There's something voyeuristic about TV chefs peddling fresh veg to burger-chomping council estates. It may start off as a worthy idea but it becomes condescending and didactic. And it makes awful viewing.
The solid formula is chef feeds nice-recipe veg to aesthetically-imperfect working-class family, family admits fresh food isn't a comparable evil to nuclear destruction or Sarah Palin as they once thought, family then thank said chef and once he's out the door likely bump up their veg quota by an iceberg a week.
So as nice as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his little River Cottage niche is, he should stop his one man, Thursday evening crusade against low income families. The initial intentions are justifiable, but the demographic that tune into HFW and his little idyll are nowhere near the social group he targets, and the whole programme strays from an educational exercise to voyeurism: "Don't they all eat badly? Oh, if you're popping out grab me a Jerusalem artichoke".
AA Gill summed it up best in his Sunday Times TV review:
"Last week in River Cottage Autumn we were taken creeling for velvet crabs. These are rarely eaten in this country, he pointed out, and I'll tell you why: there's not enough in one of them to make a fish-paste sandwich for a garden gnome. As an exercise in self-sufficiency, spending two days wading chest-deep in a November sea to catch three crabs is the fast track to extinction. I wouldn't mind any of this whimsical folie de verdure if it were just the nostalgic good life, if Hugh were the Guardian-reading reincarnation of Jack Hargreaves. Remember Jack Hargreaves? He had a thing about the feel of wizened tools. Always rolling something knobby between his callused fingers. But Hugh hectors us -- he gets all schoolmarmy and wags his greener-than-thou finger at us. He sows guilt among the radishes."
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