Excellent example of blissfully unaware arrogance working with cultural ignorance. I don’t think I would call the author a racist though without an established pattern of similar behaviour.
Clearly, neither Oliver nor his publishers consulted with anyone who had any familiarity with Australia. To have a story hook built around an Aboriginal child being abducted is obviously “tone deaf” in light of the “Stolen generations” - one doesn’t need to be indigenous to know that. Oliver should write kids’ books about what he knows if he isn’t prepared to do the research.
Oh no! Children have been deprived of recipes for the blandest food on the planet…
Jamie Olive Oil
I’m sorry WHAT does the picture caption say?? And they’re just going to gloss over that?
Al Jazeera just needed any random photo of Oliver to put on the article and it just so happens they chose that one. But mentioning him at the WEF would be pretty irrelevant to the article would it not?
i only know who this cracker is because youtubers mock his awful cooking 😅 why is he famous?
His cooking is honestly fine, when he sticks to his specialities: Italian and pastries. He just gets mocked for frequently trying and failing at doing cuisine outside his expertise.
He mostly got famous off his BBC show. He also spearheaded some actually good charities that were focused on improving the food that was served to children in public institutions. His cookbooks make absolute bank.
As far as celebrity chefs go, he’s not the worst. This particular case just seems heavily rooted in ignorance. Which isn’t itself an excuse, especially when you are going through the effort of publishing a book on the topic.
Maybe I’m an idiot, I looked at the book, and I don’t fully understand the anger
In Australia, we had something called the Stolen Generation where mixed race indigenous Australians children were taken from their mothers and placed into foster care.
The idea being that Indigenous Australians were dying out for “unknown reasons”, so if they take those kids away from Indigenous families and “integrate” them with white Aussies, they will eventually breed and their descendants will get the brown tone wiped out and get something white enough to fit in to white Australia. This was a government practice all the way up until the 1970s.
The Oliver book has an indigenous foster child character who gets abducted.
I was familiar with the the stolen generation/residential schools type of thing, but I was unaware the the child in Oliver’s book is indigenous.
