Remember Jamie Oliver? The pukka chap who loved his cooking as much as his quirkily named kids who has become something of a health food radical – nay, fun-sapping nutritional fascist?
The one whose incessant, patronising preaching about what we should and shouldn’t eat has us wanting to dump an entire bag of Smiths’ French Fries into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and go to town with a tablespoon in each hand?
Yeah, him.
Well, Oliver is now targeting iconic cartoon characters that market high-sugar cereals to kids.
He wants them whacked, erased, completely rubbed out if you will.
So that means Toucan Sam, Tony the Tiger, Coco the Monkey and – artificially-sweet Jesus, no! – Snap, Crackle and Pop will be swimming with the fishes.
And by the way, those fishes will include Nemo and Dory who have also adorned cereal boxes.
He’s got form too.
His first animated victim has been identified by The Independent, who noted that he’s surreptitiously deleted a 2015 baking tutorial from his site that had an animated Moshi Monster character on hand as he made the delicious-sounding and high-sugar “Moshi Monsters’ butternut squash muffins”.
RIP Moshi.
Everyone's favourite turkey twizzler snatchin' paternalist killjoy – Jamie Oliver – is at it again! pic.twitter.com/tH95JcjgDE
— Daniel Pryor ? (@DanielPryorr) May 30, 2018
Since murdering Moshi, the celebrity chef and heartless cereal killer has given evidence to the UK Parliament’s Health and Social Care Select Committee saying that the characters “peddle rubbish” and should be used to promote healthy foods instead, reports iNews.
So Tony, if you want to live, you’ve gotta plug unsweetened bran flakes, ok?
Look, sure, some of his statements have some merit, even if they do leave us wondering at what point he’ll just declare that the citizens of Earth are too stupid to look after themselves or even be allowed out unsupervised.
Oliver recently told The Sydney Morning Herald he wants Australia to follow the lead of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who has moved to ban junk food advertising on the city’s public transport networks.
And hang on to your french fries, kids – because that means Micky D’s will only be able to market their salads. (Which won’t work, because when I see an ad for a McDonald’s salad I immediately start thinking about cheeseburgers.)
So are kids not allowed a treat sometimes of sugary, corn-starchy goodness? Are they not allowed a primary-coloured animal friend to talk to while they achieve their artificial sugar high?
I loved the (admittedly rare) treat of making a Coco Pops milkshake when I was a kid – but it was up to my parents when and how much I could have.
It shouldn’t be up to patronising celeb chefs to tell parents how they should feed their children. That’s for the well-meaning, public-service-minded corporate marketing teams to do!
Yes, you can blame obesity on “brand-generated characters” as the definitely-not-named-by-marketing Health and Social Care Select Committee calls them, but ultimately it’s about our own restraint.
Kids, shockingly, aren’t always great at that, and that’s where parents should step in, reading carefully from the packet adorned by the cheerful monkey.
Don’t blame the helpless, innocent and frankly, fun and friendly cereal mascots. Don’t sentence them to death. To paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, they’re not bad, they’re just drawn that way by multinationals to flog cereal to kids. It’s not their fault.
And if we scrub these treasured childhood characters from cereal boxes, what’s going to replace them? Jamie? The Select Sub-Committee’s annual minutes?
Or do we go the way of cigarettes, hiding cereal boxes from view alongside the baby formula? Or force them to carry branding with graphic imagery of the rotting teeth of kids and Jamie making sausages?
Certainly makes me want to stop eating literally forever.
Oliver says the notion he’s trying to deprive us of junk food is “bulls**t”, and that he’s not a “rich f**k” who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Sure, mate. And those chicken tacos will only take 15 minutes, start to finish.