Full Fat Politics

Conservative journalist Peter Hitchens once went on an epic rant against the rising popularity of skimmed milk in corporate coffee chains, but particularly the skinny cappuccinos sold by such franchises. Hitchens is right that the conflation of fat with weight gain has diverted attention away from sugar and its role in the obesity epidemic. He has done well to write about this subject in his column.

There is a great deal of confusion out there and advertising has taken full advantage. The trending support for healthy food - whether 'natural', 'organic' or even just 'low fat' - has been used to sell many of us barely edible garbage. Even 'low sugar' or 'zero sugar' is just a way of getting us to buy drinks loaded with vast doses of aspartame. Meanwhile the country gets fatter and suffers the results, as the collective anxiety about weight and diets intensifies.

Of course, the popular diets probably succeed in weight loss because they are effectively a form of self-imposed starvation. But this is also why so many people fail to eat well. They try to slim down by eating very little, and inevitably transgress later, only to feel awful about themselves. It's all about the super-ego. And I doubt many people are totally living healthy lifestyles (myself included) in terms of what they eat and how much exercise they ought to be doing (I write as the owner of a Fitbit watch).

Unfortunately, Blighty remains an island of ill-health and bad food. Yet British society continues to follow such celebrity chefs as Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson. Cooking programmes are a staple of the viewing diet. One wonders the extent to which people just tune in and never try out the recipes. Perhaps the cooking programmes are just vicarious. I can only speculate about this.

On the one hand, we are bombarded with celebrity-endorsed diets and newly branded 'healthy' food in supermarket isles; while culinary luddites demand that we get on the 'slow food' train and rely on local produce, on the other. It's a rather farcical situation. The fast food culture is just as worrying - and certainly guilty of sugar peddling! - and it leaves us with a political question. If we can't fix our food by personal choice, what do we need to do about at the level of the polis.

On that note, I will defer to the writing of others. I recommend reading Rachel Laudan's article on 'culinary modernism' from last year for a start. Nick Srenicek and Alex Williams have a great section on 'slow' and local food in their book Inventing the Future. These are just starting points for the critically minded.

Dead Hypocrisy.

Jeanette Winterson recently set off a whirlwind of fuss on Twitter. The author had trapped a rabbit and what followed set off the standard Twitter hate mob. After trapping the fluffy creature Winterson prepared it for cooking, skinning it, then feeding its entrails to her cat; the shots of which she then tweeted to the horror of bewildered twits. Apparently, farmed meat and industrially produced meat is superior somehow to freely hunted and slaughtered animal flesh. It would seem hypocrites don't just come in herds anymore, they now operate with greater convenience by iPhone.

The flowering displays of abstract moralism here should draw the suspicion of anyone concerned with animal rights. It's a lot like the so-called debate on halal meat in the UK, which is routinely instigated by the right-wing press. Only vegetarians and vegans can pass judgment, not the befuddled consumer base of Subway's quaking at the possibilities of "creeping Shariah". It's as if millions of people believe cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens, are all stupendously pampered - well fed on a healthy diet and well treated in open fields - before being painlessly dispatched. Maybe a portion of them believe cans of tuna grow on trees cultivated by the well meaning people of Cornwall. If only it weren't for troublesome minorities and writers spoiling our paradise.

Actually, it is probably the case that the outpouring of anger towards Winterson comes down to the fact that the photographs she uploaded remind people of what we take part in on a much larger scale. I'm sure that at some level the same can be said of the hysteria around halal. The industrial system of meat production can hardly be deemed humane and ought not to be taken as a significant advance upon the dietary practices of desert monotheisms. Yet it is the presupposition of most of the criticism led by a cynical media campaign that it is Islam which is backward (and not just in this instance). The lack of any moral highground for the meat industry cannot be stressed more. Except perhaps in cases where the suffering of animals makes us feel we should do anything.

Reformism is the default position for those in search of convenient redemption through moralism. We may eat meat, but at least the animal is properly stunned first before it is killed and dismembered. Instead of falling into this, we should keep in mind our own choices as omnivores and ask questions about the motivations behind the media campaign against halal. As for the political contours of animal rights we ought to look critically at the mechanised production system that keeps us well fed. There was a thought provoking piece by Jon Hochschartner in CounterPunch last week in which he articulates a Marxist theory of animalism. He puts forward an adaptation of the Marxist labour theory of value and extends it to non-human animals.

