TVScope: Food is supposed to be nutritious. It helps so much if it also comes with the right mix of humour, pertinent information and good company. Full on Food, BBC Television's lavish and modern series (an hour long!), hits the spot.
Firstly meet the team who appear on a grand stage before a responsive audience. Roxy Beaujolais, landlady extraordinaire, she relishes cooking simple, divine fare for her punters coming to her pub. She's an antidote to packaged ready meals and claims she can have a more sumptuous offering on the plate before those three minutes in the microwave. Her trademark saying: "Food prepared by others is always a sort of journey, but usually - let's face it - we favour a gastronomic trip just down to the corner rather than to the limits of imagination."
Next up is Stefan Gates, a self-styled epicurean desperado. He loves wild culinary quests, weird foods and hardcore feasting. Last week, he went diving for fresh scallops off Guernsey. The hand-picked variety are more delicious than the dredged version, and healthier too - the shellfish are less stressed and come with less sand/silt, and certainly better than the frozen/preserved lot to be found in many fishmongers. For Stefan, man with mission who likes to source his own food, there was success on a plate. In this case, he says "raw with sauce" is the only way to consume them. Not for me in this instance Gatsey but I sure got the message.
The final team member is Richard Johnson, food and drink columnist for the Independent and Guardian. His recipe for culinary success: "Pretend to be a restaurant critic by taking notes when eating out. You'll always get better service." But when he doesn't get good service, or food or wine, he likes to complain - and thinks he's rather good at it. He took in a trip to the awesome Fat Duck restaurant run by Heston Blumenthal (blessed with three Michelin stars) in Berkshire. Here is a man working at the outer limits of gastronomy; "playing with our prejudices about food" - hence, snail porridge and smoked bacon and egg ice-cream. We entered his adjoining science laboratory and tasting room, where he conducted a simple lesson on the crunch in eating a raw carrot. It's simple really, the more crunch, the fresher the food seems. "Hearing is the forgotten sense in eating," he declares. He is toying with the idea of giving his dining guests headphones.
In between the excursions, the viewer is treated to five dishes and an eclectic news briefing - on this occasion, concentrated on chewing gum.
But the most interesting segment was on the British £1.9 billion ready meal industry, traditionally the stuff of mechanically recovered meat, E numbers, salt and fat (lots of lard).
With scepticism, the boys set about tasting some of the latest products embracing international cuisine. In contrast to their disgust at lardy lasagnes and cottage pies (still out there, alas), they are impressed by the creations of ASDA ready meal development unit. Ready meals are "not the soup of chemicals they once were". And yes, Full on Food passed the tasting cliché test. There was no mention of the awful "tasty" and only one "hmmm" in response to a completed dish. Phew, another "hmmm" and we would have found against Full on Food, albeit on a technicality.
