Jamie Oliver Is Pretty Flippant About Child Abuse

For someone who’s devoted years of his life to ensure children’s health through decent school lunch programs, Jamie Oliver sure has an odd take when it comes to child abuse. The celebrity chef recently lamented (in jest, we hope) how sad it is that he, as a famous person, can’t get away with beating his kids.

“It is not very popular beating kids any more,” Oliver said at the BBC Good Food Show. “It’s not very fashionable and you are not allowed to do it and if you are a celebrity chef like me it does not look very good in the paper. So you need a few options.”

MONDO BUMMER that you can’t hit your kids without the press writing about it, dude, but what can you do? Well, if you’re Jamie Oliver, you just put chili peppers in your children’s food instead.

As The Daily Mail quotes Oliver, “I give them chillies for punishment.”

“[My daughter] Poppy was quite disrespectful and rude to me and she pushed her luck. In my day I would have got a bit of a telling-off but you are not allowed to do that.

“Five minutes later she thought I had forgotten and I hadn’t. She asked for an apple. I cut it up into several pieces and rubbed it with Scotch Bonnet and it worked a treat. She ran up to mum and said, ‘This is peppery.’ I was in the corner laughing. [Jools] said to me, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.'”

A scotch bonnet is 100,000–350,000 in Scoville heat units and is one of the hottest peppers you can buy in the supermarket. The amount of pain and discomfort caused by eating one could vary based on his daughter’s palate and how much he used, but Oliver’s methods certainly have the potential to hurt as badly as a spanking.

Whether feeding his daughter chillies was an act of abuse or not is currently being debated by the internet at large (a discussion that always turns out great). One fact is for certain, though: Jamie Oliver sounds like kind of an asshole.

Image via Getty.