Domesticated animals, like slaves, are distinct from proletarians in that they do not sell their labor power under the pretense of free choice. Rather, they themselves are commodities. Their labor power is sold all at once, unlike proletarians’ whose labor power is sold in increments. “The slave did not sell his labour-power to the slave-owner, any more than the ox sells his labour to the farmer,” Karl Marx said. “The slave, together with his labour-power, was sold to his owner once for all. He is a commodity that can pass from the hand of one owner to that of another. He himself is a commodity, but his labour-power is not his commodity.”

In Hochschartner's argument emphasises the difference, as well as the common ground, between the human worker and the non-human animals found in the food production system. The proletarian produces their own livelihood in necessary labour, after which comes the surplus labour spent toiling without remuneration creates the profits of the capitalist enterprise. By contrast, Hochschartner notes "When an animal exploiter purchases a non-human, he is not only purchasing the animal herself, but a lifetime of her labor power, which is used to create commodities that include - among others - her offspring, her secretions, and her own flesh." The degree to which the non-human animal is owned goes far further than the way in which human beings rent themselves out for wages.

The need to increase profits to higher and higher levels forces the capitalists to take one of two options. As Hochschartner argues, absolute surplus value is obtained by increasing the amount of labour time devoted by each worker while relative suprlus value is maintained by lowering the amount of work involved in necessary labour proportional to the work dedicated to surplus labour. He claims that the surplus labour of non-human animals can be divided in the same way and he has examples to support this assertion. The amount of time a horse spends pulling a carriage can be extended to raise absolute surplus value. Likewise, the factory farming of chickens lowers the costs of production substantially thereby increasing relative surplus value per chicken.

In the same way that the question of animal rights has to be understood in qualified terms, to be specific, as rights not identical to those enjoyed by human animals. As Noam Chomsky pointed out, rights partly come down to responsibilities and non-human animals cannot be endowed with the same rights as humans for they do not have the capacity for responsibility in the same way we do. Dogs and pigs can't commit crimes for this reason. Yet we would extend rights to infants who similarly lack responsibilities and, in that regard, we might have to own up to a modestly necessary anthropocentrism. So when it comes to animal liberation Hochschartner is wise to clarify the distinction from human emancipation.

Of course, what constitutes liberation for slaves or proletarians is different than what constitutes liberation for domesticated animals. Whereas the ultimate economic goal for human laborers is social control of the means of production, domesticated animals, were they able, would presumably not want to seize, say, a factory farm and run it for themselves. They would want to be removed from the production process entirely.

It is certain that there is a moral case for vegetarianism, but it is also clear from all of this that the limits of consumer ethics are hard to overcome. It's not just an issue of demand, it's supply as well. Most people will find it hard to give up meat as long as it is readily available to them in shops cheaply. Many of us (including myself) make choices every day which have negative consequences in ecological and economic terms. The consumption of meat makes such a contribution, just as the use of products tested on non-human animals does. Unless we become vegetarians and vegans overnight we can hardly pass moral judgment on people like Jeanette Winterson. Likewise, we should pause for thought and reflect on our own behaviour before accepting the claims of a smear campaign against Muslims and Jews.

Europe's problem with Muslims.

Now Marine Le Pen has stated that there should be no 'special treatment' for Muslims (and by extension Jews) with school meals. Either they eat pork, or they starve. This isn't to be understood as in isolation. As some of you may have read the Danish have banned halal and kosher slaughter on the grounds of animal rights. Of course, this is just another event in a long procession of bans in Europe. The French government banned the veil in public places, the Swiss government banned minarets, then there was the Cologne ruling against circumcision in 2012, and the 2013 ban on halal and kosher slaughter in Poland. This is at the same time as we've seen calls for the Qur'an to be banned from Dutch politician Geert Wilders. He has found common cause with other self-described 'counter-jihadists' such as Le Pen. We've had a recurring debate about whether Islam is compatible with 'Western' culture. Britain routinely has a debate over whether or not to ban the veil, with similar debates on halal meat and circumcision taking place with less frequency.

