a very ish must see TV viewing - Jimmy on the BBC

[southeast-isher]

anyone else see Jimmy doing Crop to the Shop Supermarket Secrets tonight? I love all his programmes and enjoyed this especially.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... t_Secrets/

[snapdragon]

Jimmy who?

[MKG]

You must have seen the bits I didn't watch. All I could see was a blatant attempt to justify supermarket buying policies - ironic coming from him! I switched him off just after he said that it was OK to use jet aircraft to fly beans from Kenya to the UK because the Kenyan farmers were carbon-neutral, so that cancelled out the flying. Still, a mathematician he never was. Or did I switch off after I saw him telling us how wonderful Dutch mass-grown veggies were? Can't remember.

I met him at a food fair once - he's a nice bloke. But, like his maths, his food knowledge is a little lacking (and his sausages were bloody awful!).

Mike

[southeast-isher]

Alright Mike, i saw the show completely different - i saw it as him investigating the extreme lengths gone to in order to provide us with out of season goods... he had to seem impressed to the people in order for them to allow him to film what they do but the commentary i thought really spoke about what a waste of energy and resources it all is... and he said many times how he still believed in producing locally in season goods for a local market. Ludicrous how those beans were just wasted just because they were bent even though they were just as tasty as the others.

[Annpan]

I didn't see this show but I watched some of Jimmy's food factory shows and I found them annoyingly unbiased. He went through the mechanics of how food is produced without showing disgust at the way that energy is wasted and most of what we eat (we as a nation) is rubbish...

eg... taking the wheat germ out to make a corn flake, then spraying a manmade concoction of vitamins and iron back onto the corn flake ... what a waste of energy and resources.

I guess he is informing the masses, who don't want to be preached to, so for that it is good... and it is always good to know where your food comes from.

I just want to see someone angry about the process and the waste, and at the multi-nationals and supermarkets.... and convince people that real local food is better.

[southeast-isher]

I guess he is informing the masses, who don't want to be preached to, so for that it is good... and it is always good to know where your food comes from.

I just want to see someone angry about the process and the waste, and at the multi-nationals and supermarkets.... and convince people that real local food is better.

That is why i thought it was good, becaujse it is accessible to the masses on prime time tv showing what many people take for granted - i felt his approach right as if he was angry people may seem him as sanctimonious or preachy in some way and switch off.

I'm sorry but i've gotta stick up for Jimmy!

[Annpan]

You're right.

I guess as someone who is convinced that we (as a nation) are going about food production and consumption all wrong, I like to see people agree with me But of course it is better not to have him preaching, because people would just switch off. Maybe they found there was a bit of a backfire against Jamie Oliver's school dinners, I guess he could be seen as sanctimonious.
But I agree with you, Jimmy/the production team are doing it the right way..... just not for me.

[southeast-isher]

I would love to see some stricter laws brought in to stop this madness but what can be done?!

[bonniethomas06]

I agree - not every documentary on television should have a ragingly obvious bias. The strength of this programme was in it's evenhandedness. After all, surely a documentary should inform, before anything else?

As much as I absolutely ABHOR most of the production methods and transit methods he showed (c'mon - fish that is frozen to last 18 months?! WTF?!), I thought it was interesting to see another dynamic to the arguement - that suddenly ceasing trading with Kenya, although better for the environment, would cause human suffering.

And I cringe to think how I have (in the past- pre-ish) bought products from Amsterdam on the basis that they are closer - and therefore better, than Kenya!

I think it tought us to look a little more closely into the matter, rather than reject all of it out of hand. And one hopes that people would come to their own conclusions as to the madness of it all, on a balanced consideration of all of the facts - far more powerful way of getting the message to hit home.

Gosh what a long email, sorry! Rant over, and anyway, I will ALWAYS grow my own, whatever!

[southeast-isher]

Jimmy who?

a tv farmer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Doherty_%28farmer%29

[southeast-isher]

Yes Bonnie. On the subject of the food produced in Kenya - wouldn't it be better if they produced it for their own people locally? (as Jimmy hinted at)

[southeast-isher]

I think it tought us to look a little more closely into the matter, rather than reject all of it out of hand. And one hopes that people would come to their own conclusions as to the madness of it all, on a balanced consideration of all of the facts - far more powerful way of getting the message to hit home.

That's exactly how i feel but couldn't articulate it! thank you.

[theabsinthefairy]

Sorry - all I saw was a one hour piece of propaganda obviously sponsored by Waitrose.

[grahamhobbs]

I'm fed up with paying celebrities to visit places all round the globe, however I thought this series very interesting. Most people are generally so unaware how our food is produced, so it is good to see a real discussion about agriculture and food production, how it is a global market and what the developments and trends are.

No Jimmy wasn't angry about the stupidity (criminality) of the system, the waste of resources involved, but he did question much of it and he showed that this agriculture was the logic of the market system. The rich can buy 'perfect' beans and out of season potatoes transported from the other side of the world and the poor are thankful to recieve a wage.

