on watching Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food

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"Good food and good eating aren't a class thing -- anyone can eat good food on a budget as long as they know how to cook." 
-- Jamie Oliver

While flipping channels one night, Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food show in TLC caught my attention. Being culinarily challenged myself, I could relate with the people featured on the telly. In the episode I watched, Jamie gathered together people in Rotherham who had no clue about how to cook (one didn't even know what boiling water looked like!) and who relied on take-away dinners to feed their families. They reminded me of Master Shifu's statement at the very beginning of Po's training in Kung Fu Panda (the first movie): "There is now a Level Zero."

As I watched the episode, I thought that I fare a little better than these people because I do know how to cook rice, pancakes, and scrambled eggs... and a few others. I had my first taste of cooking (simmer meats and cut vegetables, really) by assisting my mom in the kitchen (though I always successfully disappear when I'd be assigned to deep fry meats... I never got over my fear of splattering cooking oil). Remember "Wok with Yan", "Cooking It Up with the Dazas", and that Chinese cooking show on RPN 9 after the Sunday morning Chinese action movies? Well, I was a fan of those too. 

Despite knowing enough to survive on food that I cook up, I previously opted to eat burgers, chips, and soda (don't forget the chocolate chip cookies!) when I was a grad student. My reason, similar to Jamie Oliver's students, was that buying take-away is much much easier than cooking my own food... well, until I got quite sick and was forced to three days' worth of bed rest.

Watching the cluelessness in Jamie's students made me wonder, aren't there home economics classes in Great Britain where the students are taught how to prepare weekly healthy-food menus?

By the end of the episode, the students were nothing short of amazing. From clueless fast food fans to confident cooks!

If they could do it, so could I. How hard could following instructions from a cookbook be, right?

Right?

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