Yikes. Jack, you are out-Jacking yourself today.
1. That message to Marcus Rashford. You've embarrassed yourself, sweetheart, and revealed a lot more about yourself and your attitude there than I think you realise. Who *do* you think you are? I can spin this, just, as you taking a defensive stance towards MR, but as a capable, calm and decent adult I should imagine he neither needs nor wants someone embarrassingly shouting on his behalf. As for the language use, oh my god, can you not hear yourself? It is patronising, it is racist (I'd call it a micro-aggression but it's worse than that) and it's appropriation like I've rarely seen. I'd suggest you have a word with yourself, but I don't suppose that would be very helpful. That was so bleeping out of order. You should apologise for 1. your disgusting privilege (I rarely invoke this) and 2. embarrassing him by association.
2. With regard to the school meals. No, those are not great lunchboxes. However, *screaming* on Twitter and thrashing around shouting about conspiracies and fat cats and making vaguely libellous statements does not help 'get people fed' (or whatever charming catchphrase you were trying to make happen yesterday). I don't for a second think there aren't failings happening that mean we've ended up here, but you don't tackle them by screaming abuse in people's faces. First off, we all function within the society we happen to be in right now, which is a capitalist one. Whether you like it or not that means the mechanisms we have for distributing food on a massive scale are capitalist mechanisms. Those are the ones you can leverage quickly and make move fast, because they have the weight, power and finance behind them. So, as per MR excellent example, we are going to have to work with what we've got.
That accepted, let's turn to motivation and what we've got. Yes, motivation of large businesses is to make money. I work for one in an adjacent industry to the one we're talking about here. I fundamentally do not believe that there are large numbers (or even small numbers) of 'fat cats' out there rubbing their hands like Mr Burns and contemplating the pleasure of taking a few pounds more profit for providing children with crappy looking apples and weird-ass everlasting bread. It's not happening. There is also as you rapidly work down the scale plenty of people who are just people with jobs doing their thing and probably going home to worry a bit about their finances too. They are not in this for the scamming children factor and I am sure are concerned about what they are providing and glad to be doing something worthwhile in this hard, hard time. Let's not tit all over them as we're getting all Twitter-outraged. So let's look at this carefully.
What is happening is a complex interplay of government funding, business models, supply chain, small scale distributors and possibly most importantly, time. Everything has had to happen very fast. This makes things hard, and can make the outcome less than ideal. I would imagine, once this all shakes out, the problems likely to be identified are a lack of clarity of what was being offered in the first place, a lack of ability to accurately forward plan (complacency and poor information likely causes here), a lack of consistency around standards and supply chain efficiency (around correct products correctly packaged). There will also be inefficiencies and inconsistencies, different in different areas that will need to be examined. It will be complex and it will probably not give a simple answer that fits a particular narrative.
What needs to happen now is consensus. Not people shaking with rage, getting their virtual spittle all up the face of one particular figurehead. As MR is doing, and demonstrating, there needs to be accountability, but also consensus, talking, communication and working out of the problems and the challenges. That will have to be done within the constraints of the system we have in place because there is no bleeping time to build a new system (get them fed, yadda, yadda).
What could a minorly famous cookbook writer do in these circumstances? Well they could provide a menu and ingredients list that would fulfil the dietary requirements of children. Would also be helpful to have them for people with special dietary needs. Though, who could have foretold that might be needed? Oh, Jack, you did, but you didn't do it. Cool, cool, Mary Poppins cos-play doesn't create itself. I get it. They could broker consensus, they could take what people need and translate it into bigger picture purchase ideas. You can support discussion and consensus and organisation without throwing around accusations like that Mickey Rourke in Iron Man II with his electrical whips. You can stop centring yourself and your anger and listen and work with people instead of confrontation that makes people instantly hostile and frightened. This doesn't generate as many Twitter likes from other middle-class poverty tourists, I grant you, but it might actually be helpful.
The awful thing, the really awful thing is that I don't think you have no impact, rather I feel like ultimately you have a detrimental impact on this process. Frankly, I wish I could send you to your room and tell you to let the grown ups get on with it. This last 24 hours have been so bleeping embarrassing. So bad. It's like listening to a teenager say something that you know is going to make them cringe inside-out when they are older and remember it, except you are 3-bleeping-2 years old. Stop it. Please. It's so bad.
I wonder how small Scottish journalism circles are...
