We had one single practical cookery lesson the whole time I was at school. It was preceded by three or four extremely tedious lessons on food hygiene, so we were stoked to finally be getting our disinfected hands dirty. The meal we prepared was given the delusional moniker of "cheese and potato pie" – it amounted to a bowlful of cheesy mashed potato topped with limp tomato and whacked under the grill. Although it helped teach us some basic skills, it hardly instilled in us a lifelong enthusiasm for cooking from scratch.
Instead, my mum taught me how to cook. She has a preoccupation with healthy food that, at times (particularly the times when, as a teenager, all I wanted was a bowlful of super noodles washed down with a Mars milkshake) I thought verged on the obsessive. I was one of those kids who was acutely aware that a carefully sliced carrot does not a Cheesestring make. I'm grateful now, though she did once get so excited by the lack of artificial flavourings in Sainsbury's products that she squealed, "I love Jamie Oliver!" at the top of her voice, startling fellow shoppers.
Like her, I have always admired Jamie Oliver's crusade to get this obesity-riddled country eating healthily, but after this week's comments about modern poverty and the mum and kid he saw eating chips and cheese even though they have a "massive fucking TV", and how those on a low budget should be eating stale bread, I now wonder whether he's best placed to be the face of "austerity cooking" after all.
He's right about education. What many of those deprived of decent cookery lessons never learn is that cooking from scratch can be a joy. You can see that joy on Oliver's face, and sense his puppyish exasperation that other people don't seem to feel the way as he does about salsa verde. It's the same face I make whenever my boyfriend announces that he doesn't "get" Bruce Spingsteen. Just as my boyfriend cannot empathise with the inherent melancholy of living on a New Jersey turnpike and wanting to rev up the Cadillac and get the hell out, Oliver has never actually experienced poverty. As many a skint observer of this saga has sagely pointed out, if he had, he would know that only posh bread goes stale and shit bread just gets mouldy. That doesn't mean that he has no right to comment – as an authority on eating habits in this country he's done more research than most, but he has to realise that the "not getting it" thing cuts both ways.
Lots of poor people don't "get" this love of cookery, and it's not because they're fat or lazy or feckless and they can't be arsed to turn their leftover crusts into a "pukka panzanella". It's for a multitude of complex reasons not easily condensed into a digestible soundbite for the Radio Times.
Take the fact that most people entitled to benefits are actually in underpaid employment. Some people are working so hard that trying to think of what to make for dinner at the end of a long, busy day is just a mental step too far. As a study this week revealed, some people expend so much energy on immediate problems such as paying bills, and feel so much anxiety, it impairs their ability to deal with more complex tasks. As anyone who's been seriously skint will tell you, you don't always feel like bish, bash, boshing up a bechamel. Sometimes you don't feel like doing much of anything at all.
When I was on the dole in London, I put on a stone. In the city, the supermarkets are small and expensive, and there's less that you can afford to do outside of the house. Jamie is wrong about all junk food being dear, though – there aren't many other countries where you can buy a box of cakes for less than a quid, as you can here. The trip to the shops for Mr Kipling was the high point of my despondent little day, probably much like those cheesy chips were for that mum and child.
Also, the difference between rural and urban poverty is vast. We were poor when I was growing up, but I had a healthy diet not only because my mother (and her mother before her) had been taught to cook, but because we lived in the countryside. Local vegetables were cheap – cheaper than the £4 my mum would have spent on petrol to get to Tesco's. And she had the time to make the stew. My friends, whose turkey dinosaurs and tinned spaghetti hoops I desperately envied, mostly had working mums. It's no coincidence that the rise of the microwave meal overlapped with women entering the workplace. Why not try redressing the balance of domestic labour, or introducing proper childcare, before you tell women (it's almost always women) that they're not cooking properly? That they don't take enough joy from cooking?
Politicians and public figures invested in the narratives of scroungers and feckless single mums always fail to grasp the fluctuating nature of poverty. The poverty line may be a straight one, but people will dip above and below it depending on their circumstances, the level of basic comfort that they experience undulating like a wave, up and down, and up again. A couple of days on the job? Suddenly things seem that little bit brighter. Maybe we'll even buy a telly on credit! Housing benefit short? No tea for the kids, and we'll have to leave topping up the leccy for another night. And down again. It's called the "poverty trap" for a reason.
And about the "fucking big TVs": that poor people sometimes have a larger-than-average televisions has become the go-to cliche for those cashing in on the strivers-versus-skivers narrative. It's another example of people simply not getting it. Not getting that, when you're poor, there isn't much that you can afford to do out there in the world, especially when that world is small and grey and scary at night. Better to keep everyone at home, warm and safe and close in the comforting glow of aspirational fluff, courtesy of the guy living opposite who can get you all the channels for 40 quid. Not getting that you can get a massive telly from a catalogue on a consumer credit agreement, which allows you, for 50p a week for the next eight years or however long they've got you by the balls for, plus interest, to buy into the whole middle-class lifestyle-porn dream that Oliver and his fellow TV chefs tout so enthusiastically.
We have filled the void left by the home economics classes with cookery programmes, and there's nothing we love more than watching those shows on our massive TVs. But, as one is often tempted to cry during the red-faced exertions on shows such as Masterchef: "chill out mate, it's just a bit of dinner. To people who are hungry, food is just sustenance. There isn't a gluten-free nutburger in the world that can keep you warm when the heating's off again, but the combination of cheese and potatoes, whether from the chippy or mashed up and rebranded as "pie" by a domestic science teacher? That'll do the trick every time.
