If you have ever met me or read my articles of late, you'll know that I am a person of simple tastes. I am BBC3 rather than BBC4, Cosmopolitan magazine rather than War and Peace, tinned ravioli with chedar over gourmet cuisine. I am cheap, I am easy to please, and I am proud of it.
However, I do occasionally like to pretend that I'm far more refined than I really am, so I make an attempt to watch something that can improve my life. This generally falls in the realm of the television cooking show; trying to impress upon you that you too can cook like this without the team of home economists that are present on every episode.
My favourite television chef was always Nigella Lawson, unapologetically pouring butter and double cream into the most mundane of recipes. Nigella would stand there slobbering all over herself, making the most delicious looking food which you knew was totally out of your price range, and yet you knew that you would sell your own kidneys and mother if you had the chance to have her larder and look like her. As much as I know I should hate her, I just can't do it.
However, food shows have gotten far more bizarre since Nigella first sashayed onto our screens in 2000.
Perhaps the best example of this is the legendary Man v Food, which has been shown on the Good Food and Dave channels. In every episode, the dashing Adam Richman takes it upon himself to travel around America, eating everything that comes across his path. The second part of every episode has Richman undertaking a food challenge, whereby he must either consume something particularly spicy, or something incredibly big that has usually been deep fried, and then smothered in low quality cheese, in its entirety.
By completing each task, he usually racks up a new picture of himself hung up on the wall of the establishment in which he succeeds at getting closer to the verge of type 2 disabetes. Previous challenges have included burgers the size of full-term babies and chicken wings so spicy that his entire face resembled a puffer fish having an asthma attack after only one bite.
Man v Food is everything that is wrong with the world - it is selfish, self-serving gluttony. It attemps to be funny when it really isn't, and it glorifies binge eating as though it's perfectly natural to regularly shove a lorry load of beef down your intestines. Man v Food is to the food world what transporting pandas to Scotland and expecting them to mate in front of everyone watching is to nature - theoretically sweet, but in reality, hideously disgusting and just plain wrong. Yet for some reason, I still love it. I'm ashamed of myself.
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