Damn you, Mr Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall...

Mr Hugh...

I never thought that I'd say this, but I think that I have been enlightened by River Cottage. It's some of the values that they have in there that have really struck a chord with me... In fact, I'm quite surprised that I haven't watched a whole episode before!

Let me start from the beginning...
I think that it was one of those days where i had been eaten by the sofa after dinner , and the Sunday run of Come Dine with Me had finished. Normally I would get up and do something else, however, on that day I was feeling rather lethargic so remained in front of the telly box, practically dozing off and waiting for energy to come to me. Don't get me wrong, normally whenever I see River Cottage on the channel menu I wouldn't give it a second glance... just something about it made me "not be arsed" to watch it. However, River Cottage popped up on More 4 and I couldn't be bothered to change the channel, and I was pleasantly surprised!
In fact, it was so influential that I've changed my views on eating meat because of it. D:

Catch of the day

The episode I ended up watching was the Christmas episode, well, the end of season one anyway. It was something about him going round and growing his own produce, rearing his own meat and anything that he wasn't able to produce himself, he would go out and find someone whose family has been doing it for god knows how many generations.
What I think was most sad was the fact that he went out to catch some herring from a local seaside town (at 5.30 in the morning because of the way that the herrings follow the sun) and went with a local fisherman. The fisherman told Hugh that in the town's heyday, over 80 boats would come out and fill the bay early every morning, using ancient methods to catch these herring. These days, it's just the lonely fisherman and one other bloke who goes out at the crack of dawn in search of these little fishies... And yet we're still getting more herring, just due to the massive trawler boats taking in ridiculous amounts of fish at the time from a place where we're not meant to take them. This change in age-old tradition somewhat saddened me, and led me to continue to watch on.

Tartiflette.

Yes, it is a ridiculously middle class show. I mean, who has baked potato, AND cream, AND finely sliced ham, AND granary bread in the fridge to rustle up a quick lunch of something that has a posher name than it really deserved. Actually, who has enough time to go home for lunch?! But it's one of those things that makes me think: "In ten years time, I want to buy a house in the country and become completely self-sustained and have my own vegetable batch and raise my own chickens and it will be excellent! I shall forage and contribute to saving the world!" Maybe it's the dream that I will probably never have? Who knows, maybe later...

This is lamb, not beef.

The other amazing thing that he did on the show was show this cow that he had raised, and then taken to slaughter and was about to show us what he was going to do with the rest. This cow was a cow that wasn't just stuck in a field with a crappy diet of grass and cheap fodder, oh no. This cow had been fed on oats and molasses and had had a splendid short life in the field, and when Hugh brought the carcass through to the chopping board with his butcher friend, you could tell that that piece of meat was going to be so much better than your standard supermarket cuts. Even the meat looked so much happier than your sad, drab supermarket meat that has been pumped full of crap, and you could tell that it was going to taste amazing.

This led me to the conclusion that I should stop consuming meat from supermarkets. Why eat all that sad, lifeless rubbish when I could go to the butchers, save a dying institution and gets something that actually tastes good. Or pop off to the Farmer's market, one of those conventions that is becoming less and less frequent these days? Well, I am currently poor at the moment, so I shall have to be living a rather frugal vegetarian life up until I come into the money again... But I might as well savour what I have anyway. 

Oh Hugh, what has been done? If that was the effect of one episode, I don't think that I'd be able to watch a whole series without being converted to a real countryfile.

Ere mert wat yoo lookin at