Friday 7 March 2014

The Waste


Television goes through fads and phases all the time.  Only a few years ago we were all watching Big Brother and a whole swathe of other reality shows.  Before that, we were in thrall to the detective dramas of the day. Nowadays, if someone isn’t sobbing their heart out in front of celebrity judges on a talent show, it ain’t worth watching.  However, there has been one constant of TV schedules for as long as I can remember, and that is cooking shows.

So, taking the talent show format and artificially inseminating it with a cooking show, we have been given The Taste.  It’s a bit like The Voice, only with less warbling and more spoons.  The whole premise is that the budding chefs have to create one spoonful of food for the judges.  The judges in question consist of the world’s sexiest crack fiend, Nigella Lawson, an unknown Anthony Bourdain, and a man who is so stereotypically French that he’s almost racist towards himself, Ludo Lefebvre.  Together, they taste the spoons without knowing which chefs are responsible for their creation.  This is supposedly an effort to evoke impartiality in the same manner as The Voice does, only without the need for swivel chairs and a terminal dose of Will.I.Am.

The main problem with the show is quite simply the amount of food that gets wasted.  In order to create these tiny spoonfuls, the chefs are given vast array different foodstuffs, much of which isn’t used.  In order to create a tiny cube of smoked salmon for their spoon, one contestant butchered a whole salmon to get the miniscule blob they required.  A fish had to die for the privilege of getting a sliver of its flesh onto that spoon.  But the wastage didn’t stop there.  Oysters were mercilessly crushed for minute amounts of sauce.  Chickens were debreasted and cut into lego-sized mouthfuls. Even the vegetables didn’t get off lightly as they were sliced into fine pieces for The Taste’s leaking, gastronomic machine.  When a chef was evicted from the show, they had to walk past a gauntlet of freshly stacked fruit in order to reach the exit.

Fuck your pretentious seabass, give me a kebab!

Of course, this problem isn’t just limited to The Taste.  In fact, The Taste probably wastes less than other cookery shows due to Nigella’s raging case of the munchies.  But this leftover problem is endemic to the genre.  Take the Iron Chef, an American show that makes The Taste look quaint in terms of extreme excess.  The competing chefs are given a culinary playground as they are presented with a stack of ingredients that could feed a starving African family for 10 years, or John Goodman for 2 weeks. When you can measure your expendable harvest in galleons, you know you’ve taken things a tad too far.  And that’s before the special ingredient is wheeled out, where a table big enough for The Hairy Bikers to have sex on is piled high with a chosen ingredient, such as an orchard’s worth of apples.

So what can we do our about our decadent Western cookery shows?  We should expect our TV chefs to be a bit more economical.  Perhaps we could force them to cook using leftover ingredients.  Frankly, I like to see Jamie Oliver try and create a healthy, wholesome, 30 minute meal with some of last night’s leftover pizza, an egg that is past it’s sell by date, and a packet of instant noodles.  Either that, or they could just send the leftovers to my house and I’ll make sure they are disposed of correctly.

16 comments:

  1. We peaked with Ready Steady Cook. A half ripped Tesco's bag with a bruised potato, half a bottle of "red sauce" with a fist full of that grim crust on the lip of the bottle, a randon vegetable-like-thing described as " I bought it not knowing what it was" and some grey meat that may or may not have teeth marks in it was all they had to work with in the good old days.
    There was none of this unpronounceable foreign muck that, even if you wanted to, you could neither afford nor find in your local Aldi. It honest working class gruel.
    Ainsely Harriott would spend the whole show laugh maniacally at everyone and everything while two chefs would weep in disappear at having nothing to do but blend the fuck out of everything before giving up and just serving the Tesco's bag with a sprig of basil.
    Ainsley, as I'm sure you remember, would prattle on about Percy Pepper and Suzie Salt, getting in the way and asking the fruitcake member of the public what the hell they think they are doing before demanding the 50 or so octogenarians hold up a placard with either a pepper or a tomato to decide who wins.... (god I can't remember) while the other one is taken outside and shot (probably).