We should ask ourselves some stark questions about all of this. No Muslim country has invaded or occupied a 'Western' or European state in recent decades. To the contrary, the UK and the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and occupied leaving more than a million people dead. The vast majority killed have been civilians and no doubt most of them have been Muslims. The French were totally on board with the NATO intervention in Libya which left thousands dead, just as they also wanted to bomb Syria as US allies Turkey and Israel had already done. This is at the same time that the governments of the US and Western Europe continue to support dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim world. So the idea that there is a 'clash of civilisations' is somewhat absurd, mainly because it's rightists who want such a war. As for European Muslims, here's an excerpt from Yehouda Shenhav:

I would like to go back for a minute to what was known in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century as the "Jewish problem," and to the debates of Jewish emancipation. The debates were originally stirred by a Prussian government effort to extend an identical status to all Jews under its rule; in 1841, it released a draft law concerned with the need for maintaining "the wondrous essence" of the Jews without "intervening with the Christian state." Bruno Bauer wrote that, in a state where Christianity was the official religion, Jews could not be truly emancipated. Religious freedom necessitates the privatization of religion and eschewing it away from the public sphere, but Judaism, being a religion of (public) law rather than of faith, cannot be reduced into a "private religion."

Just as Judaism is a public religion Islam can be understood in these terms as well and liberal societies cannot easily integrate such religious groups into atomised chambers of individual rights and freedoms. The pre-Enlightenment communitarian values of Judaeo-Islamic culture reach beyond the limits of individualism, as such an identity and tradition cannot easily be relegated to a private space. This is where multiculturalism entered as a liberal option of opening up a space for newly settled cultures within the liberal framework. But this has been a beleaguered idea since it first appeared. This is how we are to understand the calls to ban the veil, minarets, and so on. It's no coincidence that the anti-Muslim racism of today can easily overlap with anti-Semitism. This is what bans on circumcision and halal slaughter demonstrate so well. The European fascist parties now have a new means of reinstating old anti-Jewish measures as a programme for defending 'our culture' from imaginary Muslim hordes.

Over the last decade we've witnessed the legitimation of anti-Muslim hatred across Europe in various forms. The actions Breivik undertook can only be understood with this background. The Far-Right used to claim Communism was the Jewish plot to destroy European nationhood, now they claim the Left (and the Jews, no doubt!) are working to flood Europe with Muslims and impose Islamic law in order to destroy 'Western' civilisation. This was the essence of Breivik's ideology: multiculturalism, feminism, and 'political-correctness', are a "cultural Marxist" affront to European nations and their traditional culture. I've covered the growth of this theory among neo-fascists before. It should concern all of us, especially as anti-Muslim hatred is increasingly normalised by the very same liberal intelligentsia who are meant to be the custodians of liberal democratic values.

Self-Service is Disservice.

The predominance of so-called 'self-service' machines in supermarkets should worry those concerned by the depredations of the market. The 'self-service' machines turn us into unpaid employees for a Tesco, or a Morrison's, or a Sainsbury's, and even a wholesome Waitrose. The fact of the matter is that it is a service to Tesco, not ourselves, for the most part, to man the till in the place of a paid worker. It is another way in which the rinsing of people, as workers and consumers, to amass huge profits - and it means worse and worse working conditions and job prospects for vast numbers of people. With all that said, it is unavoidable given the pace at which we have to live, that we are going to avoid queuing for longer (unless we have a tobacco habit), and we can't find an exit point in waiting longer. Notice that the fetish of 'free-choice' actually offers little in the way of quality, and even less in the way of consultation.

Before we go any further I ought to do some throat-clearing: the kind of jobs available to people in supermarkets should be romanticised, they are not examples of fulfilling work by and large. Nevertheless, it has to be said that once such an area of job opportunities is closed off it will leave behind a section of people who had little other immediate option to working in a supermarket. The innovation of 'self-service' machines really allow businesses to discard labour in the endless attempt to pull in enough labour to squeeze dry, but not too much as it encumber the maximalisation of profits. Important aside: profits are by definition what is leftover after the cost of labour is taken into account, before that point its just revenue. The contradiction faced by businesses is in the need to scrap labour to save money, while at the same time drag in even more of it to keep up productivity. The workers are a burden, but at the same time they are invaluable to the economy, they are a cost to be cut, and the source of mountainous revenue.

