Why MasterChef Australia made me cringe!

 

Follow greenhumour.com for some sensible stuff

I decided to watch Masterchef Australia and discover what the world has been raving about for the past 11 years. To keep up with the times, I started with the latest season. And halfway through, had to stop – I had no more hair left to pull out! 

Millions of people go hungry across the world, because 30% food gets wasted and Masterchef showed me how the number is higher in fancy kitchens. Agri-food sector is the highest carbon emitter and if we start cooking the way Masterchefs do, the damage would be higher. And then there is plastic and much much more.

Here are cringe-inducing things, that I saw:

1.     Sous Vide- you put stuff into plastic and dunk into a boiler. So along with the slowly poached food, you can get your fill of microplastic. Have you ever heated food inside a plastic container?

2.     Blast chiller – you boil stuff and immediately shove them into blast chillers, making your energy consumption reach imaginative highs. I know there is time pressure and they have to roll out exotic sorbets and ice creams within an hour, but do we also sometimes put hot stuff into our fridges? Or the reverse, pull food out of the fridge and immediately heat it?

3.     Artichoke hearts – I stared in wonder, as the chefs used whole fish, vegetables to create a ‘jus’ and then chucked the actual ingredients into the bin. Only 50% of any produce- vegetable or flesh – was plated while the rest discarded. Leaves of artichoke – throw, keep heart only. Legs of chicken – throw, I want only breast or more horrifyingly, only the skin! Have we been chucking large parts of our food- for examples leaves of cauliflowers, root vegetables like radish and carrots, which are oh so delicious?

Peel everything and throw – unless I want to use the zest- in which case, throw the fruit. The irony was that some celebrity chefs in the show, were excited about zero-waste cooking but it’s not a consciousness that seeped through the participants. Potato peels, like most peels, are heavy with vitamins and throwing them means that the bin is the only thing getting healthy.

And if you are worried about pesticides, then buy organic. Anyway pesticides are inside the whole crop – peeling doesn’t do much.

4.     Cling wrap- absolutely everything has to be wrapped in plastic. I am no chef but wrapping the pastry dough in cloth and putting it in the fridge works just fine.

5.     Coconut milk/curry leaves – this one I understand. The competition has people of different ethnicities and different types of cuisines need to be showcased. So they may want to use ingredients from all over the world. And to be fair, they make a lot of noise about using local produce. But do we? Are we still importing miso sauce and eating quinoa instead of what’s grown locally, more suitable to our body and beneficial to our farmers, planet and our health?

6.     Dehydrated, powdered, foamed – if you want to feed me strawberries, give them a good wash and put them in a bowl. DO NOT pulverise it, then dehydrate it, then create a foam or a powder and then reconstruct it to look like a strawberry! Do not add random chemicals to change its very nature. Just give it to me. Like nature intended.

Do we sometimes keep changing the nature of the food and make it unrecognizable? My favourite example is that of Karela and the tremendous effort and energy that is spent in making it non-bitter. If one doesn’t like its taste, may as well not eat it. Anyway the poor vegetable has no nutrients left after such brutal interventions.

The participants are delightful and the judges epitomise great coaching skills. But I cannot live through another assault on nature’s resources, as millions go hungry, plastic keeps piling up and we stray further away from our 1.5 degree 2030 target.