Hilarie: Jamie gives us all food for thought

Oct 4 2008 by Hilarie Stelfox, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

The fact is that two generations of children have lost their way when it comes to food and now a third is being brought up on takeaways, microwave meals and heavily-processed food.

And while there’s no simple fix, someone, somewhere has to make a start. And it may as well be Jamie because he seems to get the best out of people.

As the series pans out I’m guessing that Jamie will be creating another Nora, the dinner lady who saw where he was coming from and, as they say, got with the programme.

My money’s on Natasha, the crying smoker who admitted that giving her kids a bag of crisps and chocolate biscuits for their tea made her feel ashamed and that cooking gave her goose bumps of excitement.

One quite important thing struck me while watching this programme. Every one of the people featured had a fitted kitchen and the sort of appliances that our grandmothers could only have dreamed of. And yet these kitchens were not being used.

Supermarkets and fast food emporiums have removed the need for cooking skills and, all too often, we hear the cry: “I don’t have time to cook.”

We do have the time, however, to watch television, go to the pub, surf the internet and do all the other things that modern life is made up of. For some reason cooking a healthy meal is not seen as important – not when there’s a ready-made lasagne to be had from Tesco for £1.

And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with the occasional frozen TV dinner or take-away if time really is short, it’s just that subsisting every day on plastic pizza or fish and chips is a recipe for hardened arteries and obesity.