How much reality TV staging are you willing to endure to support a good message? Food Network aired a special last night called The Big Waste. It was an hour long commercial for not wasting food. Four chefs--Bobby Flay, Micheal Symon, Alex Guarneschelli, Anne Burrell--were challenged to create a four course meal for one hundred guests using nothing but food marked as waste. This included apples with small bruises, chickens with broken wings, and returned oysters from a misprinted order.
The chefs traveled everywhere from supermarkets to pick your own produce farms to source ingredients. They had 48 hours and had to account for food safety. A health inspector checked everything that entered the kitchen for temperature and other warning signs. Only one item failed. No produce, seafood, dry good, or raw meat failed the inspection. That means truckloads of food that were rescued from the trash were perfectly safe to eat.
Here's the thing: I buy the produce being removed from the high end markets they went to in NYC. That's a given. That's what happens for that clientele. A bruised apple will not sell. I even buy a high end bakery being required to dump unused flour at the end of the day to ward off bugs.
Where the show seems to stretch reality is at the meat and fish markets. These two shops were restaurant suppliers. They were not corner butchers or fish mongers. The chance that they did not have a buyer for hundreds of pounds of short ribs and marrow bones is preposterous. The cuts they were talking about have, on other Food Network programming, been touted as a secret to great stock or stews or sauces. The butcher might not sell the left over bits at full retail, but that does not mean they are waste.
The fish monger was even more suspect. Someone really over-ordered oysters by two huge potato sacks? A person who put in a specialty order for a whole giant fish only wanted half of it? Unless these shops were only catering to the kind of restaurant that the average person would never be able to afford to eat at, methinks the shop owners were given a heads up that the Food Network was working on a show about waste.
Furthermore, the chances that high end ingredients like halal poultry and offal going in the trash is unlikely. These products were "waste" in that they weren't going to be sold in that form. There is no reason to believe the unwanted food wasn't being sold at a loss to other companies that would process them. Seeing the chickens and seafood in perfectly iced coolers was a dead giveaway. These products weren't going into black bags for trash pickup. They just weren't being sold in their original form.
The educational content on food waste was fantastic. Watching not one but four well-known Food Network personalities explain specifically why a tomato with a crack in it was perfectly edible (that means the skin split because the tomato grew too fast and would be full of flavor) or how the end cut of a big piece of prosciutto would make a great broth was eye opening. Somehow, American culture has reached such a level of waste production that we believe a less than beautiful carrot--peel on--couldn't possibly be edible.
This is a case of staged reality programming that works. The stuff that might have been staged was necessary to sell the show. Do we really believe that a friend of a friend of Anne Burrell is a freegan who only goes to high end farmer's markets? And that the trash pickup on the street paused while the two of them pawed through bags for impeccable swiss chard and avocados?
But the scene got you thinking. Some grocery stores are willing to put less than perfect produce in packages on a sale rack. They'll call them soup mixes or remainders and give you one last day to pick them up. It might not be the prettiest looking turnip, but chances are it's perfectly good to eat. The same applies to a lot of food some people wouldn't think twice about.
However, those stores are not the norm. Most are willing to dump produce and food products they aren't allowed to donate to food shelters. It's cheaper to cut their losses than take up shelf space with a less than perfect bunch of grapes. It's a sad state America is in. Children go hungry every night in this country but people won't buy a carrot because the peel is dirty?
The goal of The Big Waste was to get the viewer thinking. It succeeded in that. The reality TV manipulation was in full effect, but the presentation of the message--clarity, visual power, applicability to everyday life--worked. That makes the special successful.
Thoughts? Love to hear them.
