Jamie Oliver's Mammoth Task

No wonder Jamie Oliver is smiling.  He must be making a fortune, not to mention the glow that comes from feeling you are occupying the moral high ground.  I was shocked today to find, while I was googling this cheeky chappie that there are even articles written about him in France, a nation known the world over for taking pride in the quality of it's food.  Not only mentioning him, but praising his efforts to bring the diets of our children back under control.

I admit I have only watched one half of one episode of Jamie taking his 'Revolution' to America, but (and excuse me if I'm wrong) the ideas seem to me to be pretty much the same as the ones he expounded in the series a couple of years ago set in UK schools.

I don't think anyone could seriously disagree with his principles!  Feeding children good, wholesome fresh food is a good idea.  Cutting down on fats, sugar and additives is a good idea.  Although for a time during my life it was just not PC to say a person was fat. Saying fat was (and is) rude.  But it now seems to be perfectly OK to say that a person is obese.  Let's face it, it would be hard not to notice that over a scarily short period of time people in the West have just kept on getting bigger.  During the same time, post WW2, we have had in the UK at least (and I suspect elsewhere in the developed world) a growing love affair with choice.  Politicians seem to dangle the possibility of ever more choice in front of us on a regular basis.  Certainly in terms of the variety of foods available to us the choice has grown rapidly over the past 50 years or so.

Now here's the thing.  Do people make good choices?  Certainly where food is concerned, if we take the health of the individual as a measure, then people do not make particularly good choices and in some very visible cases, very bad choices indeed.  It's distressing to see children as young as 4 or 5 panting their way up a single flight of stairs to sit in an amorphous puddle of fat to watch their own TV or play on their own computer whilst munching something unspeakable from a colourful family sized pack.  If this scene can be commonly seen across the western world, at first glance it would seem to be the outcome of a series of bad dietary choices.  Or is it? 

One thing a I have never heard mentioned in any of the multitude of programmes and articles about our modern day diets, and most particularly the large amounts of fats and sugars consumed, is our natural instinct to favour those sorts of foods over any other.  It's not just advertising Jamie Oliver is fighting, or the tiny budgets available for school meals, or the ever increasing demands on a typical persons disposable income - it's nature itself.  There is a mammoth in the room.

Early man did not go to the trouble of cracking open Mammoth bones just for fun. Mammoth marrow, and as far as I know bone marrow in general, is a very good source of fat as, in fact, is brain - another stone age delicacy.  We humans, like any other animal, are programme to pack in the calories.  Honey is a great source of sugars, we all know that.  Ancient man knew it too and would risk a damned good stinging, not to mention the chance of a bone breaking fall, by climbing tall trees and scooping out honey-comb from the nests of wild bees.  I think the idea, put very simply, is to pack in as many calories as possible since there may not be too many available the next day, week or even season.  It makes sense to store fat.  Of course, those ancient bone cracking, tree scaling people did not go home to centrally heated homes (shivering uses calories)  and as far as I know there is no evidence to suggest that there was a neolithic version of a pizza delivery guy.  They had to burn calories to get calories.  All that hunting, butchering, bone cracking, fire wood collecting, tree scaling and so on used up a lot of energy.  Yes, I'm stating the obvious.

These people were not more virtuous than modern humans - and being slim these days would seem to suggest an implied virtuousness, I think you'd agree - they just didn't have any choice. I'm sure if you took little baby Ugg, the early human, and brought her up in a modern North American home she would be munching the unspeakable snack whilst exercising her thumbs texting her friend. 

So it begs the question: Is choice a good thing?  I think my answer is 'Not always'.  If choices are not influenced by a strong natural imperitive then, in most cases the choosee can use his or her intellect to make a good decision.  But if the choices to be made are influenced by fundanmental natural drives like eating loads when there is loads in case the hunting is bad tomorrow, it's difficult for most of us to overcome our natural urges and make good healthy choices.

