They Eat Horses, Don't They?

Supersize Vs Superskinny

In these modern times it’s not easy to make bigoted judgements about people. Accents are disguised, new double-barrelled names invented, and the honours lists are full of the most unlikely sorts, some of them, apparently, with only three buttons on their suit cuffs. So if you’re finding it difficult to sort Raffles from the riff-raff, just have a look at what they eat. Though there may be very little on the flickering screen telling you how to cook, there are plenty of experts out there just itching to insist that dinner is eaten in the evening and not at lunchtime, and that the difference between good and bad food is as much a matter of taste as flavour.

And the cooks themselves have turned from nurturing teachers, showing us how to combine and create into, judges, juries and ( if their scaremongering is to be believed) executioners.
As Channel 4’s own introduction to new show Supersize Vs Superskinny ( presented by Dr Christian Jessen ) goes:

“Faddy foods, slimming products, diet surgery and extreme weight loss regimes, the UK has gone diet mad.  But alongside every new celeb diet launch we’re continually bombarded with confusing food scares and health warnings about being superslim, so it’s no wonder our relationship with food is becoming increasingly dysfunctional.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that programmers at Britain’s edgiest channel were bemoaning these facts, but, in yet another bout of smug navel-gazing from the people who gave you Big Brother’s Little Brother, they seem to be justifying their presence on this creaking bandwagon.

The same morbid curiosity that makes you want to poke a dead badger with a stick (for which you’d have to switch over to BBC 2) seems to have infected the increasingly intolerant Gillian McKeith as she starves fat people and stuffs the skinny ones like so many Strasbourg geese. 
Her idea is to hit her subjects over the nose with a culinary rolled-up newspaper and rub their face in their disgusting, appalling, unhealthy meals. 
Will Self points out that feeding Christians to lions had a higher sense of moral purpose.

But even if McKeith’s given the benefit of the doubt and we allow that she may have been trying to educate people, her tawdry offering is nothing more than a reinforcement of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s unintentional, or at least unconscious, demonstration of food as an index against which we are invited to judge class, education and wealth. 
Again, you might expect the Channel to be doing something to overcome the resultant stereotypes and, again, you’d be wrong.

If you watch any of these scrofulous programmes you’ll soon become convinced that the poor eat badly not because they’re poor but because they’re stupid. 
If dad’s a Cabinet minister or you’ve done a stint in the City then you’re well within your rights to live off pigs’ trotters. But if you work in Asda and eat cows’ hooves in the form of winegums then you’ll find yourself very quickly herded onto some lurid shame-fest for the delectation of the great middle classes.

We’ll snort Jonathan Crisps out of our noses with tittilation as we sip our cheeky New World cab-sauve and pretend to be appalled at your short, nasty and brutal life.
 No representation of a working-class family seems to us complete without the Bargain Bucket, no lurid footage of ‘hoodies’ considered viable without crisps (Wotsits, dear, not Kettle Chips), chocolate (Cadbury, not Green & Black), and cider (of the White Lightning variety – you really must try the stuff from Brittany).

Can it be coincidence that we didn’t see Clarissa Dickson-Wright (one of the eponymous Two Fat Ladies) or the increasingly ‘curvaceous’ Nigella Lawson being ritually humiliated by Jamie Oliver in his sensational ‘exposé’, Eat to Save Your Life? 
No doubt the domestic Buddha was busy making another Nigella Express in which she shows us how to cram four pints of cream and a bottle of vermouth into a pudding where God had intended only half a pint of each. 

It’s quite alright for the likes of Rick Stein to hold aloft gout and liver cirrhosis as battle scars earned from a high life well-lived, but woe betide the lower socio-economic echelons of disease: adult-onset diabetes and obesity are stuck up on poles outside the working-class tenements as warnings to those whose poison of choice is more pork scratching than Paxton & Whitfield.

The same producer who spends his days finding hard-up single mothers to pillory for not spending enough on their chicken wants us all to have a £400 Kitchenaid and hand round nibbles to a posse of fawning chins in an L-shaped drawing-room.
 ‘Live like Nigella or Hugh and you too can join us in the skinny jeans and pointy white brogues of this most excellent zeitgeist,’ he may well say.
‘Otherwise it’s into the abyss, off the property ladder, down into the outer darkness where there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth amidst the fat, the skinny, and the bargain buckets.’

Somewhere the true intentions of all these excellent cooks have been lost.  The idea that food programming might deign to tell us as much about how to cook as how to live appears to be so last season.

 With the honourable exception of, strangely enough, Jamie at Home. 
Written as well as presented by the man himself, he’s got to the stage where he can tell us how to cook a shoulder of lamb without an executive in square glasses telling him that he’s not being ‘aspirational’ enough. 

Certainly we’re invited to build our own raised vegetable beds and shop at Sainsburys, but we stand up half an hour later thinking that it might be nice to cook leeks like Jamie cooks leeks or even simply cook a leek without piercing the film lid and nuking it on ‘high’ for two and a half minutes.

It’s not a tightrope that has to be walked between McKeith and Nigella, between degradation and aspiration. 
There are enough fine cooks and excellent cameramen around to make shows that get us enthusiastic about cooking and eating food. 
We just need fewer producers and commissioners who feel that they alone can sense the cultural pulse or even that the term ‘cultural pulse’ has any meaning at all.

Go forth and find Keith Floyd, offer him a bottle of something red and 12% ABV, and let him get into beast mode amidst the fire and knives.

James Pryor

Supersize Vs Superskinny, Tuesdays, 8pm; Jamie at Home, Thursdays, 8pm, both Channel 4

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