The TV chef whips up crisis-budget meals, but his jolly shtick about poverty cuisine being a delight is jarring – even Jamie can’t make meals cheap enough for people with no cash to cook them
Sometimes it’s the little things that ram home how far downwards Britain has slid. If you are accustomed now to not being able to rely on the ambulance service or swim in the sea safely, and if you are numb to those studies suggesting that 50,000 or 130,000 or 330,000 people have been killed by austerity, here is another canary indicating that the coalmine is filling with gas: with the well-intentioned one-off show Jamie’s £1 Wonders (Channel 4), Jamie Oliver has moved into crisis-budget cookery.
For more than 20 years Oliver has been an aspirational shortcut for relatively comfortable home cooks, who have loved serving their families or dinner-party guests something delicious before admitting it was a Jamie recipe. Now some of those folk are finding their income doesn’t cover their expenditure, Oliver has responded with a portfolio of still-toothsome dinners that come in at less than £1 per portion. It is an awkward watch: however good it is, there is a constant voice in one’s head bemoaning that it needs to exist at all.
