There was a fascinating article in yesterday’s Guardian that claimed, “Food, and real people’s experience of it, is still all about class.” The article was ostensibly about Jamie Oliver’s new television series called Ministry of Food*, which probably won’t reach American shores for a year or two, but then moved on to an analysis of the eating habits of the haves and have nots in Britain.
Certainly here in the U.S., where the dividing lines between classes are more fluid, there’s boatloads of evidence that folks with less disposable incomes eat worse than those of us who can afford watching the likes of Jamie and Nigella on cable television. But even knowing this, I found these lines fascinating and scary: “Sharp inequalities can be clearly mapped, even short distances apart, according to Dr Tim Lobstein, director of the childhood research programme at the International Association for the Study of Obesity. Travel the eight stops on the Jubilee line tube from Central London’s Westminster to Canning Town and you find a decrease in life expectancy of nearly one year for each station going east.” (My italics.) I’m not so sure the lines here in the U.S. are so dramatic. Those are some scary — and very visual — stats.
At any rate, this looks like a show I’ll look forward to. I used to think Jamie Oliver was this lispy, annoying twit, but as I’ve seen all he’s done — giving disadvantaged youth a chance in his restaurant Fifteen, going after the abominable institutional school lunch program in Britain — I have a lot of respect for his work. He may be a gazillionaire with a 2-acre kitchen garden to die for, but I respect him for not turning his back on those crippled by the system.
*The Ministry of Food was an actual entity set up during World War II under Britain’s agricultural department to oversee food rationing.
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Diana-
“Travel the eight stops on the Jubilee line tube from Central London’s Westminster to Canning Town and you find a decrease in life expectancy of nearly one year for each station going east.”
I bet the same kind of figures would become evident if you looked at similar data for train lines out of NYC to NJ and CT, subways in NYC, BART in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Chicago train network. Whether or not public health gurus have tracked the numbers that way, I don’t know but it’ll show up if not in life expectancy in things like asthma, obesity and probably school testing scores.
ebh
I’d be curious to learn if that’s true, B. It seems like neighborhoods in cities like NY and SF are a little more fluid than they are in London.