Jamie Oliver has been getting media attention lately for his fight for better food. But Oliver isn't the only person on my TV who has been fighting that good fight.
Thanks to the Sundance Channel, I've been watching the adventures of River Cottage Treatment and its host Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
Hugh runs a good sized company, growing local organic food and selling it. He also has time to take us on different adventures, touting how great it would be to eat better food.
In one incarnation, Hugh takes a group of people (those who can't cook, those who love take-aways) and brings them to River Cottage. He makes them sleep outside, go to the loo in outhouses (where the end product becomes part of the compost). There are various activities Hugh makes them go through, such as building a pizza oven or shooting pigeons for dinner.
By the end of the hour, they mostly learn their ways. In a twist, Hugh will show them at the end of the episode after a few months to see if they are still doing better or gone back to their old ways. They actually show cases where people didn't do well. Based on American standards, we didn't know we could show failures on reality TV.
Hugh also did a brief series on finding better species of fish and seafood to use, and another brief series on trying to get a small town to focus on eating free-range chicken.
The British take on reality TV is slightly less annoying than the American counterparts, and Hugh does enough silly stunts to make it seem like a reality TV show. Amusingly, in one episode in the chicken series, Hugh's special guest is none other Jamie Oliver.
In the chicken series, Hugh tries to run simultaneous side-by-side a regular chicken farm and a free range farm.
Unlike Kardashian-related programming, there are great lessons to learn. Watching people who were naive gain wisdom and knowledge is positive programming on a medium that doesn't always try to teach.
At this point, the Sundance Channel looks like it has run through all of the River Cottage programming. But the channel may start over. Jamie Oliver's run ends on Friday. But there are more programs to help you and others see the light toward better grown food.
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