Metropol

I'm watching "Economy Gastronomy" on BBC TWO and am sitting here with my mouth open wondering exactly who it's aimed at.

The "experts" are visiting a family of two adults and 3 kids under 8 who spend £220 A WEEK on food. So as a challenge to reduce a shopping budget we're starting with a pretty easy task. From the pile of ready meals on the table it looks like these people have never cooked anything (and they're both overweight). They're now being taught how to cook mince. The husband has taken a week off work to help his wife as the kids are off school and apparently she wouldn't be able to cope with looking after them and cooking too.

The programme is presented without a hint of sarcasm, seems to be aimed at adults, yet I'd expect a 12 year old to know all the stuff that's in this programme. If it was on CBBC I'd understand, but this is on BBC TWO for an hour at 8pm. Perhaps it will improve in terms of the recipes they're doing, but I'm not convinced.

Is the general population completely fucking dense?

(Oh and note to the presenter, Buttermilk is not just an ingredient you can only buy in the US as you've just indicated, I can buy it in the shop round the corner).

its like those change for life adverts - very obvious.

a couple of my friends, whilst they do not consume large amounts of ready meals ingest takeaways several nights a week, including a fried 'builders' breakfast at a local greasy spoon at the weekend.

i don't know how they can afford or justify it - even a crappy breakfast at a cafe is about a tenner per person (vs about 30p for a bowl of cereal and milk) - £20 for two - that's a couple of days food for us.

has to be said though, we don't buy hardly any processed food (maybe sausages from the butcher occasionally), but a reasonably healthy shop is pretty damn expensive.

even 'in season' fruit, like strawberries are as expensive as they are in december - most fruit is, and of course you can't buy shit loads from the farmers market every week because it to only seems to keep a few days.

i don't buy organic either, mostly because of price and secondly because, i don't really see the word 'organic' on the packaging as a guarantee that what i'm eating (and all the processes that made the end product) is truly organic.

although i've never purchased them, i notice that 'tesco organic sausages' are actually made using 'non organic beef protein casings', so how many other things are made using non-organic components?

it's freaking me out that such stories or shows are now regular TV... sometimes I think that it's all staged because I can't imagine that there are such people...