Stop chucking Twizzlers at Jamie Oliver – he’s still a class act

The words “controversial comments” are now as joined to Jamie Oliver as: “There’s no way you can make that casserole in 15 minutes mate” and: “Bosh a bit of balsamic glaze on that ciabatta.” And he has stayed true to form at the launch of a report on obesity. “What you see is parents who aren’t even thinking about five fruit and veg a day. They’re thinking about enough food for the day,” he told the Times. “Willpower is a very unique personal thing… We can’t judge our equivalent of logic on theirs because they’re in a different gear, almost in a different country.”

I can understand bristling at the clumsy, patronising wording, at the idea that people living in poverty are somehow not the same as “us”, whoever “we” are. But Oliver’s intentions are good, as they almost always are, and any attempts to skew his meaning seem to me to be at best cynical and at worst a deliberate desire to misunderstand what he’s saying.

I took his point as an attack on middle-class assumptions, rather than on working-class eating habits; he’s saying that if you are hungry, making sure you eat healthily is always going to be less of a priority than making sure you eat full stop. And any guidelines with a hope of being effective surely need to understand that.


Source : foxnews

Farm Girl Café, Chelsea: ‘We don't stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough’ – restaurant review

The menu at the Farm Girl Café features lots of initials. There’s V for Vegan. There’s GF for Gluten Free. There’s DF for Dairy Free. I think they’re missing a few. There should be TF for Taste Free and JF for Joy Free and AAHYWEH for Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. If you examine the company’s website, and I would only advise doing so if you have strong teeth that can cope with a good grinding, you will learn that the Farm Girl group offers: “A holistic and healthy yet comfortingly simple approach to Australian Café culture.” Nope, me neither. Apparently, they like to use “nutritionally nurturing ingredients”, which sounds rather nice. I could have done with a bit of nurture, rather than the dishes that came our way.

I have nothing against eating healthily. I have only one body and I try to look after it. My mother used to say that she hoped to die aged 98, shot dead by a jealous lover. She didn’t quite manage it, but it’s an ambition I’m happy to inherit. The menu here is omnivorous with a heavy emphasis on non-meat cookery, which is a fine thing. I like vegetables, me. They can taste really nice. But this sort of cooking does have to be done with skill, grace and, ideally, an absence of malice.


Source : foxnews

I left my serious job for the frivolous food industry. But chefs can bring change to the table

A lot of people who cook food – and even more who write about it – have asked themselves at some point what the hell they’re doing. Particularly recently, as deeply entrenched institutional inequalities and biases are brought to light – not only in food but across numerous industries – a nagging question presents itself: am I doing something meaningful with my life?

These panicky moments vary in severity. Some are passing irritations that strike as we stand at the sink peeling a bucket of carrots, or while staring blankly at white pixels on a screen trying to come up with yet another word for “delicious”. Other times, it feels existential. More than a few people have left successful restaurant careers to pursue something they find more consequential. But the narrative you hear more frequently is about the person who leaves their desk job to work with something more tangible – namely food.


Source : foxnews

Was Annihilation too brainy for the box office?

Tonight, at the stroke of midnight, one of the year’s best films will be readily, quietly available to pyjama-clad night owls at home – while over in the US, it is still screening to admittedly sparse crowds in multiplexes. Feverishly awaited by cinephiles and sci-fi geeks alike, Alex Garland’s Annihilation was not supposed to be a direct-to-Netflix release internationally. Tensely following an intrepid group of female scientists into an uncannily mutating stretch of wilderness from which almost no man comes out alive, it’s a larger-scale follow-up to Garland’s smart, stark, Oscar-winning directorial debut, Ex Machina, and should have doubled down on that film’s sleeper success in cinemas. Watching it at home, I missed the vast, dark expanse of a cinematic environment for its gasp-worthy effects and shuddering sound design – it may be intimately, brain-scramblingly idea-driven, but Garland has fashioned it first and foremost as big-screen spectacle.

What happened, then? Annihilation’s surprise, do-not-pass-go swerve into the streaming realm portends an interesting, somewhat alarming future for grownup genre cinema: films that are too large and flashy for arthouses, but whose adult inclinations or deviance from formula make major distributors commercially nervous.


Source : foxnews

José Rivera on Kiss of the Spider Woman: I had to kill what I loved

Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman is many novels in one. It’s a political critique of unlimited right-wing power; a psycho-emotional exploration of state terror and incarceration; an interior dreamscape; and a redemptive love story between two prisoners, the apolitical window dresser Molina and the committed leftist guerrillero Valentin.

Most of the novel is told in dialogue. These long, complex, emotionally fraught conversations read as if they are word-for-word transcripts of the prisoners’ secretly taped encounters. Some sequences feel like jazz, others play like hallucinations. There are dazzling, surreal, stream-of-consciousness internal monologues – extended fever dreams inspired by Faulkner and Joyce. There are also chilling police reports on the ruling junta’s efforts to spy on the newly released Molina. And there are scores of lengthy footnotes detailing Freud’s analysis of homosexuality and the elimination of repression (the association of sex and sin), as well as Herbert Marcuse’s championing of the “free flow of the libido”


Source : foxnews

Jason Isaacs: ‘I want to punch walls’

Traditionally, journalists and actors are supposed to spend the first half, at least, of their allotted time together in some airless hotel room politely discussing The Work – by which I mean the star’s latest project, whether magnificent or corny. But tradition can go hang. Thanks to Harvey Weinstein and all that has followed in the months since his disgrace, such encounters have a strange new energy, a directness that makes short shrift of such matters as awards season and the ordeal of the red carpet. Journalists want to know if the atmosphere in meetings and on set has changed and, if so, whether such a shift is likely to be permanent; their interviewees accept that, for whatever reason, such questions cannot be ducked. For the time being, then, a certain amount of soul-searching is the order of the day.

But perhaps Jason Isaacs would always have been desperate to talk about something other than Monster Family, an animated movie in which he hammily voices Dracula. For one thing, he still hasn’t seen it. For another, far too much of his head space is currently occupied by Donald Trump, a man for whom his fear and loathing seemingly know no bounds. “I’m not a breakfast television presenter,” he says. “I find it hard to go from ‘this fucking monster’ to ‘by the way, my new film opens next week’.


Source : foxnews