My satellite dish was fixed on Wednesday. There were men on my roof and everything! So I have Sky working again after an extended drought of about 5 months. I needed something intellectually stimulating so put on Dave in the hope of an old episode of QI. Instead, I saw something completely new to me and utterly horrifying – Man v Food.
In this fast-paced program a chap named Adam Richman travels around the US eating burgers, chilli-dogs, spare-ribs, great globules of yellow cheese, pounds of fries and bowls of hot chilli. He talks a good game praising the balanced flavours and the tenderness of the meat. Nearly everything is grilled or fried and it drips with fat. What makes the program stand out is the sheer volume of food he consumes.
The major gimmick is that many of the places he visits have a food challenge. This usually involves either eating something absurdly hot (the hottest bowls of chilli) or so ridiculously massive that it would feed a normal person for a week. He tries valiantly but I have yet to see him complete a challenge successfully. It is grim but strangely compelling viewing.
In any crowd scene they normally find some slim and attractive people to stand near the front but the overwhelming majority of the people he encounters look as though they could possibly lose a few kilos. There is also a vague feeling of discomfort that this is a society that has so much that they can afford to waste it in oversized menus, whilst a good proportion of the world does not have enough to eat.
To quote the splendid Charlie Brooker in the Guardian…
Plenty of cattle get eaten; at times Richman may as well lie down, open his gob and let a herd stampede directly into his stomach. Entire carcasses are greedily consumed by overweight folk with juice dribbling down their chins, tearing flesh from charred bones with their glistening teeth. It’s like sitting in Sawney Bean’s cave. Meat and skeletons, meat and skeletons. A sequence in which Richman peers inside an oven at Memphis’s premier rib joint to witness a landscape of scorched and smouldering ribcages almost resembles the aftermath of the Dresden firebombing. This is definitely not a programme for vegetarians.
Questions…
- What essential dietary component does lean meat supply?
- Into what is this digested before absorption?
- What could you put in your burger to add some dietary fibre?
- What function does fibre perform in your diet?
- Dietary fat can be saturated or unsaturated. Suggest a food rich in each.
- Who was Sawney Bean?
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