I want to glass Jamie Oliver

Truth be told I avoid cooking shows where no one shoots partridges or gambols nude on an icy British beach, exposing their buttocks like a pair of pale genetically engineered lychees. So, like Nigella, I really haven’t watched any of Jamie Oliver’s shows, nor have I cooked any of his food. Regardless, I hate him. Hate. Him.

There are many reasons for my unthinking hatred of the slab-faced media tycoon. There’s his Melbourne restaurant Fifteen, subject of reality clusterfuck ‘Jamie’s Kitchen,’ where he takes Teh Yoof of Melbourne into a kitchen and makes them cry, then tells them to stay off drugs. Apparently Jamie described Melbourne as the most violent, drug-addled, drink-sodden hellhole he’d ever seen, causing the townsfolk of Johannesberg to feel rather overlooked. Then there’s his tendency to slap his name on anything and everything, from saucepans to mass produced mince pies to olive oil, which they sell at the place I go to for red wine vinegar and poncy French lentils. Actually, I think I hate him most for that fucking olive oil. The label reads, in big lowercase letters, ‘Jamie’s extra virgin olive oil is nice and peppery,’ and every time I catch sight of it on the shelf I feel violent.

Olive oil aside, the biggest reason to hate Jamie Oliver is simple. He’s a sneering middle class paternalist who, deep down, wants all women unthreateningly back in the kitchen and all children to be seen and not heard. He’s the pug-like, spiky haired face of all that is wrong with British food writing - the smarmy conservatism, the snobbery, the fear and revulsion of The Working Classes and that Dreadful Food they Eat. And, like so many of his brethren, he uses the convenient moral panic de jour of child obesity to justify all of his fears and prejudices.

At the time of writing the ‘about’ section at the bottom of the page is still faux-latin gibberish, lending this blog a pleasant spammish air, so the reader could be forgiven for not knowing what I do with my days. I’m doing a PhD in cultural studies on obesity, so Jamie’s tiresome lecturing on child obesity particularly hits a nerve with me. I could go on, but, once again, Charlie Brookers sums up my thoughts better than I ever could.

‘Yep, dead by the time you’re 25. And that’s not just hysterical opinion, that’s unscientific non-fact.’ Thanks, Charlie, that’s pretty much my thesis right there.