I may be wrong, but I get the impression that the adoration being heaped on certain chefs may be starting to wane. Perhaps it is the recession; perhaps it is the stories of Gordon Ramsay’s empire in disarray, or perhaps we are just sick of them. I am all for promoting better cooking, better eating, and buying the best local produce, but realistically how many people actually ever cook anything they see demonstrated on television? It is a bit like watching reality TV, except you are watching someone cook rather than wander about a house.
You have to admire Gordon Ramsay for turning a cooking programme into an empire that earned him $7.5m in 2008. What I am particularly amazed at is the way his foul mouth became popular in the US. Normally such effing and blinding on prime time US TV would not be tolerated, but they seem to love it, perhaps because he is British they think he is just a crazy foreigner. One of the US chefs, Wolfgang Puck, earns $16m per annum for his trouble, and having eaten in one of his establishments I was seriously unimpressed, so celebrity is no guarantee of quality.
Certainly people are now more knowledgeable about food, particularly the kids, and that may in part be due to the daily dose of chefs on TV. However I am not aware of any data that says we are one iota better off in terms of cooking after 10 years of celebrity chefs in our faces. Maybe an indicator of that is that a recent survey listed the following dishes as being the most popular during these recessionary times in the UK.
They are:
No 1: Bangers and mash
No 2: Fish and chips
No 3: Beans on toast
No 4: Chocolate.
There is nothing wrong with any of these if selected and cooked with care, but my guess is that most come from a deep freeze, and while chocolate is good for you, it has to be dark and bitter, which is not what is referred to above.
Rather than having celebrity chefs doing their thing, what we need is an addition to the primary school curriculum that gives equal importance to understanding what we eat as to understanding grammar. Most of us only acquire knowledge about food, calories, nutrition, and vitamins as we enter our late teens and 20s, whereas the real benefit would be having your eight-year-old screaming for high fibre, organic oats, carbohydrates, and proper yoghurts. Can you imagine the long-term effects if our kids were telling Mummy and Daddy to stop pouring salt over everything? It is a simple thing but many, many Irish adults reach for the salt cellar without ever tasting the food first. Salt cellars should be banned from the table at home and from the tables in restaurants; however every restaurant that has tried to do this has failed. We need to start all this education right from the first day in school. Now is a good time to do this as it is acceptable to discuss the fact that we may no longer have the cash to buy ready made goodies in colourful wrapping.
Some hints for eating well in a recession are:
• Bake your own bread and scones.
• Cut back on processed food, it is expensive and has lots of strange additives.
• Eat more fruit and vegetables.
• If you have gardening neighbours, now is the time to drop in with an empty bucket as they usually have more than they can eat.
• Make a mid-summer resolution; porridge every morning for the autumn/winter.
• Try cooking inexpensive pieces of meat and fish, for example liver and mackerel.
• Cut down on meat, experiment with cooking eggs, tinned sardines are cheap and very good for you.
• Finally, get kids cooking. Try carrot cake, pancakes, brown bread, cookies, scones, and rice crispie buns.
Finally, I received a copy of the newsletter from Susan & Alan’s Pantry in Oranmore, and after the initial puzzle of trying to read the Latin front page, I moved to page two where Alan lists his 10 favourite cheeses. Send an e-mail to [email protected] for a copy — Alan is giving a 15 per cent discount on these cheeses during August. If you wish to send me an e-mail
with your comments
and suggestions,
e-mail williampshaw@ gmail.com
