In the UK: Monday 7th to Wednesday 9th, 9pm, Channel 4
January has seen the start of Channel 4’s Big Food Fight. It’s been heavily advertised and the schedules are crammed with programmes about food. What it’s actually about is slightly less obvious. We’ve a live cookathon with Gordon Ramsay to look forward to a week tomorrow, but this week’s offerings concern what happens to our food before we eat it. What’s the link? I don’t know.
Chicken appears to be the big concern, though. Apparently, chickens aren’t treated very well before they get killed then eaten, except for some strange variety called “free range” that get treated slightly better – before being killed then eaten. Who knew?
ABC1s, that’s who. C2s, Ds, et al? All clueless dimwits apparently (oops. Veering into Peter De Lane territory now). Channel 4, of course, had great success with its Jamie’s School Dinners campaign so for ‘the dimwits’, there’s Jamie’s Fowl Dinners on Friday to look forward to – I think he’s just going to stick a chicken in Black and Decker Workmate or something.
But only the really middle class, well off or well meaning can afford to spend three consecutive nights watching hour-long Channel 4 documentaries. So to give the ABC1s a chance to sneer at the prols for being so uneducated and crass, which was surely the real point of Jamie’s School Dinners, there’s been three hours of Hugh’s Chicken Run, in which Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall tries to turn the town of Axminster into the first free-range town in Britain while simultaneously convincing all the supermarkets to only stock free-range chicken.
How did he try to do that? By setting up his own intensive chicken farm.
