Hugh’s out-of-date dinners are Weapons of Mouldy Destruction
Eton old boy and River Cottage cook Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall famously has no qualms about what he serves up for dinner. He’s been known to eat a squirrel sandwich made from roadkill, and even human placenta mashed up in a pate on toast. So when he scolds a family in
Hugh’s War On Waste (BBC1) for throwing out food past its sell-by date, and tells them, ‘I’d eat that’, we believe him — but we don’t necessarily trust his judgment.
He sniffed at a ‘slightly discoloured’ rasher of bacon from a pack that had been open several days, and pronounced it fit for human consumption. He did the same with a box of out-of-date eggs, plucked from a bin-bag.
‘What’s the worst that can happen if you eat that?’ he scoffed. the actual answers to that question sound grim: listeriosis, for instance, which can cause miscarriages; salmonella and E. coli, which can kill by dehydration; or trichinellosis, which brings on heart attacks.
Hugh’s bacon and eggs, in short, ought to be classed as WMDs — Weapons of Mouldy Destruction.
His intentions are good. this twopart documentary takes aim at the appalling waste at every level in the British food industry, from the families that chuck away a day’s worth of good nosh each week, to the supermarkets that reject mountains of fruit and veg because it’s too small, too big, too knobbly or slightly too colourful.
He visited a struggling farm in norfolk, where the growers were obliged to plough 20 tons of parsnips back into the ground every week, at a cost of £7,000 — decent veg that was ruled unfit for human consumption for no good reason.
But Hugh’s solutions were hardly visionary. He wanted to turn the parsnips into ready-meals with his name on them, and sulked when bigwigs at Morrisons supermarket asked to speak to the show’s producer instead of him. So he set up a market stall outside the store and harangued customers through a megaphone.
Hugh has admitted he lacks the discipline to work in a kitchen — and he doesn’t have the focus for presenting this sort of show either. His attention kept wandering: after spelling out his concerns over food waste, he started fretting about old clothes and chipped knick-knacks.
Signing up as a binman in Prestwich, Lancashire, he dug through the trash to find anything that could be salvaged, and then held a jumble sale on the local common.
A pair of pink slippers that still had some wear in them were brandished like trophies, and thrust upon some unfortunate, embarrassed woman — probably the same lady who had binned them in the first place.
But her discomfort was nothing compared with the squirming, red-faced cringeing of the 16-to18-year-olds who signed up to a Beeb experiment about sexual behaviour and found themselves watching a video of a drunken assault at a party. the youngsters on Is This Rape?
Sex On Trial (BBC3) were not old enough to sit on a jury. It seems callous to ask for their naive opinions on a crime without first explaining the laws, and then to open them up to ridicule by airing their ill-judged comments.
the staged assault, by a boozedup teenager on his sleeping exgirlfriend, was unquestionably rape. there was no ambiguity about it. Most of the youngsters taking part in the programme seemed to understand this instinctively. But presenter Will Best thought it was fun to bamboozle them, for instance by introducing them to a young man who really had been unfairly accused of rape.
All we learned from that segment was how easy it is to sway a teen’s mind with specious arguments.
the show made no effort to educate the youngsters about safe behaviour — about how dangerous it would be, for instance, to get blind drunk at a party while a creepy ex is staring at you and following you to the bathroom.
the inalienable right of teenage girls to binge- drink themselves unconscious was taken for granted. What’s the point of a tV experiment that appears to encourage risky, irresponsible behaviour?