Poisonous little runt Jamie Oliver is plugging his latest television series with a spiteful interview featured in The Guardian today which shows just how far removed the so-called chattering class’s lives are from the people they chatter about.
With many people forced to live on just a few pounds a week due to benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax and other savage cuts, Oliver has decided to launch a new television series lecturing us on how we can eat cheaply for no money.
If this week’s comments, first published in the Radio Times, are anything to go by, then it looks set to be yet another Channel 4 poor-bashing diatribe with the usual exploitative footage of single mums and pensioners crying whilst smug twats like Oliver deliver sermons about how their poverty is their own fault.
His ludicrous comments about the lavish diets of Sicilian street cleaners gives a taste of what to expect . In Jamie Oliver’s pampered mind it appears he thinks everyone has a farmer’s market just down the road. No-one has mobility problems, and so can easily drag home bags of shopping, even if the plebs don’t have a car. The electricity and gas required to slow cook cheap cuts of meat never runs out. Hard pressed single parents can simply pop out to browse the artisan stalls outside the local Poundstretcher, whilst pensioners should just pick up some cherry tomatoes and fresh fucking mussels at the off licence on the way home from the Bingo.
Just add a dash of olive oil, a sprig of fresh basil from the garden and a splash of red wine from the cellar and stir up on the Aga for a cheap and refreshing treat that at current prices would cost more than many people’s food budget for a weekend. This prick knows nothing of the lives of millions of people in this country who face desperate poverty.
If Oliver had actually set foot anywhere but Waitrose (except to get paid) in the last 20 years, he might have seen how ‘value food’ – cheap shit with a poor nutritional value – dominates the shopping trollies in the poorest areas. He might even notice that in areas where there are cheap take-aways, a bucket of chicken and chips will feed a small family for the price of one of his ready meals. Perhaps he would even have taken some responsibility for his role in promoting the supermarket dominance which has forced millions of people to buy over-priced and unhealthy food because as anyone poor knows, it is usually the cheapest option. And in areas where supermarkets have closed the local shops and markets down, it is increasing the only option.
Oliver claims he finds it “quite hard to talk about modern-day poverty” because some people have televisions. This has become an increasingly ludicrous slur which suggests that anyone with a wide screen television can’t be properly poor, like proper poor people in poor places. Oliver seems to think that if someone turned up in the slums of Mumbai with a wide screen telly the locals would immediately gasp and falls to their knees in reverence at such a vast display of wealth. In fact they’d probably barely look up from watching X Factor.
The world is littered with discarded electrical goods. Toasters in Tesco are nearly as cheap as the toast. You can sometimes find a large screen telly in the street. If not it may have been bought as a gift, or on credit, or before poverty took hold. You can’t however, eat a fucking television.
The rich have always condescended to the poor about their lifestyles and pretended there is some escape from the grinding suffering of destitution. Whether it’s Iain Duncan Smith claiming workfare and benefit cuts are the best route out of poverty or overpaid celebrities like Oliver saying we should all be happy living on stale bread and rat stew, it is an all too familiar tactic. Traditionally violent revolution has been considered one of the best ways out of poverty. Jamie Oliver should consider that before he delivers his next Marie Antoinette routine. Let him eat lead.
Join me on facebook or follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid
the void 
You must be logged in to post a comment.