"We like to give the kids choice" and  "The parents like their kids to have choices" are paraphrases of statements made by the 'dinner ladies' on Jamie's programme. I couldn't help myself.  I shouted at the TV.  "Don't give them a choice.  Choice is bad".  If anyone had witnessed my outburst, I probably would have been embarrassed, but I still believe that giving very young children (and actually older children as well) choice about what they eat is a very bad idea indeed especially if the choice is between a 'healthy meal' and a Happy Meal.  Of course they will choose the fatty stuff, the sugary stuff and the brightly coloured stuff.  Berries are often brightly coloured and are packed with vitamins.  Little Ugg's eyes would have lit up at the sight of a brightly coloured fruit and so little Daryl's or Cheryl's or Justin's eyes will light up at the sight of gaudy wrappers and so are almost bound to choose the bright blue bubble gum flavoured soda over a plain old glass of water.

Bad habits die hard, and you could also say that having bad habits makes you die hard, and young, and in a very costly way to society in general.  It is accepted that children who eat balanced, healthy diets and are introduced to a variety of natural foods when young are likely to continue to eat that way into adulthood.  If 'choices' are good in adulthood (and I seriously doubt that is always the case) then 'choices', in my opinion, are often not good at all when offered to children. 

Children's natural instincts are sharp and their intellects still in development.  I know that to criticise parents is not a fashionable thing to do but surely Jamie's attempts at revolution are made much much harder if parents are not on board. I think parents need to recognise that we all have little Uggs, dying to crack open the bone, except our little Uggs don't shiver often or go charging after Mammoths. 

PS I think Jamie's idea is a really, really good one!

I just read the comment made by Lilith.  I agree with her too (today seems to be a good day for agreeing!) that choice is market led and the big food producers have large budgets to play with so their products are present on our screens a great deal. However, there are lots and lots of healthy alternatives readily and cheaply available.  Perhaps 10 or 20 years ago the general public could claim 'to know no better', and this could account for the appalling diets many children have. But in the last decade there have been countless advertising campaigns paid for by government, programmes such as Jamie Oliver's, posters in doctors' waiting room and so on. There cannot be many people in the developed world remaining who are unaware of the effect of diet on children.  Food in all it's forms is cheaper now than ever before.  Some people are just choosing to stick with fast food, take aways and unspeakable snacks.

That 20th Century Gender Bending Dream Just Keeps On Fading

The new Equality Act is being discussed on TV and Radio with vigour at the moment, and although it seems the act is to address a whole range of 'inequalities in the workplace', I am hearing an awful lot about the still unfair gap between the wages of men and women.

In my almost 50-year lifetime the role of women in society, and consequently that of men, has changed enormously, and the trajectory has not been a straight one. There is a whole book, perhaps a library of books, in the changes in gender relations and roles over the last 50 years - too, too much for a blog, so please let me stick with generalisation, nostalgia, anecdote and opinion.

For me there was a golden era. I remember a magical time when it suddenly seemed peace in the world, and most certainly between the genders was a possibility, even an inevitability. James Taylor and Carole King were singing the same songs, expressing the same emotions and it was alright. Alright, at least in our circles, for men and women to wear more or less the same clothes, to grow their hair long and to address each other as 'man' regardless of the gender of the addressee. This is the mid 70s, late era hippy.

At that time we sometimes heard middle-aged guys say as we passed by 'you can't tell if it's a bloke or a woman from behind' and I think, far from being offended, we were not so secretly pleased. Woodstock had already passed into legend, the Vietnam war had spawned unprecedented levels of anti-war sentiment, and the easy availability of the contraceptive pill (and with AIDS 10 years in the future) had led to a sudden and startling sexual liberation. Within the protective circle of my friends to be a sexual young woman, or indeed young man, was a thing of beauty. We were making love not war and the sexual frisson came not from indulging in an illicit, sordid act but from the sheer 'rightness' of being young, beautiful (everyone is beautiful in their own way, don't you know?) and willing to express this physically.

