Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall thinks it’s time we all went veggie (River Cottage Veg; Channel 4, Sunday). Coming from a man whose favourite dish is human placenta marinaded in fruit-bat extract, who slaughters his own pigs with a pocket knife and dances naked in their gore as he turns them into 2,058 varieties of artisanal black pudding, and who recently confessed he wouldn’t mind eating the odd puppy if push came to shove, I suppose this is something we should take quite seriously.
Personally, I feel betrayed. As betrayed as I felt all those years ago when my most heavy-duty smoking friend Ewen gave up fags, which was so unfair because I’d been relying on him to die of lung cancer, not me. ‘Et tu, Hugh?’ it made me think. Because I like my meat, an awful lot. Not only does it taste good but it’s also the thing that has made us great. If it hadn’t been for meat, we would probably never have discovered fire. And it was that fire/meat combo which gave us the brainpower to become the dominant species we are today. Otherwise just imagine what might have happened: maybe we’d now be governed by sheep or lemmings or other similarly brain-dead herbivores. Imagine!
Anyway, Hugh’s vegetarian adventure started off quite poorly, I thought. He has many fine qualities, does Hugh, but his tendency to pontificate in that mannered, up-and-down trademark TV voice of his is not one of them. Pontification is not in and of itself a bad thing: I do it all the time. But for it not to be off-putting, there needs to be at least a hint of a suspicion that the pontificator is slyly, engagingly aware of his own fallibility and absurdity. Success has killed that in Hugh, as of course it does in everyone.
Consider the bacon sandwich stunt. Hugh bids his farewell to meat — his carnevale — by frying some of his best home-cured bacon and putting it between two slabs of fantastic-looking sourdough bread, slathered with Riverside Cottage (TM) organic über-butter, hand-churned at dawn by nubile Dorset maidens with accents just like the sexy rabbit in the Cadbury’s Caramel ad.
You think he’s going to eat it. But then he changes his mind and gives it to his gardeners instead. If he’s going to go veggie, he should do so in a positive frame of mind rather than dwelling miserably on what he’s about to lose, he declares. But though I can see that trope working, just about, in print, on film it looked stagey, portentous and a bit pompous.
Then it got even worse. If Jamie were doing a series on vegetables, it would be called Jamie’s Vegetables, with lots and lots of delicious, practical recipes involving vegetables. For Hugh, though, it has to have a sociopolitical edge. So, next thing we know we’re being treated to a homily on the increasing amount of land being taken up to feed a growing world population of carnivores.
Well, there’s a solution to that. It’s called supply and demand. If meat grows more expensive we’ll eat less of it. Or farmers will find a way of producing more of it to satisfy increased demand, perhaps — if we’re lucky — using some of the vast acreage of landmass currently being squandered on biofuels.
But Hugh, well knowing his middle-class audience’s self-flagellating instincts, doesn’t give us that option. No, his preferred solution is that we all give serious thought to renouncing meat: and look, let’s go for a traipse round my marvellous Dorsetshire garden, lovingly tended by my personable, attractive, bacon-sandwich-eating gardeners, to see just how easy it is to have simple, honest, wholesome vegetables grown for you by professionals on your private estate. Oh, and by the way, did I mention how yummy our alpine strawberries are too?
Next, having run up some sort of fresh, green soup with fresh green garden stuff in it — and made extravagant ‘Mmm’ noises to show just how delicious meat-free food can be — off Hugh goes up London way to meet a whole family of vegetarians to discover how normal and happy and glowing with health they all are.
It helps that one of them is a brilliant Kiwi chef with the time and the inclination (and the career structure) to rustle up the most extravagantly wonderful, zingy vegetarian dishes. Dishes, you know, with all sorts of readily available ingredients like pomello and betel leaves; stuff you’ll have plenty of time to spend tracking down now that you no longer have to queue for that pesky butcher; dishes that make you go ‘Wow!’
Look, Hugh, with respect, I think we knew this. Our problem with vegetarian cuisine is not that we think it’s resolutely boring. Our problem is that the trouble required to make it interesting is more than most of us can bear. Cooking well without meat is not impossible; only like trying to beat France at rugby minus one player after your captain has been sent off in the 18th minute.
Still, nice recipes as ever. Very charmingly done and pretty to look at. And I do like the new short haircut.
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