Food Unwrapped - C4 Mondays 8:30pm
degsyhufc
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http://www.channel4.com/programmes/food-unwrapped
The food and science series that travels the world to explore the industry secrets behind our favourite produce
Series Summary
Food Unwrapped explores how our food is really made and the industry secrets behind our favourite produce. Reporters Matt Tebbutt, James Watt, Martin Dickie and Kate Quilton travel the globe to discover just how the food we love is mass produced. The series contacts supermarkets and producers with simple questions about the food we buy: What's the wax on my lemons?; What are the bacteria in my Probiotics?; What is formed ham?
If they can't explain it, the gang of hungry detectives stop at nothing to find out, travelling to the food producers who supply the supermarkets to investigate, from Liverpool to Swaziland, and Thailand to Spain. Taking the cameras behind the doors of factories worldwide, the inquisitive food lovers meet food technicians, scientists, factory owners, growers and producers in order to reveal weird and wonderful facts we never knew about our food.
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Comments
I used to work in a meat factory when i was younger and it put me off eating A LOT of stuff.
The original bacterium might have been from a human but it has been replicated exponentially since so the new bacteria isn't. Or just buy non-probiotic, they are kind of a marketing scam anyway.
Probably because it's not 100% fat-free - usually it's something like 0.1grams of fat per 100g of Yoghurt. So technically it shouldn't even be fat-free if we're being picky .
Why?
If it's because the source of some of the bacteria came from faeces then that is really silly. Every day you will swallow faecal bacteria that have come directly from faeces rather than their ancestors.
Of course if it was because you don't like all the pus and other nasties in cows milk that would be understandable but they didn't mention those in the programme.
To me the show was a mix of a previous C4 food show called Food: What goes in your basket? and BBC's Food Factory.
Agreed. Absolutely nothing original about it at all.
(Coming soon on C4: "Obesity - The Truth")
The tour around the formed ham factory was quite interesting.
Unfortunately the pointless Scotish blokes let the show down.
And i'm not sure about some of the other trips.
Do you really have to go over to Spain to ask a lemon grower why there is wax on lemons when his reply is "I don't know. We don't add wax. They do that at the warehouse".
Hmmm.... I think a phone call may have been cheaper :rolleyes:
and speading £50 on ham for a 'scientific taste test' of eating 10 slices at a time :yawn:
The rest is just unneeded filler.
Jimmy's Food Factory and Gastronuts were alot more entertaining.
A tour round a doner kebab factory
75% of fresh oysters straight out of the sea have traces of norovirus. This is why they should be purified.
I'm sure Heston is well aware of this now
Whilst aspects of this programme might be a bit too simple, or seem too much like 'stating the obvious', covering things we think surely anyone with common sense should be able to work out for themselves, sadly too many people just shovel the cheapest, easiest thing in their shopping trolley (owned by their profit-driven supermarket) and either turn a blind eye to, or don't have a clue to start with about the origins of their food or its nutritional value. It always makes me laugh that the customer service 'helplines' often have no idea about the product their paid to answer questions about. Granted, most customers don't phone up and question a manufacturer about whether or not there is a fish called 'scampi', or how much beef is in a beef stock cube, but that's no excuse for some of the embarrassingly awful answers we've heard to fairly simple questions! I wonder if any of the companies will improve their staff training as a result? Probably not...
Even if you do have a bit (or more than a bit) of a clue, some of the features in the series have been interesting. For example, I'd always assumed that the iron they used to fortify cereal with was similar to the liquid iron supplement you can get in health food shops to get your blood count up a bit if you're anaemic (it looks, and tastes, a little like blood :eek:) but I'd never considered they put powdered 'food grade' iron filings in it - I mean, who takes a magnet to their cornflakes?!
Programmes like this might be a good way of getting children to take more interest - to believe, even - about what's in some of their favourite processed foods without it sounding like mum nagging them not to eat it with phrases such as "I'm not buying that for you, it's rubbish..." or "No I can't prove it's full of yucky stuff, it just is..."! Critics might say that it appears to be aimed at children to start with, but unfortunately many parents really do have no idea, much less care, what they're feeding their children as long as it's quick and cheap, so maybe there is a place for attention-grabbing, gimicky programming such as this if it's what's needed?
I cook from scratch every day because I love cooking and have the time to do so. With food you learn by experience, and through experience have learned (in a very non-scientific way!) to be fairly sensible and knowledgeable when it comes to understanding the machinations behind processed food, and I buy as little of it as possible. I suppose from that point of view, programmes like this have little 'shock value' to me, but it doesn't stop me watching it! I'm always happy to learn new snippets of information (like the iron in the Cornflakes story) and if nothing else it will make for an interesting "Did you know...?" trivia question the next time breakfast cereal comes up for discussion!
What???: eek:
I hate these scare monger shows. You would not eat or drink anything if you knew what went on ..or breathe air
Did they show you what a Doner looks like before they killed it? :cool:
Interesting article here about the use of iron in cereals: http://blog.afoodlyaffair.com/2011/08/07/cereal-fillers/
Presumably they have to pitch it at that level to sell it to the TV executives?
Thanks for that, very interesting.
I'm thinking if Kelloggs advertised the fact and put a free gift magnet in every packet for the kids to play with sales would increase, but countered by a decrease when others were somewhat put off by the revelation..
Personally I would not have believed it without the demo.