Jamie Oliver should teach people to fry chips.

In his recent series Jamie's Ministry of Food the archetypal celebrity chef set out to get the people of Rotherham off junk food and into the kitchen. His big idea was to teach a small group basic recipes such as stir-fry and spaghetti bolognese and then get these people to pass on the newly acquired skills to their friends, this new group would then pass it on again and so on, spreading his own vision of culinary correctness far and wide.

In the flurry of media debate that followed all sorts of arguments were aired. Wasn't there a conflict of interest with his lucrative Sainsbury's sponsorship? What about the economics of trying to cook on benefits?, etc. What seemed to be missed was the obvious question of why, if Jamie Oliver wanted the people of Rotherham to be more healthy, did he not teach them to fry chips?

This simple counter-intuitive move could have overcome a host of problems. Firstly it would have undercut the class-cultural issues which have plagued Jamie's campaigning since he first launched his philanthropic broadside at the nation's school dinners. By hectoring working class people about their diet from the rolled-down window of his Range Rover he reinforces the perception that posh food is for posh people. Obviously being patronised by millionaires is not the sort of thing that gets ordinary folk on-side.

While he tried to sidestep this by recruiting arch-enemy Julie Critchlow(the infamous Rotherham mother who passed crisps and burgers through the school railings)to advise him on his latest project, this was little more than tokenistic appropriation saying, "look, even Julie thinks I'm right, you lot had better listen this time".

By teaching people to cook chips, rather than telling them they would be better off eating how he eats and spouting in the press about how he's so saintly that he'd never let his kid's eat a McDonald's, he could reassure people that he is not judging them or attempting to undermine their cultural identity. As a consequence surely they would be far more receptive to his ideas.

The second benefit of the chips method is that it would have allowed those he was teaching to learn the basic cooking skills that many seemed to lack without dealing with an overwhelming host of unfamiliar ingredients. Peeling and washing their spuds introduces basic vegetable preparation, and slicing them into chips would get people used to handling knives without the need for complex chopping techniques. The chips can then be cooked by a combination of par-boiling and shallow-frying providing both a grounding in the two most widely used cooking methods and a lovely plate of chips with a considerably lower fat content than the deep fried takeaway variety.

Finally, by equipping people with the ability to inexpensively produce a meal which they already like to eat Jamie may have found that the extra money suddenly weighing down their pockets was all the encouragement they would need to get with the program. Perhaps they would even pop down to Sainsbury's and pick up some ingredients for that spaghetti bolognese.

Then again, showing the poor folk of Rotherham going from the terrible destitution of eating chips to the liberating experience of, erm.., eating more chips might not have made quite the moral impact on television Jamie was looking for.


For more on why all of Jamie's campaign show titles are prefigured by the possessive form of his own ubiquitous moniker check out this post over at Lenin's Tomb.