Mischief: Britain’s Really Disgusting Foods (BBC 3) – a review

Watch for yourself here.

You know that when a television programme contains Britain in the title it’s attempting to cash-in on a collective sense of identity.  In most cases it’s a bit lazy.  In the case of Britain’s Really Disgusting Foods its symptomatic of the laziness, vacuity, and attempt to cash in on essentialist presumptions about food.   If I were to go down the essentialist route also I could sum-up the show up in a single sentence: The programme has cherry-picked the cheapest foods available to caterers in order to create a straw-man argument, cherry picked experts with vested interests against things like mechanically recovered meat, and created a cloud of brainless confusion aimed at a teenage audience on BBC 3.

The presenter, who’s mildly funny, like dandruff, starts the programmes by saying “I reckon there’s certain things that need answering once and for all, so I’ve composed an email to the meat hygiene service looking for some answers”.  He asks them if ears, eyes, eyelids, noses, brains, lips, nipples, bumholes (rather than anus – the programme is aimed at the youth, man, and they all say bumhole), tail,  testicles, penis, bones, and ballbag, are allowed in sausages.  Testicles appear twice.  Presumably for comedic purposes.  Ha ha.  Twenty minutes later we find out that none of those things are allowed in sausages.  There is, however, a loop hole that means that if you don’t call your meat products sausages they’re allowed 5% meat.  Which I’ll return to.

The programme goes on to discuss the cheapest chicken breasts available to caterers.  Which, surprisingly, or not, as the case may be, are injected with water, salt, and stabilisers.  Partly because they’re frozen.  According to the programme this is disgusting.  A great opportunity to inform the audience is missed  at every opportunity.  Salt, and the associated problems of over consumption are well known, but the chief point the programme makes about the chicken breasts is that they’re disgusting.   Without any qualification of the health ramifications of added salt – or that if consumed sensibly there’s really no problem.  But according to the programme they are disgusting simply because they’ve undergone processing.  Animal welfare can go fuck itself.  It’s not touched upon at all.

Then, at a food trade fair, to demonstrate how disgusting the cheapest, nastiest, cherry-picked faux-sausages are, they give a demonstration of how to make the cheapest, nastiest, faux-sausages. Raising the spectre of mechanically recovered meat.  In order to do this they get Richard Guy – the Real Meat Company founder, who has no conflict of interest at all, an entirely neutral contributor (like fuck)  to give a demonstration of mechanically recovered meat.  Holding up a chicken carcass that had the breast, leg, and other good bits of meat, removed.  Which is exactly what I use to make an excellent chicken soup, using the leftovers from a Sunday roast. He then goes on to explain how the meat - the straggly bits sinew etc. -  is removed in a factory to produce a paste.  They mention the use of ingredients like sodium metabisulfite, and they state, unequivocally, that it “isn’t there to make you live longer, be happier or anything else, it’s there to make a heap of disgusting meat stick together”.

Sodium metabisulfite is familiar to all home brewers.  It is used to sterilise equipment.  It is also a preservative.  It has been used to a very long time, and it has zero side-effects.  You piss it out.  It has absolutely nothing to do with sticking meat together.  It extends the shelf-life of products, and helps prevent food poisoning.  BBC 3 viewers should take what BBC 3 tells them with a pinch of salt.

Shortly after the that programme cuts to a chalk board with “The search for the Worlds Worst Sausage”  the apostrophe is missing from World presumably on purpose, for comedic purposes.  The problem with the board is that technically it’s false advertising.  The cheapest, nastiest, faux sausages they are making are not legally allowed to be called sausages.  No mention is made of the fat-content or salt content.  The two chief problems with the cheapest nastiest food you can cherry pick.  It’s referenced – they mention that fat goes in. But not how much or how much salt goes in.

The programme then consults a nutritionist, who tells us, with minimal elaboration, what we already know about the cheapest nastiest food you can cherry pick.  Nutritionally they’re not very good. Surprise surprise.

They later mention hydrogenated fats.  Hydrogenated fats are bad.  They state that hydrogenated fat “Increases risk of coronary heart disease/contains no nutritional value”.  They do increase the risk of coronary heart disease.  Similar to butter or other natural products that contain saturated fats.  However – they’re wrong about hydrogenated fats containing no nutritional value.  It’s the trans-fats which are a by-product of hydrogenated fats that have no nutritional value.  No mention is made of the problems with saturated fats.  Presumably because telling people their expensive supermarket best sausages can also be bad for their health doesn’t fit their straw-man argument.

They pick on the use of waxy starch in apple pie filling.   Which is no different from using cornflour to thicken things.  But that wouldn’t support the argument.

The programme’s attitude towards E-Numbers is similarly stupid.  At one point the host compares E-Numbers to excrement.  They mention that an E-Number colouring is derived from coal tar.  Like paracetamol used to be, and a whole host of other things utilising organic chemistry.  The idea that anything good can be derived from coal tar is ignored.  To support the argument that the E-number colouring in question is bad they mention that it’s banned in two countries.  I don’t know how many countries it is not banned in, but that doesn’t support the argument, so it’s omitted.

They talk about how marketing people give a false impression of food.  The next time I get a shag out of wearing Lynx deodorant I’ll celebrate by eating a trans-fat laden cake in a park where it’s always sunny and there’s no dog shit.  Marketing gives a misleading idea of what product is/does.  Well I never.  If the argument about misleading advertising were backed up by a coherent argument about unhealthy or disgusting food the programme may have had a point.  Instead it’s an opinion piece of the worst kind.

BBC 3 and Britain’s Most Disgusting Foods are shit.  It’s a broadly misleading programme, aimed at teenagers, that adds nothing to the argument about healthy food, and potentially increases the ignorance of its viewers.  The programme contains nothing about how much salt, saturated fat, and sugar it is healthy to consume.