When I first saw it, I laughed out loud.
A group of pretend chefs sneak up to a metrosexual young man standing in his designer kitchen reading a cookbook, then encourage him to put down his wooden spoon and bottle of olive oil and liberate himself from the "tyranny" of home-cooking.
The prime-time TV advertisement looks like the spoof of a film starring Leslie Nielson. But then I realised the message behind it was deadly serious. "Don't cook," said the strapline. "Just eat." By ordering a meal from your local takeaway.
It comes to us courtesy of just-eat.co.uk, a network of takeaway food outlets, and its website goes one step further by welcoming visitors to "the rebellion" and posting its anti-cooking manifesto. Cooking is cobblers, it says. We want people to burn their aprons and liberate themselves from the tyranny of home cooking. People must cease stealing our jobs.
The blurb maintains that cooking is all about complicated recipes you need a PhD in advanced foodology to understand, that it's encouraging us to buy celebrity-endorsed gadgets we never use and requires hours in the kitchen just to end up with mush. So we should burn our cookbooks and silence the celebrity chefs to rid the world of "these evil people" for inventing cooking purely to enrich themselves. We won't stop, it adds, until every cooker in the country is kicked into touch.
The tone is tongue-in-cheek and, yes, it's quite funny. However, I reckon it's dancing with danger because it runs the risk of convincing the most vulnerable in society to part with their precious money in return for a hit of instant gratification.
Some takeaway outlets supply the type of food that requires a lot of dressing-up to look and taste good. Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Thai, pizzas and kebabs: these foods aren't inherently unhealthy, but my worry is encouraging us to order remotely risks undermines a growing trend among the young to re-engage in growing, choosing and preparing food. Are takeaway meals really worth allowing your cooker to be blown up for, as featured in another episode in the JustEat TV ad campaign?
The bit that gets me most is how the creatives behind it could have kept a straight face when dreaming up the line: "It's time to let the professionals do the work."
There are so many issues thrown up by this silly campaign I don't really know where to start. The most obvious is how it attempts to normalise a complete disconnection with the food itself. If you order remotely from a menu you've read on a computer screen, pay for it online before tasting, then wait for it to be delivered to your door sealed in boxes and bags, you are abdicating responsibility for ensuring the provenance or freshness of the ingredients, and don't really care how it was actually prepared and cooked. As long as it tastes all right. The stinky packaging you wake up to the next day, with all the remnants of said meal, is sometimes not pleasant to recycle so it's easier just to stuff it in the bin and let someone else take care of getting rid of it.
The most recent JustEat flier I received was for a Chinese takeaway I'd never heard of located within the vicinity of my home but far enough away to require a car (or a taxi) to go and collect any meal I might care to order. So paying for a delivery service is a must-have add-on to the deal. This "restaurant" offered curry sauce with boiled rice for £2.80 and pineapple fritter for £2.20 alongside mains of meat cooked Szechuan style or in Hong Kong hot garlic sauce and offered the usual curry, sweet and sour, chop suey, chow mein and egg foo yung dishes. All offered the same list of basic or "mothership" ingredients (beef, chicken, duck, pork, king prawn and so on) and all cost around £4.50 each, minus any accompaniments. Who's to say the meat was ethically sourced? Or that there were no unsavoury elements thrown in alongside too much salt, sugar and fat?
Flogging takeaway food from a remote and invisible kitchen is not only expensive for a family; it's also counter-intuitive to accepted nutritional aspirations and only serves to undermine the efforts of so many in re-educating the nation's palate towards shopping for healthy, locally-sourced food, and encouraging a hands-on approach to preparing meals to give us control over what we eat. In a country with one of Europe's worst diet-related health records, it's dangerous to say otherwise.
Maybe that's the point of this current campaign. Granted, it might appear to some that celebrity TV chefs, expensive cookbooks and right-on amateur cooks are running the world. But rebellion for the sake of rebellion is juvenile and irresponsible, undermines the main message and takes unsuspecting punters off the exciting, convivial and ultimately satisfying food journey the rest of us are on.
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