Tag Archive for 'eating habits'

It’s 12.36 in the early hours of another Wednesday morning and guess what I’m watching on the tele. If you’re thinking that it’s quite likely the rerun of the first season of Grey’s Anatomy, then all I can say is that I wish I had the patience and stomach.

I must admit that the writing and script were quite impressive (the first season, that is), and the plots, well thought through and thick. But watching self-absorbed and whiny medical interns delineate the facts of life over emancipated casual sex in the midst of more than few life-and-death situations is just not my thing.

No, I’m watching the late night rerun of Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food series (on Discovery Channel’s Travel & Living). Sure, the concept of passing on a ‘good thing’ is not new. I’ll admit that it is quite clichéd – passé, in fact, if you consider what the Good Book has been trying to teach us for the past millenniums.

But rather than surrender to the possibility that some of us just can’t cook, I’d like to think that Jamie may just have something really revolutionary going on here. Goodness knows we all love to eat. And maybe, just maybe, we love it enough to learn a little bit more about why we love it so, and how some of it (food) is prepared.

Then, and only then, we might be inspired enough to teach someone – even if part of the reason involves a chance to show off a little. Everyone knows that we learn things we otherwise can’t when we teach, or pass on what we’ve learned.

I guess the doctors on Grey’s Anatomy do the same when they share what they learn in the process. And if that just isn’t doing it for you, there are at least the dishy accounts of complex relationships, notes on sleeping with colleagues, and the joy of watching a medical genius with immaculate hair stumble over the complexities of love to savour.

If you’re thinking that cooking, like brain surgery, is just too difficult for some, I say, ‘Newsflash: Cooking is nothing like brain surgery’.

It’s time we stop ignoring how complacent and spoilt we, as a society, are becoming. Apparently (as seen on Jamie’s Ministry of Food programme), some people in the UK don’t even know what boiling water looks like!

So, if what you love about food is mainly the fact that ‘someone else cooks it for you’, I hope you’d seriously reconsider.