Jamie Oliver Saves Our Bacon
Channel 4's Great British Food Season Continues
In the last 10 years the UK’s pork breeding herd has halved. Consumers and supermarkets demand low prices, so UK farmers are losing out as more and more pork is imported from the continent, where more intensive farming methods are used. Government restrictions mean farmers cannot use mass production methods similar to those for battery hens, but the same government allows imports of pigs reared precisely this way.
Once again Jamie Oliver is in crusade mode, and this 90-minute programme highlights the problems pig farmers face, and how consumers can help buy choosing to buy British pork rather than continental. As with his School Dinners campaign, Jamie feels the government is not doing enough to support farmers or to make sure shoppers have the option to buy UK products at a reasonable price without the suppliers making a loss.
UK Farmers Can’t Compete On Price
Covering the life of a pig literally from birth the death (the latter is not for the squeamish), with insemination, tail docking and castration in between, Jamie pulls no punches in demonstrating the life of the typical British pig. He is prevented from visiting a farm in Denmark which uses rearing methods banned in the UK; instead the PR officer of a Danish bacon firm wants him to see an “acceptable” farm which produces pork to UK standards. What do they have to hide?
Other items on the show, however, appear to have been inserted to stretch it to an hour and a half. Cute clips of piglets behaving like pet dogs or playing the keyboard to emphasise their intelligence add little, and the Big Brother take-off, “Pig Brother Stall Mates”, merely dumbs down an issue obviously close to Jamie’s heart. As with his Christmas special, Jamie feels he must drag on a “celebrity mate”, in this case Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Joanna Lumley, to make the cause more appealing. Rather than impressing the viewer, the two merely appear to be leaping on an opportune bandwagon.
Clear Labelling Is Crucial
What Jamie does best, of course, is cook, and he provides credit-crunch-friendly recipes using cheaper cuts of meat such as pork belly, shoulder and neck fillet, ably assisted by one of his students from the Ministry of Food series. A demonstration of how misleading food labels can be, confusing shoppers who cannot tell where the meat comes from, is a well-aimed prod at supermarkets to promote UK pork.
Despite the padding, Jamie Saves Our Bacon is yet another example of Jamie Oliver taking on a cause others prefer to ignore. Love him or loathe him, at least he uses his celebrity status for worthwhile projects, not just to open yet another restaurant ordinary people can’t possibly afford. And barely an F-word in the whole show – Gordon Ramsay take note!
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