It is not the case that the prices of food have fallen since this innovation of the marketplace. Yet the liberal accounts of technological progress would have us believe that the betterment of life overall will come out of the liberating capacities of technology. Its a convenient viewpoint, for a liberal or even a Fabian, there is no need for radical change as the evolution of technology will gradually perfect us and perfect our society. If the 'self-service' machines are to be installed then the goods should be cheaper, and if not, then the employees of the supermarket should have a higher wage. Neither is the case. Not only do they take our money for over-priced products they make extra money by not hiring the staff to man the tills. It's yet another instance of the rationality of the market really amounting to irrationality. The business can depend on human beings to act against their own interests, to work for free, to buy over-priced garbage, and ultimately to contribute to the further enrichment of those layabouts convinced of their own brilliance - the crust of wealth hoarders.

Only under particular conditions would self-service actually be conducive to social betterment. The companies could probably be cooperatised, we could each be hired and have a slice of the profits if we are to be engaged in any meaningful kind of self-service. The right to work has to be enforced if there is to be full employment and equitable standards of living enabling each person to lead fulfilling lives instead of living to fulfill the lives of a tiny few. Under conditions of universality and mutuality these machines would be of better social use. It might actually free people from a mind dulling role standing by counters, leaving them to more authentic pursuits, and not just tossing them on the wayside to rot. Otherwise the machine is a bloody con, for consumers, and for workers. In the meantime one can hope that the managers will be replaced by machine innovation sooner rather than later. Now that would be progress of a kind.

For a Few Rice Bowls More.

 

During the appalling crimes of the Khmer Rouge the US remained vocally critical, but effectively stood back in as part of the push to open up China. The subject of human rights was never an issue of policy, not that it has ever been since. Washington postured over Pol Pot and the media moralised, there was a whitewash for who was funding Suharto's genocide in East Timor. It's impossible to understand these events without keeping in mind the American war on Vietnam. Originally the US waged war on South Vietnam after its proxy terror-state slaughtered 70,000 people and aroused an uncontainable resistance. The liberal administration in Washington arranged a "seat change" for President Diem, a man they had put in power, and just before JFK was assassinated Diem was promptly executed. The pretext for all of this was to contain China and the absurdity of this justification didn't become apparent until Nixon went to China years later. Nixon embraced Mao as US planes were dropping the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on Cambodia.

 

 

The US continued to block all attempts at peaceful settlement until 1975, by which time Cambodia and Vietnam had almost been bombed back into the stone age. Washington had failed to achieve its maximal objectives, a ravaged Indochina would live on, but its main objectives were actually fulfilled by 1965 - when the US installed Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia. By then Vietnam was devastated, estimates of the Vietnamese dead ranged from 3 to 4 million. The war had been continued for the sake of US prestige. The aim had been to kill the "virus" of independence in Vietnam, the fear was that the rot might spread to Indonesia and eventually Japan. That would mean the US would lose everything it had fought for in WW2. The common perception of American defeat in Vietnam is not unfounded. This reading lacks subtlety in terms of analysis and exhibits imperial self-pity in conclusion. In short, the US secured its regional objectives though Vietnam survived the onslaught as a outpost of Soviet power in the Far East.

 

The US establishment was left profoundly bitter and sick over Vietnam and remains so to this day. So when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia the US led the chorus of condemnation, even though the Vietnamese drove out the Khmer Rouge. In fact, the US and its allies went as far as to support the Khmer Rouge as a government-in-exile of which Sihanouk became a representative. The Khmer Rouge were allowed to hold onto their seat in the UN as the legitimate representatives of Cambodia. And as a guerrilla force against the Vietnamese occupation the Khmer Rouge received training from the SAS, which the British lied about until 1991. Until then Western governments withheld a great deal of aid to starving Cambodia. The argument was that the Vietnamese would not allow food to reach everyone that it should, namely the Khmer Rouge - who were holding 45,000 people hostage at the Thai border with the protection of the UN. In spite of its battle to rebuild itself Vietnam sent over 25,000 tonnes of food aid across the border to feed civilians.

