Food Unwrapped (2012) s08e03 Episode Script

We Brits are a nation of food lovers.
Oh, my goodness! Hello.
Our supermarkets are jam-packed with products from every corner of the globe.
Konnichiwa! But how much do we really know about the journey our food makes to our plates? - Wow, I've never seen anything like it in all my life.
- Oh! The Food Unwrapped team travel all over the world and beyond This is like stepping into the future.
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to reveal the trade secrets behind the food we eat.
Coming up, I find the future of fish farming on a London industrial estate.
Look at those.
I discover what gives marmalade its bitter tang That is incredibly better.
And I get to grips with what happens to the billy goats the dairy industry doesn't want.
- Now you're a goat farmer.
- Jesus! Hello.
First, sustainable fish.
We've heard there's an amazing new way of farming fish that could be a game-changer.
But what's wrong with how it's done now? I'm kind of guessing that, I don't know, is it the case that if fish is farmed it is always sustainable? 'Yes, that's the idea behind it.
Farming is always sustainable, yes.
' - OK.
- There's so much on the packet these days, isn't there? You don't know if you are coming or going or - Cos it's in a farm, it's sustainable? Amazing.
- 'Yeah.
' - And what do they eat on the farm? - 'Just normal fish feed.
' 'There's no animal by-products or anything like that.
' So those big old salmon, they're vegetarians.
- They can just survive on those vegetable pellets? - 'Yes.
' Salmon is our most popular farmed fish.
Today, we munch our way through a million fresh salmon meals a day.
But the Marine Conservation Society are concerned about the sustainability of farmed salmon.
To find out why, I've been told to start at the top of the ocean's food chain and a tank full of predators.
Look at this.
Sharks! It's feeding time with marine expert Carey Duckhouse.
They're beginning to circle.
Now, these sharks are beautiful, but what have they got to do with salmon? Essentially, they both eat meat.
It might be a different size of meat that they're eating.
Right, wow.
So salmon are carnivores.
What kind of fish do they eat? In the wild, a salmon would feed on small fish.
To feed a farmed salmon to its full growth of about 45 kilos, it can take significantly more weight of wild caught fish.
So it turns out they don't eat vegetable pellets after all.
The Good Fish Guide, the leading authority on such matters, only gives non-organic farmed salmon a rating of three on a scale of one to five.
This means that they don't consider it fully sustainable.
But why? I've called Dawn Purchase, one of the experts behind the Good Fish Guide.
Now, first of all, what does sustainable actually mean? Sustainability really means being able to do something now that we can continue to do in the future -- not depleting wild-capture fisheries and not damaging the environment when we are producing fish.
I was astonished to find out how much food you have to put in in order to get one piece of salmon out.
The salmon currently are eating kind of more fish than they are actually producing.
Organic salmon is probably the nearest we've got to being sustainable.
Non-organic farmed salmon isn't quite there yet.
What is it specifically? The waste and the pollution around the salmon farm cages.
- That comes from organic waste and chemical waste - Mm-hm.
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and there are some improvements that need to be made.
Salmon producers say they are dedicated to improving sustainability and are funding research into new farming methods to minimise their environmental impact.
But, as I've learned, non-organic farmed salmon eat more fish than they produce and then poo out a whole load of waste.
Not to mention the chemicals used to keep the fish parasite-free, which can damage other marine life.
And that's where our fish farm of the future comes in - You haven't got fish back there.
- Come with me, I'll show you.
- Have you really? - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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where I discover a brave new world behind closed doors.
- Oh, my goodness! - Pretty cool, right? Britain is in the middle of a marmalade revival, kick-started by a movie about a citrus spread-loving bear.
Can I offer you one of my marmalade sandwiches? Think I'm Paddington Bear? Marmalade always strikes me as odd.
Everyone knows jam is full of sugar, so why is marmalade so bitter? So what is it about marmalade that makes it bitter? - I think it's the rind in it.
- Maybe the orange peel.
Maybe it's the amount of sugar that they put in.
I think it's the peel.
