Food, Food and More Food

It seems like food has risen to the top of the news agenda here in the UK. The newspapers are talking about how climate change will lead to food shortages. On television, there are ever more programs devoted to food. I personally enjoy watching Masterchef on BBC 2. There are 6 contestants - first, they must cook one dish in 40 minutes (some of them have attempted 2, but the judges will only try one) from some surprise ingredients. On Wednesday, they were given some pasta, ground beef, basil, pine nuts, puff pastry and a bunch of other ingredients. All except one decided to do some form of pesto pasta. Can you guess what happened to the woman who didn't make the pasta? She was chosen as the winner at the end of the show. But first, what happens is that 3 contestants are eliminated after making the dish. The remaining 3 have the chance to cook in a restaurant for lunch service. After lunch, the judges meet with the head chef to see what he thinks (it's almost always a he - why are there are so few female head chefs?) After this, they cook a 2 course meal just for the judges and they get to choose what they cook.

Over on Channel 4, there was a very interesting show on this week called Supersize vs. Superskinny. In this show, the fat and the skinny women swapped diets for a few days and surprise surprise, the skinny one gained weight and the fat one lost weight. The big surprise I believe, is that they got to talk to each other about their relationship with food. The skinny woman had the diet of a 4 year old and thought that she would get fat if she ate any more while the fat one was eating until late in the night and she had lost one of her children and as a result, was eating to fill the pain. This is a sad state of affairs - there are many people around the world who are malnourished and us in the western world either eat too much or too little it seems. Why can't we have a healthy relationship with our food? Is it because we've become so cut off from food production? Think about that the next time you're at the supermarket.