 

 

Upon the invasion Sihanouk was deployed to make a speech damning Vietnam's aggression at the UN, after which he sought refuge in China. He was later anointed as President of the coalition in waiting. As the respectable face of a government, which included many mass-murderers, Sihanouk thanked the US for passing on lists of Cambodian "traitors". In this grubby partnership Sihanouk was constantly aware that his life was in the hands of hardcore Khmer Rouge in his own entourage. In the meantime the Khmer Rouge decided to wage a guerrilla war and wait for the Vietnamese to be driven out of Cambodia as a force condemned as "outlaws" by the international community. The move would then be a forceful takeover of the country and a return to the barbarism of the 1970s. The Vietnamese occupation was not undeserving of criticism given its brutal repression of dissent and racist policies against minorities. In the end Vietnam left the country in the hands of Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge who had defected to Vietnam, who continues to dominate Cambodia.

 

 

With the end of the Vietnamese occupation the transition to a liberal democratic capitalist state began. Yet it was only a formal shift to a multiparty system of representation as Hun Sen remains in power to this day in a sort of dictatorship lite. The old command economy has been blown apart to make way for markets and the forces of capital. Sihanouk was reinstated as King while the Khmer Rouge stood at a far and tried to appear as a modern force by embracing market liberalism. The power-sharing arrangement was between Hun Sen and Prince Ranariddh and thankfully not Pol Pot. Once again the conservatives banded around the royal family began to collaborate with the Khmer Rouge. In response Hun Sen orchestrated a coup and purged around 40 royalists. By now King Sihanouk was fixing pardons to rehabilitate the old men who had led the Khmer Rouge in its heyday. It would be another decade until a handfull of these aging killers would even see an indictment.

To the Immoderate and the Abstemious.

Although my own inclination is abstemious it cannot be denied that the hostility to popular recreation is bourgeois. It isn’t my place to sneer at the decision of vast swathes of my fellow citizens to go out after work on a Friday night and get hammered. It’s certainly the case that the working-class needs an outlet in a system which increasingly is not to their benefit. Alcohol is the one constant in working-class life that has outlived many governments and political orders. It was once the social lubricant that accompanied quite a variety of recreations, from blood-sports to fairs. It has retained its close association with football, which the pub holds onto as the central gathering where the beautiful game can be watched. You pay for the atmosphere and not just a drink, so it's not really public space but private space which appears public. It was once the case that the pub and the music hall were the hangout of only working-class men, women were excluded from pubs for a long time.

The elites had their own drinking arenas, rituals and standards. The pub was a space where the bourgeois standards of sobriety would not be adopted. It is possible that the public house is a declining phenomenon, it is clear that pubs are closing all across the country. Some are being bought by oligopolies that can afford to cross-subsidise in an effort to prop them up. Around 300 pubs closed between September 2011 and March 2012. This is nothing new, but it does dull the weekend for many people in this country. There isn't much to say about the politics of alcohol, if there is such a thing, we might be able to take down a few worthwhile observations. It has been noted that the level of inequality correlates with high rates of drug and alcohol dependency. This would be because of the amount of deprivation which comes with living in a crookedly unequal society. There is also nothing new in alcoholism, or the plague of "binge drinking" that seems ineradicable on this dreary little island. Clearly there is a lot of sorrow to drown in Britain.

In retirement Churchill once remarked as he stared into the fireplace "I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed." Today Churchill would be labelled a functioning alcoholic in his constant attempts to fill his inner abyss with a near endless river of brandy, wine and whisky. He shared vodka with Stalin and compared his first meeting with Roosevelt to the uncorking of that first bottle of champagne. Goebbels opted to depict Churchill as a depraved drunkard who loved war mainly because it was quite true. As for people who know how to drink for fun, Karl Marx knew all too well as Liebknecht recollected: "Now we had had enough of our 'beer trip' for the time being and in order to cool our heated blood, we started on a double march, until Edgar Bauer stumbled over a heap of paving stones. Hurrah, an idea! And in memory of mad students' pranks he picked up a stone and Crash! Clatter! A gas lantern went flying into splinters. Madness is contagious - Marx and I did not stay far behind, and we broke four or five street lamps." 