Those lovely boy/men stirred lentils, wore jewellery, grew the ubiquitous long hair and were more than happy to 'get in touch with their feminine sides', even before the phrase had been coined. We talked endlessly about the coming world, how it should be, how bright and free of aggression, and quite often about how men and women were only different because they had been brought up that way. Passing round a spliff and listening to prog rock on the record player we 'knew' we were right. Give boys dolls, give girls toy cars and mini tool sets and soon only our bodies would differ.

As our generation grew up, into the 1980s, New Men appeared - Cosmopolitan Magazine was full of it. Gender roles, at least for the chattering classes, had been re-defined. The images that had been presented in the reading books of my early school-days - Mother, always in a dress, at the kitchen sink, Father in a chair, smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper after a long day 'bread earning', little boys fiddling with catapults and building blocks, little girls cooing over her dollies and, oh so cute, following mummy with her own miniature sweeping brush -were images that quite suddenly seemed obsolete, irrelevant and darkly funny.

Feminists had been invited in to the mainstream, and of course, issues were discussed including that of equal pay for equal work. Amongst the many bones of contention was the issue of the 'objectified' woman. It seemed, to me at least, that the era of woman as simply a sexual play-thing was all but over. And so to the 90s.

Can you imagine my dismay when I first saw 'lads mags', first heard hip hop/gangsta rap, and watched music videos with lyrics that referred to women as either bitches or 'hos'. I really felt as if we, as a society, were slipping down a muddy bank, just about to fall with a splash back into the noisome swamp of sexism. The message seemed to be loud and clear - perhaps even louder and clearer than ever before, given the unprecedented, and still growing access to 'the media' we now enjoy - A woman's value lies in her pulsating, joggling, openly inviting bottom and certainly not in her brain. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

The only conclusion that I can reach is that we were wrong. Yes, we were wrong. Perhaps that soft, idealistic cloud of mild 70s weed obscured the evidence. We wanted it to be true and so it was. But, men and women are not the same. Indeed, boys and girls are not the same - and possibly, although I have no evidence to support this, male and female foetuses are NOT the same. Having watched my own wonderful children grow up and having observed the children of my peers too, it seems all evidence points to the fact that boys and girls are just born different. Of course, there seems to be a spectrum which goes from very male to very female, one might say very blue to very pink with a lovely shade of lilac in the middle. But as with most things the majority of men, and the majority of women too, fall somewhere in the body of the bell curve.

Given that social change often seems to occur, not in a straight line but, in a series of swings of the pendulum, we can only hope that soon things will settle somewhere in the comfortable middle. Looking back I can now see that the radical feminism, at it's peak in the late 70s and 80s - at a time when large numbers of women regarded the use of the term 'Chairman' as a serious crime (Chairperson, please) and that apparently "a women without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" - may have led to women feeling more empowered but it most certainly alienated a large number of men.

Lots of men tried very hard to adjust to the new balance of power but I have to admit that my more radical 'sisters' seemed that they would only be happy when men were subjugated in the way that women had been for so long. Personally, I've always been an 'Equalist'. Feminism had a dark face for me, confirmed once and for all by the appearance in the late 70s of rad fems sporting tee-shirts stating that 'all men are rapists'. I recognised then that alienating 50% of the population was no way to reach harmony. You can't attain mutual respect by name calling.

And now the question. I really don't know the answer. Did the feminists with their extreme views and antagonistic attitude to men only precipitate a back-lash? Can the rise of the lads mag and the 'bitch/ho' culture be traced back to those feminists whose attitude was just as sexist as any 'unreconstructed' man before them. I fear this is so. And as for equal pay.... I think this will only come to pass when men and women really respect each other for what they are, and the old enmities are dropped so that people can be paid for the work they do according to their ability and the contribution they make.

We understand team games in our society. We understand that in a team some are the fast ones, some are the strong ones and some are the strategists. Isn't this the same in the workplace and of course, in the home? Can't we just be what we are - pink, blue or lilac - and be paid (and respected) for that?

I may shed a little tear for that lost golden era, but I live in hope that the painful shifts and changes that have occurred between the sexes over my lifetime are simply growing pains, and that the pendulum is due to swing back into the middle, where it belongs.