In 2005 Jamie Oliver visited Kidbrooke School as part of “Jamie’s School Dinners,” a four-episode documentary. His objective was to find a way to improve the quality of a typical British school lunch, called a school dinner in the UK.
The situation was grim. The school’s daily budget for dinner was 37 pence per child, which meant the school had to rely on junk food. The children especially loved chicken nuggets, and it is here – to the limited knowledge of the watcher, as unfortunately we may never know what lurks in his mind – that Oliver began his unceasing crusade against nuggets. Oliver changed the menu to a healthier one which lead to angry children, overworked dinner ladies, and a skyrocketing budget.
The series was mostly successful in that it kickstarted a nationwide campaign to improve school dinners that would reach even then-prime minister Tony Blair. Funds were allotted, pledges were given, and the topic became enough of a hot button that it was a major factor in the 2005 general election. The series was not successful in actually improving school dinners, as Jamie Oliver himself would admit in 2015. Nevertheless, he would go on to campaign about healthy eating, pushing his bold belief that all people – even the poor ones – deserve healthy food.
The underlying message, however, raises eyebrows.
For example, in 2015 he stated that the reason his attempts to improve children’s nutrition didn’t work was because “eating well and feeding your kid right and being aware about food is all considered very posh and middle class." To Oliver, it is the parents’ working-class sensibilities that makes them abhor healthy food, not the fact that, according to the Food Foundation think tank, “almost 4 million children in the UK live in households that struggle to afford to buy enough fruit, vegetables, fish and other healthy foods to meet the official nutrition guidelines."
Somehow, it’s not the Coalition government’s fault even though the education secretary they appointed, Michael Gove, actively worked on walking back many of Labour’s school policies. In 2011, Jamie Oliver did comment on Gove’s decisions, which included the decision to abolish the School Lunch Grant and merge it into a more general Dedicated School Grant, to scrap nutritional food standards for government run schools, and to free local councils from having to monitor the number of free meals thus making it harder to allot a budget for them. Oliver declared himself “very worried” about the decisions that he thought were at least in part due to Gove’s belief that such work was evidence of the “nanny state." Still, even if worrisome, such decisions are not mentioned among the reasons that Oliver's initiative failed. Sure, the government may have worked against the working-class, but why was the working-class still choosing to eat chicken nuggets?
Of course, Jamie Oliver is just the last in a long line of rich people blaming the poor for not taking their advice on how to thrive as poors. The Victorian age saw a plethora of nutritionists and food reformers attempt to convince the working-class of the worth of, in no particular order; temperance, pudding – the British kind, of course –, brown bread, breast feeding, and oatmeal.
I am not saying that these things are bad, although I admit I have my doubts on the merits of pudding. I am, however, saying that these proposed changes were offered with no regards to the time and energy available to the working-classes.
For example, breast feeding would have certainly provided more nutritional value to babies than the pap (i.e. a mixture of bread and either milk or water) they were fed. The truth, however, is that women probably had neither time nor strength to breastfeed, as they were often forced to work to bring in more money and would often be too undernourished to produce milk.
The many Dickens heroines who would starve offstage were a representation of a very real issue that doctors and social workers were often trying to combat. A physician in 1904 described it as a mother’s “auto-starvation,” with the St. Pancras School for Mothers writing in 1907 that there was an “extraordinary tendency of women to starve themselves”. The undernourishment of working-class women was caused by a mixture of economic and social reasons which were undeniably connected; for example, low wages meant that there had to be a hierarchy at the working-class Victorian table that favoured the main breadwinner – who usually was the father – with the logic that they needed bigger portions because they needed energy to work. Likewise, if anyone else was earning money they would receive more food than anyone who did not work, with children generally getting whatever food was left. The mother would adjust the size of her meal so that the breadwinner and the children would have something to eat, which at times meant that she would not eat at all if wages were particularly low. The mother would adjust her meal regardless of whether she earned money or not, since it was her "duty" to take care of the rest of the family. The advice to breastfeed, therefore, was a solution that considered money (free + nourishing = correct) but not the actual effects of not having money, such as – amongst other things – the lack of strength that comes from poverty-induced starvation.
Furthermore, most nutritional changes pushed onto the working-class had no interest in respecting the working-classes’ basic humanity. Humans generally understand food to be more than a way to intake the calories necessary to survive. As families, we unite around the table to eat together. As friends, we often meet for coffee and a treat. When it’s our birthday, we order cake even though we realize that it’s not healthy for us. Maple syrup is just as much part of Canadian culture as long cold winter nights and politeness are. There is a reason why most celebrations include food; because food is a way for people to come together.
