Eating Albion

…“Contains images of animal slaughter that some viewers may find disturbing,” says the announcer. “That’s rather the point,” I say.

When it’s farming bears for bile in China it’s cruel…

When it’s chickens in the UK, it’s just food.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall kicked off the Food Fight season tonight with Chicken Run and I have to say I rather enjoyed it (though it’s still TV, so can we really trust it or was the whole thing planned out, shot, and edited months ago? - of course it was, mwhahahah!).

For me the interesting part wasn’t the intensive vs free-range experiment, as we probably all know how that’ll turn out, but the ‘rough side of town’ experiment as Hugh described it. Now, my old man lives in the West Country, as did I for some of my childhood years. That’s how I know that, unlike the North, it’s not a region normally associated with making-ends-meet poverty. Devon, Dorset and Cornwall are all about the English Riviera, tourism and summer holidays, so I found it interesting that Hugh went to Axminster’s Millwey Estate to see the very sort of people who buy Tesco’s 2-for-£5 chickens.

Furthermore, letting Haley and the other single parent families say ‘I’d like to see him live on my budget’ to camera was an interesting move. And a valid one, as telling ‘the poor’ what and how they should eat has always been a middle-class preoccupation. When Alexis Soyer went to Ireland during the potato famine to set up soup kitchens, can you imagine how the rural Irish peasantry received this Frenchman from London lecturing them on how to cook and eat? Do-er of good deeds or do-gooder?

Of course, the residents of the Millwey estate aren’t that kind of poor. They all have homes and clothes, and Haley doesn’t look like she’s ever gone to bed hungry. But what they do have is a different set of priorities. She summed it up perfectly, however, when she said, “I know they’re raised in sheds and they’ve not much room, but at the end of the day they’re cheap and they taste nice.” Will Hugh succeed in changing their minds? We’ll have to wait till part two tomorrow.

As an aside, it seems Hugh’s thunder has been somewhat stolen today by the Jamie vs Sainsbury’s spat that was on the front page of The Mirror. Despite its outrage, however, the tabloid was quite happy to join forces with Sainsbury’s - the official supermarket of the World Cup - for the redeeming of collected tokens to get a free World Cup video…

People have criticised Jamie in the past for taking King’s shilling, myself included back in the School Dinners days. But Oliver, like many others, probably wants to try and work with big businesses to change them from within. (And let’s face it, the food industry isn’t as evil as, say, the arms industry…) Mind you, he did say in the Grocer in 2003: ‘Working with Sainsbury’s has given me the opportunity to influence the food choices of millions of peoples.” Hmmm.

Like many other TV personalities, Jamie Oliver is a businessman now. The multiples now stock his products, along with Ainsley’s cous-cous and, um, Barry Norman’s pickled onions, and that’s in addition to the products that celebrity chefs endorse. Ramsay does Gordon’s Gin, and Rhodes, Harriott and Worrall Thompson do Fairy. Now there’s nothing wrong with endorsing products or trying to flog them; that’s capitalism, right? It’s fair game, as long as it’s not greenwashing, where big business tries to look all cozy and homely. In this murky corner of the food industry, Green and Blacks was sold to Cadbury’s, Seeds of Change was bought by Mars, and McDonald’s bought a stake in Pret a Manger. The list goes on. Are these companies really trying to evolve their businesses away from what society now considers somehow wrong, or are they just hedging their bets? I guess the answer depends on which side of the fence you’re on. For me, perhaps one of the best insights on the subject is on the UK DVD extras for Morgan Spurlock’s ‘Super Size Me’, where says of the fast-food industry, “These aren’t bad men. They’re businessmen’, in that they give us what we say we want. If enough people demand change, we’ll get it.

But back to the Food Fight season. I’m looking forward to Jamie’s Fowl Dinners. If this season achieves anything, it’s moving food TV away from ‘cooking as the new rock-n-roll celebrity chef lifestyle crap’ of the late 1990s and more towards food reportage. Which is one of the aims of this very project… Hiya, fellas!