Television
Viewer's digest
Martyn Harris
0 nce in America I read a newspaper report about an ant-eating contest, the winner of which had eaten 3,000 ants in the prescribed time, which was five minutes, I believe. The runner-up, on the other hand, ate only two, which he first had to cut up into tiny pieces and douse in tomato ketchup. The report seemed to think this was disgraceful and unsporting, but my sympathy was with the loser. You can say what you like about the arbitrary nature of food taboos, but to force yourself to eat disgusting food has to be one of the silliest forms of macho display. In Arena's Food Night (BBC 2, 8.15 p.m., Saturday) a collection of would-be sophisticates, in the setting of a Peter Greenaway stately home, were being very cool and rational about eating mealworm canapes and wasp grubs on toast. A dinner-jacketed entomologist called Dick Vane Wright confidently crunched whole locusts to camera, but I was certain he was only showing off. The tension was there in his neck muscles and blink rate and lofty laughter. His companion, a down-to-earth female weightlifter, was sticking sensibly to the bread rolls. Helen Chadwick the artist talked boldly about eating placentas, which is another urban myth, I'm sure. A female explorer mentioned a tribe somewhere who ate pieces of diseased relatives, which was just the same as vaccinations really. Except that eating a rotten relative is disgusting, and it doesn't work, and it is liable to poison you. On the whole I thought the idea of devoting a television evening to food was excellent, allowing plenty of time for dig- ression into culinary arcana. Nice to learn for instance that carrots have been special- ly bred with blunt ends to avoid piercing the plastic bags in supermarkets; or to hear about the Italian who was prosecuted for making parmesan out of grated umbrella handles. And I was charmed to discover that Murraymints were kosher, while Nut- talls Super Strong Mints were not. This knowledge was benefit of 'Consulting Kosher Detective John Meyer' who was currently investigating the precise status of Southern Comfort liqueur (it was OK). Lady Jakobovits was shown bustling about her kosher kitchen, or rather two kitchens, because one was devoted to milk and the other to meat. Depending on where it lived, this cleaver was 'milky' and that teapot was 'meaty'. Milky and meaty items could not share the same oven or even sink, which led me to wonder if Lady Jakobovits herself could convey pollution from milky kitchen to meaty, or whether indeed she had her own kosher status. If she did I would suspect it was meaty.
All of this was entertaining and informa- tive, but not argumentative, unless you counted the occasional pious nod in the direction of hunger and fasting. In 1985 the United States sent $500 million to Ethiopia and spent $5,000 million on dieting. Fast- ing is supposed to be essentially spiritual, but even this act could contain the seeds of self-indulgence — as with the performance artist starving himself for ten days at the Tate Gallery.
The really queasy programme was The Last Supper, a look at the meals requested by condemned men down the ages, ending in the Louisiana State Penitentiary where, with the usual breathtaking openness of American public life, they invited the cameras right down Death Row. Favourite meals here seemed to be cheeseburgers with extra cheese and pizza with extra peperoni. One condemned man had re- quested two packets of Kelloggs Frosties, which should have been ludicrous, but instead was terribly poignant. Invited to laugh at the poverty of aspiration, one was struck instead by the sadness of such yearning for the ordinary, in the face of the impending extraordinary.
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