And yet, when the discussion veers towards the poor, food suddenly turns into a matter of pure sustenance. Victorian upper classes were free to spend lavishly on meat, which was understood as being particularly nutritious and a staple of their diet, but any such expense from the working-class was seen as frivolous and unnecessary. The working-class should have instead focused on gruels and oatmeal, cheap and nutritious meals that were also generally bland and, in the mind of the Victorian public, intrinsically connected to the workhouse.
The poor used white bread instead, and lots of it. An 1881 national study by the British Association for the Advancement of Science shows that bread was second only to meat for household spending, though Charles Booth’s London budgets from the late 1880s estimate 6.5 pounds of bread eaten per person each week in contrast to the meagre 1.6 pounds of meat. White bread was a convenience food, cheap and easy to eat, needing no cooking or cooking utensils to be enjoyed. It was filling, and it could be a meal on its own if need be.
It was also, at times of greater hardship, the only thing people could eat. Poor children would go days eating only bread, to the great disapproval of the – mostly middle-class – schoolteachers, school managers, and various charity workers involved in providing school dinners after the late 1870s. It goes without saying that this was seen as a mother failing her children, not a reflection of social trends or systemic issues.
School managers in particular were trying to reform school dinners with the hope of re-educating the children out of their “slum tastes,” with “slum tastes” signifying “the dislike for food that has culturally come to mean poverty and degradation.” They hoped to convince children to eat “poverty foods," which were generally disliked by those living in poverty because of their negative stigma, rather than the bread that was seen as non-nutritional. Of course, poverty food was also avoided by the upper classes who also often indulged in white bread completely guilt-free.
The oatmeal in particular was a poverty food that was seen as a symbol of the social question of hunger. Oatmeal is nourishing, it’s healthy, and most importantly, it’s inexpensive. If the people were starving, then, “why do not the poor use porridge?”
The plan of the school managers was therefore twofold; first they would get the children to like foods such as the humble oatmeal, and then, through the child, they would manage to change the food habits of their mothers.
The best laid plans of the social reformers clashed with the actual reality of the working-class. Some mothers did, in fact, try to serve porridge, but they had no milk or sugar to flavour it and the porridge would take on the flavour of previous meals cooked in the pot, creating an unappetizing sludge that appealed to no one.
Porridge also needs water to be made, and access to water, which was usually polluted, was often difficult. There were very few buildings with piped-in water, and the many private companies supplying it might only turn it on for a few hours a day, or turn it off completely on Sundays.
There was another reason why working-class women depended on bread, other than its price and versatility: their kitchens, or rather, their lack of one. Most flats only had a fireplace they could cook on, usually with a grate, sometimes with a Dutch oven. In the 1880s gas stoves were being introduced, but they were expensive to run, costing a penny for five hours of gas.
Women also didn’t know how to cook, although working- and upper-class women were often united on this point. Sadly, that’s where the commonality ends. Cookery books and magazines with advice for housewives were popular, but most of them took for granted that their readership would have an oven, time, and more than £1 a week for expenses. Free classes were set up by the government in the 1890s, but these classes were useless for low income people as the instructions required expensive ingredients and not only access to a kitchen, but access to a comfortable one.
Which leads us back to Jamie Oliver and his crusade against junk food.
In “Jamie’s Dream School” he teaches twenty teenagers how to make homemade chicken nuggets, and promises them that the homemade ones are cheaper, better, and faster. While technically nothing he has said is a lie – it would take some prepping and a certain level of know-how to make homemade chicken nuggets in less than sixteen minutes that most people do not have, but it can be done – Oliver is bringing an economic solution to a social issue. No one is making chicken nuggets because they are misguided and have been tricked into believing it’s healthy. People are making chicken nuggets because they are tired and want an easy, tasty meal that won’t require them to do dishes.
In 2009, Jamie Oliver went to Huntington, West Virginia to bring his “food revolution” to what was then one of the unhealthiest cities in the US, with the highest rate of obesity in the whole nation. Just like the British children four years earlier, the American children love those terrible chicken nuggets, but when he shows them how the nugget is made, involving “gross” ingredients and processes, the childrens’ ravenous nugget hunger is undeterred. The failure of his scare tactic convinces him that “we’ve brainwashed our kids so brilliantly so even though they know that something is disgusting and gross they’ll still eat it if it’s in that friendly little shape." The kids are broken, and Oliver must fix them.
