I have a modest proposal to make – one that will, I hope, alleviate the terrible suffering in this benighted land. I refer, of course, to the plethora of cookery programmes cluttering up the airwaves. And not just full-blown competitive ones like MasterChef or the Great British Bake Off – no fifth-rate local radio station, or 24-hour news channel is without its gastronomical guru, pushing some noshy nostrum or other at the overweight listeners and obese viewers at home.
How did this happen? How did we go from being a famously philistine nation when it comes to food, to this mad collective obsession with what we put in our mouths? A transformation that has occurred at exactly the same time as the poor have got poorer and fatter on a diet of factory-produced unsaturated fats; while the rich have got richer and leaner on 128-day-aged Wagyu beef, from cattle raised on human breast milk and educated at Eton.
I exaggerate – but not much, and if I weren’t intent on attacking the whole mad Lazy-Susan-go-round, I might well pitch an idea for my own cookery show, to be called The Great British Foodbank Challenge, in which contestants have only to make a meal fit for… Ooh, I dunno – maybe the King; after all, he’s known to be a good sport, who likes his chow, and who’ll be only too happy to feast on the leftovers and discards of our multi-billion-pound processed food industry.
But the monarchy is really only a synecdoche of the country at large in this respect: jerks who imagine that they’re eliminating the oppression and exploitation experienced by generations of African-Caribbean people by… inviting Floella Benjamin to the coronation and eating some jerk chicken. Just as the British bourgeoisie, come the 1990s and the Blair regime, substituted eating for any other means of cultural appreciation (why struggle through Bocaccio when you can eat some focaccia?); so, now, anyone who isn’t actively starving believes they can do the same thing.
We’ve become a nation of the infantile, putting whatever we can in our mouths, whenever we want it – until, that is, we reach our second childhood and become incontinent at the other end. There’s only one solution to this cultural conundrum – one that will reestablish gastronomy as the serious matter of survival it is – and that’s to eat Gregg Wallace.
Obviously, one bald and bombastic buffet-monger – newly flavour of the month for his British Miracle Meat fake documentary – is insufficient to feed an entire nation. But my proposal is that MasterChef – the very title of which has a Darwinian ring – becomes a true survival of the fittest, with the losers of each successive round being butchered, cooked, and eaten by the winners. An entertainment format that will reach its apotheosis when the anointed MasterChef of the year gets to eat Wallace himself, thereby putting an end to the entire ghastly farrago.
No more will we have to watch Wallace and his equally annoying co-presenter chivvy and belittle the aspirant chefs – no longer will we have to hear him say “flavours”, with that painful stress on the first syllable, so it sounds like “flayvours”; because at last, like some Aztec captive, Wallace will be flayed himself, while his vanquisher gets to drink his blood from an attractive cup fashioned from the dead presenter’s skull.
And let’s please not stop there – imagine a Britain without Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, rid of Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood, devoid of Rick Stein and Heston bloody Blumenthal. Obviously, this is an older and gamier generation of TV chefs – but once they’ve been well hung, cut down and fricasseed, we can move on to the juicier, younger ones.
If the idea strikes you as bizarre – and possibly even disgusting – I ask you to consider this: Why are so many of these TV cookery shows staged in sequestered locations, such as tents in the middle of fields, or strange warehouses in the derelict hinterlands of our ageing cities? Surely, it’s because their producers – at an unconscious level – have been intent on building death camps and extermination facilities all along.
Who can blame them? I cannot be alone in wanting to spatchcock the Hairy Bikers and serve them in an herby crust of their own… hair; neither can my desire to make tournedos out of John Torode be entirely alien to you, dear and sensitive reader. And of course, by eliminating Britain of its posturing, pretentious cooks, and returning it to an era of Lyons Corner Houses, Woolton pie and semolina, we will, once more, be properly distinguishing ourselves from those ghastly gourmets, the French.
Remember: Brexit means “inedible” – and don’t you forget it.