If we're talking about the drinking culture of America it might seem apt to single out the Irish who fled famine at home for a better life. The cultural whole of America has been constituted the near-constant flow of immigrants into its great cities. So it's fair to say that the Irish aren't the only people of drinkers to settle in the US. There was the great swathes of Germans, a people whose influence on American culture is often overlooked. Benjamin Franklin had worried that the German immigrants of his day weren't taking up American customs. It was the German-Americans who organised the kindergartens, supported the Republican Party in its bid to abolish slavery as well as stood for votes for women. Many American breweries were established by Germans. This united beer with radical politics in a way which had been out of reach for the American strain of puritanical radicalism - a most English of imports - with its combined support for abolitionism and temperance. As it was with creationism the marriage between prohibition and radicalism wasn't meant to be.

Then after the Civil War and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan the temperance cause became a plank in the platform of the racist terrorist organisation. The anti-Catholic nativism to defend a white America of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic peoples converged with prohibitionism. The Klansmen were violent defenders of prohibition once it was established in 1919. The repeal of the Volstead act and the end of prohibition came in 1933 with the Roosevelt administration. In the Great Depression with millions unemployed and impoverished the US government may have decided to get the people out of the streets and into the bars. The counter-culture then took up the sword of the German settlers in a bid to maintain a varied quality of alcohol in the new world. As the late Alexander Cockburn noted "The back lot brewers who began Sierra Nevada beer in Chico, California, who ultimately beat back Budweiser's efforts to destroy them and thus sealed the victory of the microbrews, came out of the Sixties' alternative culture."

The Narcissist Chef and the Oliver Army.

The Messiah is Back!

Cower, brief mortals, in the face of Jamie Oliver, the kitchen-dwelling Messiah who will lead you away from your life of sinful indulgence and into the promised land of raspberry vinaigrette and shaved ginger in everything. After smiting the Turkey Twizzler from our school kitchens, Jamie has set his shoulder to the wheel to rid the world of fat people forever. And he’s absolutely right to do so. Those fucking fatties, who needs them? Wasting space, sweating profusely, clogging up malls, encouraging rogue parts of the brain to visually speculate on their sex life, I hate those fat bastards. And Jamie’s got help; David Starkey, an arsehole with horn-rimmed glasses, taking a break from taking massive liberties with history and annoying everyone with even the vaguest knowledge of the Tudors, has decided to join the crusade against the well fed.

So we’ve got not one, but two celebrities telling us that lard-arses need to slim down or risk a trip to the fat-gulag, and they’re damn right to do so. If any of our readers are fat, then we want them to put down this paper and go be fat someplace else. Now. NOW! SCHNELL! The one word that keeps echoing inside the cranium whenever Jamie Oliver does anything these days is “Masturbation”, of a vigorous and mightily offensive variety (except for Jamie’s ego). He just jerks and jerks and jerks until his great pillow-like face is puffy and red and the nation is on its knees lapping up his ejaculate and crying for more, because it’s as delicious as one of his runny meals.

Really, there’s so much wrong with his “Dream School” (bearing in mind that dreams aren’t real, and can be extremely harrowing) that we would need a flow chart rather than an article to show all the ways. For one thing, it’s cropped up at a bad time for education, and the government, rather than funding a proper school with real teachers for a year, is blowing just as much money on a weeklong school with celebrity teachers touted as “brilliant minds”. Ellen Macarthur sat on a boat that sailed itself, eating muesli bars and intermittently bursting into tears for a few weeks, and now she’s a brilliant mind. I spend all my time in my apartment eating Pot Noodles and having intermittent psychotic breaks. How long is it until I’m declared a “brilliant mind” by the middle-class twat brigade? Or perhaps you’d prefer Alistair Campbell, architect of New Labour, spin doctor and professional goat-fuck? Perhaps Simon Callow, a shrieking ponce masquerading as an actor. Still not satisfied? We’ve got Cherie Blair, who I just can’t look at anymore after the descriptions of the filthy Catholic sex she shared with our erstwhile Prime Minister. This immediately leads us back to that little man with blood on his hands who still hasn’t learnt that you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it suck you off. But we digress…

