The centre of my world of despair

This evening I stumbled across a report entitled ‘The emergence of the gastrosexual’.

This is a serious piece of market research commissioned by PurAsia (they make curry paste and the like), and carried out by Future Foundation (a very proper research company).

The central premise of the whole thing is the fact that men aged 25-44 are cooking more than they used to. PurAsia want to find out what they cook, what they eat, and how much disposable income they have, so that they can skew their marketing towards that audience.

It’s 30 pages long, there are some interesting bits, and there are some very long uninteresting bits, the survey questions and answers are generally pretty predicatable, but then I came across the following, and I despaired.

The survey asked 1005 people, aged over 18, the question:

Of the following list who would rate as your biggest food hero?…

… and our survey said:

Now, before I get started, let me just point out that I have nothing personal against Jamie Oliver (or at least nothing printable), but…

What the fuck is going on? How can it possibly be that good old Jamie, and I quote here from BBC, ‘the street-talking, cheeky Londoner’, can be anybodys biggest hero of any kind.

I’m not going to go on a huge rant, spewing vitriol and bile across this page, because surely I don’t need to. Anyone discerning enough to be reading this must surely know what I’m on about already.

As if Mr Oliver sitting proudly on the top of the list wasn’t bad enough, there is worse to come.

Ainsley Harriot is apparently a far bigger food hero than either Marco-Pierre White or Heston Blumenthal. How can this be?

I really do despair.

The one saving grace of the whole thing, is the wave of joy that washed over me when I saw good old Gillian hanging down there at the bottom of the list!