Tom Colicchio.]
Skinny Jesus Chef Less Messiah, More Mess-Maker
A few weeks ago, I reviewed the first episode of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, an ABC reality show in which "Naked Chef" Jamie Oliver travels to Huntington, WV—deemed the Obesitiest Place in America by the Centers for Disease Control—where he was going to makeover the town's eating habits, a project that included revamping the school lunch program.
Well, Arun Gupta investigated Oliver's success in the latter endeavor and found that "Jamie Oliver's 'Food Revolution' Flunked Out." Oliver, it seems, is not merely a self-congratulatory fat-hating ass, but also a liar concealer of information:
At the end of one episode, we hear Rhonda McCoy, director of food services for the local county, tell Jamie that he's over budget and did not meet the fat content and calorie guidelines, but she's going to let him continue with the "revolution" as long as he addresses these issues. What is not revealed is that the "meal cost at Central City Elementary during television production more than doubled with ABC Productions paying the excess expense," according to a document obtained by AlterNet from the West Virginia Department of Education.Ouch. And there is yet more.
…Turns out that even with an unlimited budget, Jamie was unable to design a menu that provided a minimum number of calories while not exceeding the fat limits. A nutritional analysis of the first three weeks of meals (15 lunches) at Central City Elementary conducted by the West Virginia Board of Education flunked him on both counts. A whopping 80 percent of his lunches exceeded either the total fat or saturated fat allowance, and most of the time both, and 40 percent of his lunches provided too few calories.
…A document from the West Virginia Department of Education indicates Jamie's escapades put Cabell County's entire lunch program at risk. It stated: "Noncompliance with meal pattern and nutrient standard requirements may result in a recovery of federal funds." In plain English, the county could lose a large amount of funding because of the failure to meet the standards.
While Jamie did raise $80,000 to pay for trainers to teach cooks in all of Cabell County's 28 schools to produce the new menus, a document from the county outlined many other expenses that have not been detailed on the show. Meal preparation required more cooks to the tune of $66,000 a year; each school needed new equipment ranging from $20 containers to $2,945 commercial-grade food processors; the county was paying more for fresher items, such as cooked chicken at an additional 10 cents a serving; schools that rolled over to the new program were unable to use "donated food" from the USDA, valued at $522,974.68 last year, with officials bluntly noting, "The program cannot afford to lose this amount"; and the county was losing purchasing power because it was having difficulty getting the fresh ingredients through the buying cooperative it shares with eight other counties.
In a perverse way, Jamie Oliver has highlighted many of the shortcomings of the U.S. food system. But it was like taking a wrecking ball to a termite-infested house to show the rot inside at the cost of smashing the structure.
The reality behind "Food Revolution" is that after the first two months of the new meals, children were overwhelmingly unhappy with the food, milk consumption plummeted and many students dropped out of the school lunch program, which one school official called "staggering."Oliver, who spent a good part of the first episode harrumphing about the bureaucracy that was making it difficult for him to get done what he wanted, didn't dedicate any time to talking about the fact that the US "federal government reimburses schools a paltry $2.68 for lunches and $1.46 for breakfasts (pdf) for children who qualify as long as the food meets specific guidelines," nor that, as reported by Jan Poppendieck, author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, "after school districts pay for labor, equipment, administration, transport, storage and other expenses, it leaves them with 'somewhere between 85 cents and a dollar' for the actual ingredients for lunches."
Gee, that might have been a good tidbit to highlight. If, y'know, he was actually concerned about why USian kids aren't eating fresh organic foods at lunch.
Of course, it's way easier to appear to "fix" children being served pizza for breakfast than fix an institutional clusterfuck that demands school cafeterias serve up healthy grub for a buck a kid.
And what of that pizza? Another little slice (heh) of info left out of Oliver's show is that it had a whole-wheat crust and lowfat cheese—and that serving whole-wheat and low-fat dairy to kids in a slice of pizza means they are less likely to pick and choose what they eat when the ingredients are served separately.
And then there's this:
Even though these kids are eating "breakfast pizza" with "luminous pink" milk, it's probably more nutritious than what they would eat otherwise, assuming their parents were even able to feed them breakfast. The median household income in the city of Huntington is about 55 percent of the U.S. average. We never learn that a phenomenal 86 percent (pdf) of the children at Central City Elementary qualify for free or near-free meals because of widespread poverty.Fawn Boyer, a resident of Huntington, points out: "In a town where many of the state employees are making so little income that they qualify for welfare, it's unrealistic to expect people to be able to shop at the higher line supermarkets that offer organic foods." Indeed so. Which means that as kids gave up the lunch program because they didn't like Oliver's (higher-fat, lower-calorie than the school lunches they liked) lunches, their parents had to provide alternative food on the cheap, meaning highly-processed, HFCS-riddled, high-sodium junk food.
Which, despite its limitations, the school lunch program was not serving.
So what Oliver ultimately accomplished by "staggeringly" driving more students out of the school lunch program is increased consumption of the very food that no one should be eating. Classic.
If Jamie and Co. wanted to make a real difference they should go after the fast-food industry and abominations like the KFC "Double Down," a breadless sandwich composed of two fried chicken cutlets piled with bacon, cheese and "Colonel's Sauce." Then again, a recent issue of the Jamie Magazine reportedly features a "wholesome" school meal of "tuna Waldorf pita with hot vanilla milk, an oaty biscuit, and a banana" that has 643 more calories and 23 grams more fat (pdf) than a Double Down.Snort.
And just in case anyone's still wondering if Jamie Oliver is the victim of bad press, and isn't the grandstanding, opportunistic, smug fat-hater I've accused him of being, please enjoy these photos of Oliver dressed in a fat suit and "riding" a scooter with a broken wheel, a stunt designed "to show the dangers of eating too much junk food."
