Scrambled Message Leaves Oliver With Egg on Face
Updating my earlier post on Jamie Oliver, it seems the chef has outdone his previous hypocrisies. First, to demonstrate the purported evils of poultry producers, Oliver put on a nice suit and sat some well-off folks down for a studio-audience dinner. Then he had the assembled watch him gas some live chicks, and feed one to a snake. Here’s the video:
Today’s NYT notes that Oliver is part of a movement of chefs seeking to get closer to their food. I see it differently. Oliver is instead the hypocritcal figurehead of an anti-business movement seeking to compel government to enforce the movement’s views of what is right and ethical in the kitchen. As the NYT puts it:
Mr. Oliver’s message to supermarket shoppers is clear: the only reason for the miserable lives lived by most chickens is your insistence on cheap food. After the broadcast, as reported in the British press, supermarkets across the United Kingdom quickly sold out of free-range eggs and chickens.
I love free-range chicken. But as a full-time student, I also have to eat what I can afford, which means I also eat my share of inexpensive food. Perhaps it’s that wealthy people like Jamie Oliver can no longer fathom that quality and price are often at odds with one another, and that some people don’t always have the luxury of making a choice between the two. (One Guardian commentator understands how off Oliver is here, though the last thing the world needs is anyone urging Oliver to seek costly legislation.)
But maybe Jamie does understand the tension between keeping costs down and buying highest-quality goods. Else why, hot on the heels of the broadcast, would one of Oliver’s restaurants switch egg suppliers (why switch so soon after the broadcast if the restaurant was serving eggs that conformed to Oliver’s professed ethics?) and start buying exactly the type of eggs he damned on the broadcast? Beats me.
