The Great British Waste Menu, Wednesday 8.30pm, BBC One

Posted by Stewart Turner

Great British Waste Menu

These days we'll only consume tomatoes if they look like freshly polished snooker balls. Knobbly carrots are sent straight off to the pig farm without so much as a five-minute swansong on That's Life. But change is in the air, inspiring the BBC to send a collection of celebrity chefs off to pull horrified faces in Lincolnshire lettuce fields. Their task? To prepare a banquet for 60 VIPS (including Bill Oddie and Lembit Opik) from food which was on the brink of being thrown away.

Now here's a poser for you: What's worse than useless unless it's between 17 - 21cm long? A courgette, apparently. Thousands of them are thrown away every single day for failing to live up to our demanding expectations. Most depressing of all was a Kentish fisherman's haul of 200 delicious slip soles destined to be chucked because they're deemed too tiny for our dinner tables. I was particularly annoyed: it's barely a couple of weeks since I paid a tenner for one in a swanky Whitstable pub. That's some mark-up.

As the celeb chefs made their way around the nation's supermarket skips, the narrator reeled off all manner of shocking statistics. The average family wastes around £700 worth of food a year, and restaurants, supermarkets and farms are even worse culprits, chucking out prime cuts of beef, fresh eggs and gallons of decent milk like its going out of fashion. In these austere times, it's time to get creative with our food waste. In other words, it's time to rustle up some pigs head ravioli.

It's a worthy, compelling and important subject, and the statistics are genuinely shocking - but whether it merits a whopping 90 minutes of prime time TV is highly debatable. As it made its merry way around the nation's supermarket skips and abattoirs, The Great British Waste Menu couldn't decide whether to be a documentary, a Jamie-style campaigning programme or some kind of offal version of Masterchef. A little more focus – and some judicious trimming – wouldn’t have gone amiss.

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