Gregg Wallace's Recession Bites

Gregg Wallace © BBC

Remember those heady days of 2007 when we were slapping foie gras on toast with a trowel and drowning our Bran Flakes in Bollinger? Well MasterChef’s resident boombox Gregg Wallace is probably still living them, but nevertheless, the Beeb has tasked him with an investigation into how the recession has affected our eating habits.

It seems as wages get frozen, so does the food, and the nation has ditched its obsession with all things organic and starting heading for the bargain bins in droves. And against all odds, shoppers have ditched their preoccupation with European upstarts like Aldi and Lidl and are going back to Sainsbury’s and Tesco because feel like they’ve been sucked in by all that sparse, no-frills packaging. Now even Waitrose is getting in on the act.

Gregg enlists Nina, a housewife from Twickenham, to help him out with a little experiment. Instead of her usual weekly shop, she’s asked to spend a week living off budget brands – 3p bottles of gloopy, luminous ketchup and sacks of slug-like frozen mince. The conclusion? Cheap food isn’t nearly as tasty as expensive food. Thanks for that, Gregg.

Similarly uninformative is Nina’s first trip down her local high street, where she’s amazed to find walking, talking shopkeepers ready with pearls of wisdom about “which apples are sweet and crunchy at the moment”. The downside? You have to carry your own bags. Again, thanks for that, Gregg.

The show is peppered with countless other useless titbits of information, all employed to drive home the wholly unsurprising conclusion that we spend less money on food during times of financial hardship. In short, a complete and utter waste of time.

by Stewart Turner, Tuesday 29 June 2009

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