An unpatriotic chef

In recent years, British celeb chef Jamie Oliver has been in the news for his dislike of his own country.

There were two main areas that he discussed.  One was the working ethos of his fellow Brits.  He claimed that British youngsters don't work very hard and are wet between the ears, with parents phoning in for 23-year olds saying they are too tired to do a 48-hour week.  He claimed that in his twenties, 80-100 hours was the norm.  My comment is that a Frenchwoman knows that a 35-hour week is quite enough to get one's work done.  He said, "I've never experienced such a wet generation.  Meanwhile I've got bullet-proof, rock-solid Polish and Lithuanians who are tough and work hard."

A Frenchwoman is effortlessly perfect and she works efficiently to get her work done in 35 hours per week.  So therefore, if Jamie Oliver worked 80-100 hour weeks, he probably wasn't very efficient.  An efficient and competent worker should have no need to work longer than his/her contracted hours.  In Britain, my fashion magazine employers would scowl at me for leaving on time, insinuating that I wasn't committed to my job, even though I got twice as much done as the people who worked twice as long as me.  Lots of them were just pretending to be working and looking busy, rather than producing things: - a Frenchwoman has much more important things to do than pretending to be working or staying in useless post-5PM meetings, such as scouring the local markets for the choicest ingredients with the best flavour.  What is it like working at my fashion magazine?  I scowl at my workers if they stay past normal closing time!  MDR.

However, it is the second main subject he covered that caught my attention.  Jamie Oliver's words were as follows: -
"I meet people who say, “You don't understand what it's like.” I just want to hug them and teleport them to the Sicilian street cleaner who has 25 mussels, 10 cherry tomatoes, and a packet of spaghetti for 60 pence, and knocks out the most amazing pasta. You go to Italy or Spain and they eat well on not much money. We've missed out on that in Britain, somehow."

Now, a stylish Frenchwoman like me is sure to agree with this.  I know that it is possible in most places to buy the food items he mentioned for the price he mentioned.  Even in Monaco, this is probably possible or nearly so, given that there is a branch of Carrefour in the country.  As for me personally, I can't verify whether or not it is possible to buy the items mentioned at the price mentioned.  As my regular readers will know, my mentality for shopping is buying the best at whatever cost.  I'm the bee's knees: - nothing but the best will do for me!  It is probably possible to buy these things at that price, but they wouldn't be of the highest quality.

Mind you, I do agree with the things Jamie Oliver says about the immense stupidity of British people.  When I was a fashion journalist, I was given the task of writing a fake rags-to-riches story about a fashion designer who had come from a pikey household with a single mother and a child eating chips and cheese from a styrofoam container in front of a huge television like the one described by Jamie Oliver.  The fashion designer had actually come from a boho chic household with parents who were very knowledgeable about sartorial matters (not a very common household type in Britain), but my editor demanded that I write a fake rags-to-riches story, because hey, the truth doesn't sell as many magazines as a sensationalist lie.  We visited a chav home, having bribed them with £50 to participate in this blatant lie.  The photographers took photos of the mother with her brood of various different skin tones (indicating the low likelihood that any of them had a father in common) sitting in front of the large television watching reality TV (the word "reality" is a bit misleading), occasionally punctuating this with video games.  The children and the mother were eating burger and chips, cheese and chips, battered sausage and chips, battered Mars bars etc.  Yeek!  The mother was a big fat ugly chav and the house reeked of the fast food and I spoke with this woman to discuss what sort of lies we would tell about how this stylish designer grew up in this impoverished situation, but rose above it.

We wrote the article, published it and got away with it, but I must say, this article is still a huge stain on my conscience.  I kept trying to tell the editor that we should follow my mother's example of openly repudiating our background if we dislike it, rather than telling lies about it.  Apart from the fact that my mother did not emigrate early enough to acquire a native-level competency of French and therefore makes idiomatic errors in her French and doesn't have a French accent, she is pretty much as French as possible: - she only eats very dainty portions of the best quality food, she refuses to take the lift if the destination is less than 10 floors away, she walks wherever she is able and she is therefore effortlessly thin in spite of all the children she has had (I'll do an article on the tax system in France favouring "familles nombreuses" another time).

Anyway, this visit to a chav British household, apart from scarring my conscience, left me psychologically scarred for life, lol.  People might accuse me of being supercilious, but I just can't stand being in the presence of such disgusting people.  Even French people just above the breadline have more class than this.  In an earlier post, I linked to an article by Cécile Delarue where she talked about how an elderly widowed Frenchwoman with a limited income who grows her own fruit and vegetables will eat well and not waste food, knowing how much effort it takes to produce it this way.  Being an impeccably stylish French woman, I go for the best quality at whatever price, but if one has been stupid and lazy in life and therefore does not have money to burn like me, it is still possible to eat very well.

Some British right-wingers would respond to Jamie Oliver's sentiments by saying, "If you don't like our glorious homeland, don't let the door hit you on your way out".  My response would be similar: - if you hate Britain, your severely un-stylish homeland, do what my mother did: - emigrate to France and surround yourself with lots of stylish French people.