It's not being unhealthy that's the problem, you see, so much as being FAT!
These are not the pictures of a man who cares about my health (or anyone else's). These are the pictures of a man who loves nothing more than the sound of his own voice and reading his own favorable press, and has convinced himself that his "good intentions" justify any amount of insult (or deceit).
[Via.]
Quote of the Day
"Sigh. Jamie Oliver. I love Jamie Oliver. I love his food, I love his books, I love his app, I love the mission he is on. Jamie Oliver is trying to change the way we eat, and by doing so, he plans to deal a massive blow to the likes of obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. He is trying to encourage us to get back into the kitchen and cook for ourselves and our families, thereby cutting out the fast and overly processed foods that are making us sick. And fat. And depressed."—Gwyneth Paltrow, in her latest "GOOP" newsletter, a revoltingly indulgent project she uses in order to explain to the average peasant how very easy it is to live a cultured and healthy life if you're privileged to begin with.
[Related Reading: Save Me from Myself, Skinny Jesus Chef!]
Save Me from Myself, Skinny Jesus Chef!
Thank Maude for the British—because, without Kim and Aggie teaching us how to clean our homes, and Jo Frost teaching us how to raise our kids, and Victoria Stilwell teaching us how to control our dogs, and Trinny and Susannah teaching us how to dress ourselves, and Simon Cowell teaching us how to sing, and Nigel Lithgoe teaching us how to dance, Americans would be naked, cultureless beasts who lived in garbage heaps with feral children and wild dogs.
This is all true.
The latest Brit in the British How-To Invasion is "Naked Chef" Jamie Oliver, whose new show I Hate Fat People Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution features Oliver traveling to Huntington, West Virginia—the Obesitiest Place in the Multiverse!—where he was determined to use his "magic" to help Huntington's Fatties get less fat. I mean, healthier!
The reality series based on this generous thin martyr giving up his time to help stupid fat people premieres tomorrow night. But! By the magic of the internetz, you can watch it here right now!
If you can't view the video, here's a quick summary: Headless fatties? Check. Enormous food stock footage? Check. OHNOES Obesity CrisisTM? Check. Being fat is ugly? Check. Fat people are lazy? Check. Fat people are stupid? Check. Fat people are sick? Check. DEATHFAT? Check. Mother-blaming for fat kids? Check. Fat as a moral failure? Check. Religious shaming of fat? Check. Fat people don't have "the tools" to not be fat? Check. Fat people need a skinny savior? Checkity-check-check!
I want to note that there is, buried somewhere beneath the 10 metric fucktons of fat-shaming (and not an incidental dose of misogyny, for good measure), information about healthful eating (e.g. not eating any fresh veg, ever, isn't good for anyone), but this is information that could be delivered without a scene in which a mother of four whose husband is gone three weeks a month is told that she's killing her children while she's weeping at her kitchen table.
The premiere episode has absolutely zero structural critique, not even a passing comment about the reason that millions of mothers feed their kids processed foods is because it's cheap and fast, which is a pretty good solution for people who are short on money and time.
Oliver places the responsibility for unhealthful eating exclusively at the feet of the individual, seemingly without concern for the cultural dynamics that inform individual choices. The extent of the explanation provided for why someone might choose to stock their freezer with frozen pizzas is that they're lazy and/or don't know any better.
And then he wonders why he isn't greeted by the citizens of Huntington with open arms.
At the end of the episode, a newspaper article comes out in which Oliver's evident contempt for the community has been reported. Oliver claims his words were taken out of context; the people with whom he's been working to revamp elementary school meals don't believe him—and understandably so, given that he's been a patronizing ass to them.
In the final scene, Oliver speaks directly to the camera, and he is crying, wiping tears from his eyes as he throws himself a little pity party:
It's quite hard to cut through negativity, always. And defensiveness. You know, I'm giving up massive time that is really compromising my family—because I care! You know, um, the tough thing for me [exhales deeply] is they don't understand me, 'cuz they don't know why I'm here. [sniffs] They don't even know what I've done, the things I've done in the last ten years! And I'm just doing it 'cuz it feels right [sniffs], and when I do things that feels right, magic happens! [sniffs; shakes his head disbelievingly] I've done some amazing things, you know? And that's when I follow my heart. And when I never follow my heart, I always get it wrong.Wow.
Look, I'm gonna be really honest: You do live in an amazing country. You put people on the moon! You live in an amazing country. And so do I, you know? And, right now in time, is a moment where we're all confused about how brilliant we are and how technically advanced we are, and that is fighting with what once made our countries great, which is family, community, being together, and something honestly as simple as putting a few ingredients together and sitting your family or your friends or your girlfriend or your mother-in-law around that table and breaking bread. And if you think that's not important, then shame on you!
In an interview to promote the show, Oliver says, "You can't really blame the parents when the whole culture and the whole horizon of food is all the same." Which is an interesting comment from someone who chose a scene where he's telling a mother she's killing her kids for the premiere episode of his show.
That underlines a key problem with Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution: He doesn't want to be seen as the guy who blames parents for killing their kids and shaming fat people for being fat—but there he is in his show, blaming parents for killing their kids and shaming fat people for being fat. Oops.
And, on top of it, he ends the premiere episode by crying because those goddamn fat ingrates don't appreciate him.
Reportedly, Huntington eventually warmed up to Oliver, but I don't think I'll be sticking around to watch that happy ending unfold.
And, for the record, Mr. Oliver, the "whole horizon of food" is actually not all the same in the US: In some places, things are much, much worse.
