No, you don't have gigantism. The world really is getting smaller.
Local, in food sourcing terms, used to mean 30 miles. That's changed after Ten Mile Menu (ITV 1, weekdays, 2pm): not a documentary about what Fern Britton had for breakfast before her gastric band was fitted, but one of those competitive cooking set-tos that fill daytime TV schedules like butter clogs arteries.
The twist: all the food was sourced within a 10-mile radius, giving the pairings of TV chefs and low-wattage celebs the chance to swap strained banter with banjo-fingering rednecks.
Ground zero was Stroud, home of Gloucester cheeses both single and double. From that epicurean epicentre went teams headed by Aldo Zilli and Jo Pratt, snuffling gamely for organic celeriac and still-warm donkey veal.
As Jerry Garcia used to say, everyone should know a good mushroom man. If you're ever near Stroud look up Rupert, a foraging former tramp who had got back on his feet by peddling high-end fungi he found in the woods (mainly to visiting celebrity cooks, presumably).
Dressed like an undercover copper impersonating an eco-warrior, he flummoxed Zilli with an unsightly array of spores and growths such as the mighty beefsteak mushroom, which bleeds like meat, tastes like meat and, like the finest free-range squirrel, grows on rural oak trees. Now living the suburban dream with wife, two kids and a roof over his head, Rupert told the sort of heartwarming tale that will all but disappear if the Tories press on with their plans to turn homeless people into umbrella stands for the rich.
Sadly there was too much of the charisma-free 'stars' and too little from Rupert and the region's other small-time suppliers, like the meat-fatigued butcher who'd lost count of how many decades he'd spent sawing pigs into bits. But the contest was secondary to the message, increasingly pushed by the multiples' marketing goons, that local is best.
Indeed, when your audience is primarily work-shy folk in tracksuits who think getting off the sofa twice a day is an achievement, giving them a 10-mile radius to source their next fistful of frozen pizza seems unnecessarily generous.
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Local, in food sourcing terms, used to mean 30 miles. That's changed after Ten Mile Menu (ITV 1, weekdays, 2pm): not a documentary about what Fern Britton had for breakfast before her gastric band was fitted, but one of those competitive cooking set-tos that fill daytime TV schedules like butter clogs arteries.
The twist: all the food was sourced within a 10-mile radius, giving the pairings of TV chefs and low-wattage celebs the chance to swap strained banter with banjo-fingering rednecks.
Ground zero was Stroud, home of Gloucester cheeses both single and double. From that epicurean epicentre went teams headed by Aldo Zilli and Jo Pratt, snuffling gamely for organic celeriac and still-warm donkey veal.
As Jerry Garcia used to say, everyone should know a good mushroom man. If you're ever near Stroud look up Rupert, a foraging former tramp who had got back on his feet by peddling high-end fungi he found in the woods (mainly to visiting celebrity cooks, presumably).
Dressed like an undercover copper impersonating an eco-warrior, he flummoxed Zilli with an unsightly array of spores and growths such as the mighty beefsteak mushroom, which bleeds like meat, tastes like meat and, like the finest free-range squirrel, grows on rural oak trees. Now living the suburban dream with wife, two kids and a roof over his head, Rupert told the sort of heartwarming tale that will all but disappear if the Tories press on with their plans to turn homeless people into umbrella stands for the rich.
Sadly there was too much of the charisma-free 'stars' and too little from Rupert and the region's other small-time suppliers, like the meat-fatigued butcher who'd lost count of how many decades he'd spent sawing pigs into bits. But the contest was secondary to the message, increasingly pushed by the multiples' marketing goons, that local is best.
Indeed, when your audience is primarily work-shy folk in tracksuits who think getting off the sofa twice a day is an achievement, giving them a 10-mile radius to source their next fistful of frozen pizza seems unnecessarily generous.
More from this column
![ASDA_LUX_XMAS_MINCE_PIES_VIS_01[61][86]](https://dmrqkbkq8el9i.cloudfront.net/Pictures/380x253/0/1/0/345010_asda_lux_xmas_mince_pies_vis_016186_413913.jpg)
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