So, we’ve assembled our rogues gallery of “brilliant minds” we proceed to browbeat kids into swallowing the ideals that Oliver espouses. And it’s utterly, utterly harrowing to watch. The sheer moral presumptuousness of it all is enough to make us spit out our Turkey Twizzlers, compounded with the horrific bigotry against people who are more heavy-set than the national average which curdles the blood. Jamie Oliver isn’t doing this out of goodness. He’s doing it because he’s a zealot. He knows better than you, and he’s going to make you follow his ideals because you’re a moron. There’s also the aforementioned self-glorification. His masturbatory ideals aren’t marketed to the people he’s trying to convert, they’re made for all the upper-middle class mothers with small children called Jake, driving around in Chelsea tractors with the radio perma-locked to The Archers, who can nod sagely whenever Jamie declares that fat people should be locked up until they learn, the stupid fat cunts.

The Oliver Twizzler.

What Mr. Oliver and the Twat Brigade have missed is the fact that people have every right to be fat. More than that, the fact that the working classes can afford to be well-fed, and can afford to have a constant supply of food, is a sign that our society is truly successful. Jamie Oliver is doing what Morgan Spurlock did in the USA; having a smug little laugh behind his sleeve at the lower classes, and he should be ashamed of himself. While people of all incomes can afford the occasional McDonald’s or KFC meal, not everyone is able to afford fresh imported ginger or cilantro dressing to drizzle over their noisettes of goat’s cheese and beetroot quiche.

Jamie’s oft-touted line that “people in Africa eat better than we do” is either grossly misinformed at best or a fucking insult at worst. He’s living the celebrity lifestyle as the Yuppie Messiah, and has seemingly forgotten that people just can’t relate to the kind of ideals that he’s spouting. At the same time Oliver seems blissfully ignorant of the fact that in more unequal societies there are higher obesity rates, which we’re all aware of whenever we picture the average Yankee though Jamie’s head seems to be devoid of such imagination. Celebrity chefs are on TV to turn cooking into a spectator-sport that can fill in the innumerable gaps between adverts – which are what really matter to the producers – they’re not there to save us all from the horrors of cholesterol. The famous school dinners campaign which “liberated” our generation from the Turkey Twizzler (which were delicious by the way) and in the end it only succeeded in driving people to ingenious lengths of smuggling junk food into the glorified factory farms for little robots, otherwise known as primary and secondary schools. Just like with obesity there are real problems in education, which cannot be resolved through nutrition and narcissistic feel-good trips.

In education there is a contradiction between jumping through hurdles, by memorising what is just needed to pass exams and then regurgitating on command, versus the kind of critical thought essential to education. Many good teachers try to stimulate thought and creativity, which is often incongruous to the rigid curriculum of ideas of a few “brilliant minds” that we must dutifully ingest. Rather than looking to resolve this contradiction, which often produces conformity on mass, Jamie Oliver emerges with a “quick-fix” solution to massage his ego. Note that this is at a time when pressures of intellectual conformity are being intensified by the government. Funding for the humanities is being cut whilst science and maths are being prioritised, because innovation and creativity in science and maths will contribute to the running of the economy whereas sociology just might lead to greater criticism of the economic order. In the midst of this Jamie Oliver affectively jumps on the Tory bandwagon to have kids swallow the ideas of the ‘brilliant minds’.

At the risk of sounding cold, callous and malicious, which we are, we would not hesitate to say that this whole Dream School project has only redoubled our desire to see Jamie Oliver lowered into a gigantic meat grinder and then moulded into an enormous Oliver Twizzler (please, sir, I want some more) after which we can have David Starkey fired out of a Napoleonic cannon into the side of the HMS Victory, Ellen Macarthur can be placed in a death maze, and Alistair Campbell can be repeatedly kicked in the crotch to the tune of ‘Things can Only get Better’. All of which would conclude with Robert Winston being sawed in half in the name of making science ‘fun’ for kids. We hate to be less eloquent than normal, but Jamie Oliver, you can fuck off.

Note: Originally written by JT White and Josh Ferguson for the Heythrop Lion about a week ago.