This was my biggest concern, that somehow buying this food from the poor of Africa was somehow helping them, giving them money that if they grew their own food they wouldn't get. What wasn't highlighted was that their land and resources are slowly being expropriated by foreign investors and wealthy local farmers.

There was another, much harder hitting, programme a while back that showed the results of this system, the way the workers are reduced to absolute wage slaves, their families destroyed, etc, in for instance the production of prawns for the 'West' in South-East Asia.

[Jandra]

Warning: rant. Skip if you want to.

I think I saw 3 episodes of this show and I enjoyed it tremendously. I can make my own judgements about what I see and I thank Jimmy Doherty for not deciding for me what is and isn't acceptable. Some of it made my stomach turn, but I quite liked the farmer who moved his cows every day to a new field and after 4 days put his mega-chicken-tractor on the used field to clean up after the cows, eating all the parasite eggs and scratching in the dung to spread it around. And the lady scientist who propagates and sells disease free banana plants so that local farmers increase thier yields tremendously.

I believe that a lot of what many people generally believe is 'green' just blatantly isn't. baking my own bread, I use much more electricity/resources than buying it from the store, even if you factor in transport and packaging. There's much energy and resources to be gained by mass producing. The villages who used communal ovens to collectively bake their bread had that figured out already and were taking the first steps towards where we are now.

Heating/cooking on wood is supposed to be green, but personally I doubt it. It's only renewable if you know for sure that the wood you're getting is from carefully managed woodlands. After all we (humans) have deforested large areas in prehistoric times. We could never all switch to wood burning for heating and cooking, for pretty soon there wouldn't be a tree to be found. So how sustainable is it? And the dust/fine particle problem is not to be ignored.

Wood-burning stoves have been a popular heating source for decades. Unfortunately, wood-burning stoves can emit substantial quantities of pollutants to outdoor and indoor air. Among the pollutants are: chlorinated dioxin, carbon monoxide, methane, volatile organic compounds (VOC), nitrogen oxides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), and fine particulate matter (PM10, PM2.5, fine and ultra fine particles). Recent studies indicate that the use of wood-burning stoves for heating of dwellings is one of the important outdoor particle sources [Glasius et al. 2004] in residential district in Denmark. This has resulted in an increase in public exposure to indoor and outdoor wood smoke related pollutants, which has prompted widespread concern about the adverse human health consequences that may be associated with wood smoke exposure.

Air pollution is a major aggravation of respiratory symptoms and disease. Effects are decreases in pulmonary function and evidence of inflammation as well as suggestions of increases in chronic respiratory disease. Orozco-Levi et al. (2006) showed strong association between wood smoke exposure and obstructive pulmonary disease. Several studies have shown that especially the small particles, has an effect on airways, and that asthmatic subjects may be the group at greatest risk from air pollutants. The awareness of the impact of airborne particles, particularly fine and ultra fine particles, on health is growing. In recent years, exposure to fine and ultra fine airborne particles has been identified as an important factor affecting human health [Seaton et al., 1995; Schwartz et al., 1996; Oberdörster et al., 1994; Alvin et al., 2000].

And this is just the health effect, without discussing the effects of extra particles in the atmosphere. I'm quite sure that if we used more solar collectors for warm water and, where feasible, heating, then supplemented that with natural gas for cooking or electricity from renewable resources, we'd be better off. That'd make the natural gas supply last much longer, so in the mean time we can think of other solutions.

Growing you own veg can be sustainable, but how many of us buy soil improvers (compost, manure, lime, organic pellet this or that) in plastic bags? I do! Good grief, if I think of all the stuff I have bought to be gardening (25 different tools, bean poles, propagators, poly tunnel, netting, horticultural fleece, I have a ton of flower pots, kneel pads, gloves, slug traps, and all the stuff I bought for canning and preserving the harvest) I truly can't imagine it is sustainable. I know I reuse the flower pots, canning jars and the tools last a long time, but I wouldn't have needed all this 'stuff' if I didn't grow my own.

I've long since cured myself from the illusion that I am sustainable; more difficult was the realisation that to be sustainable I'd need to live at a subsistence level and I am just not prepared to do that. I want a warm house, good food (yes, some meat too), cats (very unsustainable), a car and cow manure in a plastic bag. I will use lots of energy and resources growing and preserving my own harvest and baking my own bread. I'll do a bit to make me feel better about it: insulate the house, take the bike when I can, turn out the lights, perhaps get solar collectors or PV panels, not fly to tropical destinations twice a year, and that helps.

So, I got carried away quite a bit. Apologies. But returning to the subject: I think that it is very good for a programme that shows how in different part of the world, different people do agriculture. And I liked the fact that Doherty showed respect for all the interviewed farmers and tried to look at it from a positive side, even if he made it clear to the viewer that he wouldn't choose to do it their way.

Jandra