    Everything else has been a watered down bastardised version of what was pure TV gold.... I'd rather eat a gallon drum of the muck they ended up serving on Ready Steady Cook than have a spoon of nothingness that ends up costing ten times as much. I don't know who is to blame for all of this but it definitely their fault and something should be done.

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    1. I do remember Ready Steady Cook, but I barely ever watched it because Ainsley's near-constant grinning used to frighten me in my younger days. If laughter is the best medicine, that means Ainsley Harriott is immortal.

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  2. Please tell me this Taste thing isn't a real thing. Oh please. To be honest I never actually thought much about where the food went on cookery programs. You make an excellent point though. It really does seem to all go to waste. They should cook enough for the whole audience and anyone who gets in also gets a free meal.

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    1. I know it can be difficult to tell with my posts, but yes, The Taste is very real:

      http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-taste

      I don't think The Taste actually has a studio audience, because then the general populace would probably get high from Nigella's pheremones due to the copious amounts of drugs in her system. However, perhaps they should consider sending some of it to their television audiences. At least that way we can experience the food they're describing, rather than passively watching it on a screen with no frame of reference.

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  3. I thought all of these cooking shows were meant to be an enormous middle finger to starving nations. Don't we air-drop plasma televisions and electricity into developing nations just so that we can force them to watch in envy? It's like what Brazil does with sex. Carnival is just to mock the uptight nations who don't openly sex all the sexing time.

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    1. I would like to the Ethiopian version of The Taste.

      "The judges are about to try Mpgwengo's dried, failed harvest with roasted locust and a dust jus"

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  4. I went through this entire blog post thinking The Taste was something you made up. You always manage to fool me, Addman. But they should make a cooking show based in a third-world country. Theuy will strip every utensil and cooking tool away from the chefs, and have themtry to cook a meal with items they scavenge throughout the day. Kind of like Survivor, but the contestants can actually starve to death.

    But this is some good timing for this post because just yesterday, a kid I went to school with tried me to like some page on Facebook. Turns out he's going to be on some MTV cooking show mixed with elements of Jersey Shore and The Real World. I wish I was kidding, here's the trailer: http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/1008011/house-of-food-trailer.jhtml

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    1. Well I'll be sure to tune into that!*

      *Throw my TV in a threshing machine

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  5. I think they should add a Running Man/Gladiator element to those shows. The already have razor sharp implements in their hands. Fight for that cheese. Not really solving the waste problem, but ratings would be through the roof.

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    1. That would be more entertaining. It would be even better if they released some animals, which the chefs would have to prise the ingredients out of the jaws of a hungry hippo.

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    2. Yours is better. You have to fight a tiger for that flank steak. Added bonus, if you win you can try Tiger liver tartar.

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    3. Thinking about it, I reckon this show already exists in the form of Beijing zoo.

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  6. I'm not into food shows but I could get into this one. Though I think I'd spend most of the show ogling Nigella. She's HOT!

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    1. Yep. Although I'd get your ogling in quickly before we have another Winehouse on our hands.

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  7. I think if say President Putin was also on the judging panel of the taste it would be far more edgy. I have only ever watched about 15 mins of the show once and thought . . . . . this is not for me. But with President Putin on board these cooks really would need to worry, one error and it would be down the salt mine.... Nigella and Mr Putin would be one hell of a team as she smiles at his bear chest and he runs a finger across his throat while looking daggers at another hopeful as they bite the dust (in more ways than one).

    And dont worry about the food it all goes to a homeless shelter where folk are all given a spoonful so they can appreciate how the rich live and dine before it all goes to land fill, so maintaining the economic imbalance, and ensuring those without, know what those with have.

    I note hints of leftest leaning and all men are equal towards the end of this post Mr Addman, by adding Mr Putin to the shows celebs I think I have addressed this issue rather well.

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    1. I do lean to the left, but that's because I live on a windy hill and get blown in that direction. My politics are very liberal as well. Do you think Mr Putin would send me down the salt mine?

      I agree that added Putin would spice up TV considerably. Can you imagine him being interviewed by Graham Norton? Someone wouldn't make it out alive.

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