TV review: Take a bow, Petra Bagust

Of all people, Petra Bagust, on TV3's What's Really In Your Food, emerges as a shining example of journalism.

This ridiculously pretty, famously wholesome, non-journalist did a better job of elucidating a fraught area of foodism than most current affairs journalists would have done - or indeed have done - on this subject.

Credit should go to the researcher, director and writer, obviously, but Bagust's front-of-camera work shows she's far from the harmless, happy bimbo many viewers will have her pegged as.

Her presentation of the big chook question - are indoor-raised broiler chickens good and safe to eat? - was flawlessly balanced, and she barely editorialised.

She asked the obvious questions, and did her usual light, breezy, cutesy schtick, modelling a perky 1950s housewive in a "cook, cover, chill" demonstration.

But her thoughtful summation at the end of the programme will have left no viewer in any doubt that the vast majority of chook consumed in this country is not an entirely wholesome food.

This programme did what too few current affairs or documentaries have the finesse to do: it assembled the facts, laid them out matter of factly, without bullying the viewer one way or another, and only then suggested - and only suggested - what conclusion we might reasonably come to.

What's Really In Your Food? gave the Poultry Association at least equal air time with the organic side of the argument, and it didn't rub our noses in those horrific scenes from furtively taken footage of cruelty in broiler farms.

It wanted to do more extensive filming, but the association said this would be "too difficult to organise". The programme recorded this fact, and didn't feel the need to comment on it.

This was so refreshing. Many documentary makers would feel compelled to make a big deal of the association's reticence to throw its farms open to media scrutiny, but here was a programme that simply put the facts of its particular dealings with the association out there as dispassionately as possible, and let the viewer judge.

The programme clearly didn't set out to take a stand, or even reach a conclusion. It was just there to elicit the facts.

The facts it found were that prophylactic antibiotics are fed in unmeasured doses to more than 90 per cent of the chickens we eat, and that though the association insists none of what's fed to them is capable of messing with human antibiotic resistance, that assurance is disputed, and our Government, along with several overseas, is reviewing the use of antibiotics in chicken farming.

Another fact is that more than 90 per cent of the chicken we eat is from birds which never see daylight or get to exhibit normal outdoor chook behaviour.

They are kept under artificial light, and given about six hours of darkness. They grow in 35 days to optimal size, which it takes naturally raised chooks 50-odd days to achieve.

The indoor chooks that the association allowed us to see did look happy and chooky, with plenty of room, food and water, not up to their necks in poo or misshapen, or six-drumsticked, or prone to any of the other horror stories popularly reticulated about chicken farming.

And there was no cheap juxtaposition of footage comparing the indoor chooks' cavernous barn with the more fetching, rustic outdoor organic chooks' playground. Each type of farming was reviewed unexcitedly, and separately.

The programme also tested the chicken meat. Indoor intensively farmed chicken came out as higher in fat and lower in protein than organic chicken. Chicken nuggets' contents were also analysed - containing as little as 30 per cent chicken, padded out with soy, texturisers and additives such as detergent and sunset yellow dye.

When it came to flavour, the programme had a little fun, getting opinionated Auckland chef Simon Gault to prepare mass-farmed indoor chicken with corn-fed, with organic and KFC.

The results were inconclusive, but even that was fascinating. Ingeniously, the tasting panel comprised body-builders, who consume heroic quantities of chicken, because it's about the leanest protein you can get that's easy to source and prepare.

Many of them favoured the mass-farmed chook, because, as Gault pointed out, it's what they're used to eating. The taste of organic chook would be alien to them. And Gault's own finesse with chook ran it close with KFC in another blind tasting, which was salutary all round.

As the programme pointed out, mass-farmed indoor-raised chook is exponentially cheaper than organic chicken, and in these days of vaulting food prices, that's likely to be the prime determinant in which kind of chook we buy.

And in many parts of the country, including Wellington, you can't regularly get organic chicken anyway, so price doesn't even enter into it.

However, What's Really In Our Food? has already proven itself deservedly influential, with a book on chemical food additives it referred to in an episode last year selling out within days of the programme being aired.

This week's effort probably won't dent the mass- farmed chook market but, to succumb to the irresistible cliche, it was food for thought.

*What's Really In Your Food, Tuesday, 8pm, TV3.





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