The Poor Have Always Been With Us, Ready Meals Have Not.

Jamie Oliver recently addressed the  House of Commons Health Committee, and one of the things he said was that a so called "sugar tax" on soft drinks was the “single most important” change that could be made to tackle child obesity. Predictably this was met with some criticism. It's a tax on the poor, his critics claim. It's claimed that it is naive to think that poor people are obese because they eat food that's bad for them and by taxing them, they will be encouraged to eat more healthily. And that's possibly true, taxing people won't change their mindset, but then again, with some people, nothing will.

He's not everyone's cup of tea, and his messages sometimes get lost because of that.

 Whenever Oliver's critics run out of other sticks to beat him with, they deride him for his "mockney" accent, his businesses and his wealth and his perceived attempts to get us all eating goji berries and quinoa, and to buy everything from Waitrose or farmers markets. So let's set all of those aside and concentrate on the message, not the messenger, on the general idea of healthy eating, whether it's reducing our consumption of junk food and sugary drinks, or improving the quality of school dinners.

Oliver's foray into the world of school dinners may have smacked of publicity stunt, it was the subject of a TV series after all, but he made a serious point about the nutritional value of school dinners when they consist almost unremittingly of mechanically retrieved, reformed meat products, pizzas and chips. They are cheap, the argument goes, and with budgetary constraints, represent the best value for schools. Except, much in the manner of Oscar Wilde's cynic, we are confusing price and value. Yes, burgers and sausages, chicken bits and pies may be cheap, but good value? Not nutritionally. Jamie Oliver's attempts to make school meals healthier met with a predictable queue of parents at the school gates, posting takeaways through the fence to ensure that their offspring maintained their daily intake of sugar, salt, saturated fats and minced animal offcuts.

It seems that many parents are happier if their child's school dinner looks like this...

...rather than like this.

When all else fails, Oliver can be criticised for what his detractors view as his patronising belief that we can eat well for less. Strangely, programmes like "Eat Well For Less" presented by Greg Wallace and Chris Bavin, or predecessors like "Honey, We're Killing The Kids" which have both promoted healthier food choices that can be got by spending less than on nutritionally poorer alternatives, don't attract the same sort of opprobrium. And if you think that Oliver's recipes are "poncey" and that every one requires a large number of expensive ingredients, then use the recipes as inspiration, use your brain and adapt rather than trying to copy them exactly. But of course sneering at people while slurping down a microwave lasagne is so much easier and satisfying than chopping some vegetables and actually cooking a meal.

The misconception that Oliver's critics seem to have is that he expects the poor to shop at Waitrose or a farmers markets, to buy exotic fruit, vegetables and spices, organic meats and wholegrain pasta to create sumptuous banquets; he isn't. What he wants is people to look beyond the empty calories of the ready meal, the artery clogging piles of takeaway gunk and eat healthily instead. Oh, but chips are so cheap, you say (hence the expression, cheap as chips). They are not. A small portion of chips at a local chip shop costs £1.40 and a large one, £2.20 ; a bag of McCains oven chips, weighing in at 907g, costs £1.50 at Asda (that's the equivalent of £1.65 per kilo), or a one kilo bag of spuds costs 99p.

But apparently the poor have no alternative to the ready meals in their local convenience store or the chicken 'n' chips takeaway, with the occasional McDonalds Big Mac Meal or home delivered pizza as a treat, because real food is sooo expensive; except it isn't.  How much is a head of broccoli? 49p in Tesco, and that will be enough for eight portions. Carrots? Aldi sell them for 49p per kilo. Potatoes, enough for eight servings, 99p. Four chicken breasts at Tesco, £5. For £7 you can feed a family of four with food to spare, while your chicken bargain bucket will set you back a tenner.  Real food isn't exorbitantly priced and supermarkets sell meat and vegetables approaching their sell by date at reduced prices. What's needed is a little thought, thinking beyond the ready meal/takeaway option. Even when a ready meal is cheaper, it will be poorer nutritionally; the perceived economy is a false economy.

106 grams of fat, 35 grams of sugar and 7.6 grams of salt. 

It is undeniable that at the moment in this country a lot of people, even people in work, are living in poverty. There is undoubtedly food poverty  in this country, (the first UK food bank opened in 2000 and there are now 445) not that it's exclusively a British issue. France has twice as many food banks as we do and in Germany 1.5 million people a week  used food banks  in 2014, compared with just over one million people who used them in the UK in the whole of the two years 2014-2015. That isn't to play down the problem, but those who wring their hands and suggest that the poor are condemned to a diet of ready meals and takeaways are actually perpetuating the problem, and to some extent, it is in their interest to do so.

39 grams of sugar, or to put it another way, 9 tea spoons

Apparently the poor are not only unable to afford anything other than junk food, even though healthy food can be cheaper, they are unable to aspire to anything better and have no ambition to improve their lot, which is exactly what Oliver's critics want. The poor provide them with a stick to beat him and the Tories with, except at least Jamie Oliver is trying to do something - I can't speak for the Tories, they seem to have adopted the old song as their manifesto, "it's the rich what get the pleasure, and the poor what get the blame." Critics of Oliver, or anyone else who suggests that the poor might actually want to improve their diet, condescend to them; "you are poor," they say, "do not aspire to improve your lot, know your place."

The fact is that the poor have always been with us; ready meals haven't, they only became commonplace in the UK in the 1970's. What did the poor do before then? Well, if my parents were anything to go by, and they were by no means well off (my Mum didn't work for most of the 1960's and my Dad was in and out of jobs during that period, often unemployed and receiving no benefit) they eked out what they could. A cheap joint would stretch to six servings at least, padded out with potatoes, vegetable and bread.

Jamie Oliver is a soft target and frankly it's so much easier to attack him than it is to address the issues of Britain's poor diet and obesity problem. The real problems are that it isn't in the interests of a lot of people to actually find a solution; perpetuating the problems of the poor is to their advantage. You could give a lot of the more feckless poor free meat, vegetables and potatoes that they had to prepare themselves and they'd still be microwaving junk and queuing at the chicken shop.