Jamie does eventually talk to Stacie Edwards, a mother of four. He puts all of the junk food in the house on the kitchen table and tells her,
Jamie: I need you to know that this is going to kill your children early. […] How are you feeling?
Stacie: Just feeling really… sad and depressed right now. But, you know, I want my kids to succeed in life and uh this [food] isn’t going to get them there.
Jamie: The kids are the most important thing in your life, aren’t they?
Stacie, in tears: Yeah. […] But I’m killing them.
Jamie: Yes, you are. You are. But we can stop that.
Instead of discussing money, time, or the very real issue of food deserts – a very likely explanation for why the children at the elementary school may not know what a tomato is, for example – Oliver simply tells this woman that yes, she is killing her children.
What Oliver never remarks on is the fact that Stacie is a stay-at-home mother of four living on her husband’s – a truck driver – salary. Huntington, “the unhealthiest city in America,” was also the city with the highest poverty rate in the state of West Virginia. West Virginia was at the time the third poorest state in the USA.
It is now the second poorest state in the USA.
Oliver sees no systemic issue that can’t be fixed by telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and then turning those bootstraps into a tasty 30-minute meal. In his Ted Talk, “Teach Every Child About Food,” Oliver opines that “if you can cook, recession money doesn’t matter. If you can cook, time doesn’t matter," a statement so wrong that it feels silly to rebuke. The sad truth, however, is that Oliver is not the only one who thinks this.
Anyone who cooks food on YouTube will eventually make a series of videos about cheap and healthy recipes that can absolutely-for-sure be cooked on a weekday night, as long as you're happy spending an hour cooking and then thirty minutes cleaning. Food preppers will tell you that spending all of Sunday prepping rice and broccoli for the rest of the week is not just feasible, but also clever. Look for any video that has a title like “meals under X dollars” and you will find a recipe by a charming home cook that would be under x dollars, if you could buy one clove of garlic, half a tomato, and a quarter of a box of macaroni.
On the other side of the coin, there’s the conservative uncle telling you that maybe, if you had ordered less Starbucks, you would be able to afford a house by now. The reason you can’t pay your bills is because you ordered that avocado toast.
If you’re so poor, why won’t you have porridge?
What all of these people – the charming Youtube home cooks, the conservative uncle, and Jamie Oliver, who in some way is both and neither – are saying is that you could do more. The Victorian social reformer takes off their hat and turns into the modern social reformer, they smile and hold your hand as they tell you that poverty is the result of moral failing. Poverty is self-inflicted, human misery is the result of sin. Reform your character, be “sober, pious, clean, industrious, frugal, and independent” and only then will you escape destitution.
Poverty is therefore an aesthetic choice. Begone, chicken nugget, thou foul beast; all hail the earthy porridge.
Further Reading and Watching;
Olson, Dan. "Jamie Oliver's War on Nuggets." Youtube, uploaded by Folding Ideas, 29 Oct 2021: There is plenty I haven't said about Jamie Oliver's wording. For example, he talks about how the homemade chicken nuggets smell "clean" while the store-bought ones smell "dirty," or how the breast and the thighs of the chicken are the "good" meat. The implications are fascinating, but sadly that turned out to be slightly out of the scope of this post. If you're interested in that issue, this video does a great job dissecting it.
Monroe, Jack. "Jamie Oliver? He Has no Right to Tell Us How to Spend Our Money." Independent, 28 August 2013: Jack Monroe also pointed out the classism that Jamie Oliver frequently exhibits. This is an excellent opinion piece with great recipes, although they are based on UK prices. You may not be surprised to know that if you look this article up online, people will say she was "whining".
Finch, Alan. "The provision of school meals since 1906: progress or a recipe for disaster?" Hystory and Papers, 2019: As you saw, the question of school dinner came up in Victorian England too. Provisions would be made to implement free meals in 1906, to middling success. The Education Act of 1944 required all local authorities to provide a midday meal and set nutritional guidelines. This act was scrapped by the Thatcher government. There truly is nothing new under the sun.
Works Cited
Campbell, Denis. “How to save school dinners – part two.” The Guardian, 2011.
Gerard, Jessica. "Lady Bountiful: Women of the Landed Classes and Rural Philanthropy." Victorian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1987, pp. 183-210.
Rosson, Ellen. Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Schofield, Eunice. "Food and the Cooking of the Working Class about 1900."