Jamie Oliver: Slaughtering chickens to raise awareness about slaughtering chickens
I’ve never been much of a fan of cooking shows. The chefs talk, they cook, they even sometimes teach poor food safety. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has taken the typical format of a cooking show and added an extra twist; audience members witness the killing of the chicken used in the meal. Animal rights groups and poultry farmers are outraged over his new television show “Jamie’s Fowl Dinners.”
The show serves up a giant dose of shock and awe as chicks are gassed to death and an adult chicken is killed for the meal. Yet throughout the show Oliver insists that he is trying to raise awareness about how chickens are treated in the poultry industry.
"I don't think it's sensational to show people the reality of how chickens live and die at the moment. It may be upsetting for some people but that's how things are. And if seeing some of the practices helps to change the shopping habits of just 5 per cent of people watching, then it will be worth it.”
Channel 4 factual entertainment boss Andrew Mackenzie said: "Jamie's simple message, in quite an overt way, will be: 'If you know what happens to a chicken before arriving on your plate, would you change the way you think about chicken? Would you still eat it?'"
Oliver had criticized Sainbury’s supermarket over its involvement on his show and has since apologized for it. It appears that his main goal to is encourage people to purchase free-range and organic chicken raised in less intensive facilities. However I found that most of the program depicting the slaughter of chickens seems to push people towards vegetarianism rather than purchasing their chickens from another source. You be the judge.
The show serves up a giant dose of shock and awe as chicks are gassed to death and an adult chicken is killed for the meal. Yet throughout the show Oliver insists that he is trying to raise awareness about how chickens are treated in the poultry industry.
"I don't think it's sensational to show people the reality of how chickens live and die at the moment. It may be upsetting for some people but that's how things are. And if seeing some of the practices helps to change the shopping habits of just 5 per cent of people watching, then it will be worth it.”
Channel 4 factual entertainment boss Andrew Mackenzie said: "Jamie's simple message, in quite an overt way, will be: 'If you know what happens to a chicken before arriving on your plate, would you change the way you think about chicken? Would you still eat it?'"
Oliver had criticized Sainbury’s supermarket over its involvement on his show and has since apologized for it. It appears that his main goal to is encourage people to purchase free-range and organic chicken raised in less intensive facilities. However I found that most of the program depicting the slaughter of chickens seems to push people towards vegetarianism rather than purchasing their chickens from another source. You be the judge.
When chefs blog
The Los Angeles Times reports that in the last few months some of the bigger names in food across the country have joined the online chattering class, posting their innermost thoughts, with photos and recipes, just as home cooks have been doing for years.
Do any of them ever write about food safety issues?
Laurent Gras, an Alain Ducasse protégé and former executive chef at the Fifth Floor in San Francisco, is now blogging almost daily at L.2o Blog on the run-up to the opening of his own restaurant in Chicago.
In New York, Michael Laiskonis, the pastry chef at Le Bernardin, started blogging in January, and his lengthy disquisitions on desserts and how he creates them are windows with photos into a wildly creative and contemplative mind.
Other chefs have latched on to the apron strings of established websites -- Traci des Jardins of Jardiniere in San Francisco (right) and Rick Bayless of Topolabampo in Chicago both blog for the Epi-log at Epicurious.
But as Des Jardins notes, keeping up with a blog is the hard part. She has been writing for Epicurious since December and says she is loving the freedom of expression, with editing only to "clean up my bad grammar," but has seen chefs let blogs "get old and stale."
Do any of them ever write about food safety issues?
Laurent Gras, an Alain Ducasse protégé and former executive chef at the Fifth Floor in San Francisco, is now blogging almost daily at L.2o Blog on the run-up to the opening of his own restaurant in Chicago.
In New York, Michael Laiskonis, the pastry chef at Le Bernardin, started blogging in January, and his lengthy disquisitions on desserts and how he creates them are windows with photos into a wildly creative and contemplative mind.
Other chefs have latched on to the apron strings of established websites -- Traci des Jardins of Jardiniere in San Francisco (right) and Rick Bayless of Topolabampo in Chicago both blog for the Epi-log at Epicurious. But as Des Jardins notes, keeping up with a blog is the hard part. She has been writing for Epicurious since December and says she is loving the freedom of expression, with editing only to "clean up my bad grammar," but has seen chefs let blogs "get old and stale."
People don't wash hands on television
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Tracy Hughes has a bone to pick with television shows.People rarely wash their hands
Hughes writes in British Columbia's Salmon Arm Observer that,
on medical dramas, you almost never see hand-washing unless it is a top-notch surgeon scrubbing up before he goes into the operating room and a nurse whispers some tragic secret to him just before he has to complete the first-ever super-duper, resection of the quadruple nerve -ending bypass.
What really gets Hughes is the number of scenes that place characters in washrooms and they don’t wash -- even after they use the toilet.
I agree. When we looked at TV chefs a few years ago, very few washed their hands. There was a food safety infraction on average every four minutes.
