There are many reasons to hate Jamie Oliver (his enormous tongue, his moped, his fantastic wealth), but to all right-thinking beings the primary one must be this: as of the current series of Sesame Street Cookie Monster will from now on show moderation in the eating of cookies. Which, quite frankly, is diseased and wrong and all the fault of Jamie Bloody Oliver.
Let us, for a moment, put to one side the fact that in Jamie's School Dinners he based most of his argument on the palpable untruths that today's children are likely to live less-long than their parents and that one boy's food was so bad that he vomit up his own faeces, thus becoming yet another of the boils on society who assume the British public is too stupid, illiterate and crazed on Sunny Delight to make a decision based on actual facts rather than things they have just made up. Let us leave to one side the fact that school dinners have always been tasteless, nutritionless pap, and that anyone who believes that perhaps the resources of the nation's schools might be better spent on teachers and books than butternut squash must now be held to be a reactionary curmudgeon who has forgotten that kids are so hopelessly obtuse that any attempt to educate them is doomed to failure.
Let us instead focus on the real problem, the problem that puts Cookie Monster on a diet. The fact is that Jamie Oliver should not be focussing his fire on schools, who must attempt to provide meals with the 4p per child they are given to spend each year. The fact that the Turkey Twizzler looby has not yet launched a counter-campaign suggests that they are not all that worried about schools no longer buying their products,m because they know that as soon as the children return home their parents will shove the same processed goo through their neck-holes until they can hardly move.
Why not, Jamie, instead of blaming politicians, or dinner ladies, or caterers, why not go after those who profit directly from the creation of foods made from chicken genitals reshaped to look like mobile phones? Why not attack those who are really the root of the problem? Why not have a go at the food industry, Jamie?
Because you don't like to interfere in the free market which has provided you with endless book deals and television programmes? Or perhaps because you don't care anywhere near as much about what children eat as you do about how often your pasty, grease-ridden face appears on our screens?
Instead, by attacking educators you effectively divert everyone's attention from those who are really at fault. It's not Cookie Monster's fault everyone in America is clinically obese, it's that of the people who grind animals into a paste, which they then bread and fry. Helpfully, those in and around education tend to be those who will be most affected by your pleas, and so they probably will change their policies, for whatever minute good it might do, whereas those who do the most damage to our health, with most profit for themselves, don't give a toss.
And with people like you around, they don't have to.