Rind, yeah.
I think you'd have to ask the experts on that.
Thanks, Matt, I'll do just that.
I've come to Tiptree in Essex to quiz marmalade maker Robert Parker.
- Hi, there, are you Robert? - Hello, Jimmy.
He is jam-packed full of knowledge about the preserve production process.
Well, I've got to say - They're frozen.
- They are frozen, yes.
We get them frozen whole and then we can bring them into the factory all the way through the year.
Hmm, that's odd.
I can get oranges in the supermarket year-round.
And we'll bring them to the boil and simmer them for about three hours.
This will make the oranges really soft.
It will also slightly caramelise them.
I'm surprised to see modern marmalade-making is still hands on.
So, what's the trick? You've just got to squeeze it? Take the orange and you separate it in half, and then you have to take the pulp out of the middle, making sure you've got no pips with your peel.
And then pop it on this tray.
So next time I pick up a jar of marmalade, - you've actually done all of this by hand.
- Yes, that's right.
While the gooey centres are sieved to remove pips and fibre, the peel is shredded.
- It's around eight millimetres thick.
- Wow, look at that.
- So they are just slicing that up now.
- Yeah.
The orange pulp, peel and sugar are then combined to an exact recipe and it's on to the final step.
So, this is where you are going to turn the orange into marmalade? Into marmalade, yeah.
So, sugar syrup.
This is just straight granulated sugar that's been dissolved in water.
That's sweet.
They use syrup because it is easier to measure a precise amount of liquid than it is to weigh out the loose sugar each time.
But the only ingredients I've seen are oranges and sugar, so somewhere in that orange is the secret to the bitter taste.
After 20 minutes of boiling, this sugary batch is ready to jar.
Oh-ho! Strength like a bear.
So, here we go.
The real deal.
That is delicious.
But despite all the sugar, the juicy oranges, marmalade still has that bitterness about it.
What gives marmalade its bitterness, then? That's because of the special oranges we use.
- Not your standard oranges you get off the supermarket shelf, then? - No.
Everything that you get in the supermarket is a sweet orange, this is a bitter orange.
So if I were to go and see these oranges, where that I have to go? You'd have to go to Seville in Spain.
Right, well, Spain, here I come.
Later, I come face-to-face with this bitter fruit.
Oh, that is like licking wee off a stinging nettle.
Next, goats.
Supermarket sales of goat's cheese have tripled in the last ten years, but this has had an unexpected side-effect.
To find out more, I'm on my way to Somerset to meet a man with perhaps the most unpleasant job in farming.
- Andrew.
Matt.
- Hello.
- Nice to meet you.
So what's your role in the goat industry? Well, I'm one of the shot men, so I go to farms putting down goats.
It tends to be just the male young ones because they are surplus.
Every year in the UK, it's estimated nearly 30,000 billy goats are slaughtered at birth as a direct result of our love of goat's milk products, which of course only require milk-producing females.
How do you go about dispatching them? We use a bolt gun.
It's instant for them, they won't know anything about it.
Most farmers dislike this immensely, it's a last resort, but they also know that they can't afford to run at a massive loss and not be able to move them.
To find out more about this harsh reality faced by goat dairy farmers, I'm heading to meet Richard Barter.
- Richard.
Matt, nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you.
- So, do you have any kids here now? - Yeah, we do, yeah.
So these were born this morning.
- There you go.
- Oh, my word.
- Born this morning? - There you go.
- Now you are a goat farmer.
- Jesus! Hello.
- These are male.
- Yeah, both males.
Do these have to be dispatched? No, these ones are being reared for meat.
Oh, really? Why is that? We've now got a market for some of our male kids, so Richard is one of the few dairy farmers who has managed to find a buyer for his goat meat, which has lifted a big financial burden.
In the past, we have reared billy kids, they are very expensive to rear, and you end up on the phone trying to find butchers and restaurants to try and take them.
Richard has teamed up with a wholesaler who is trying to kick-start a goat meat revolution.
I mean, is this something you hope will happen to the goat industry? Yeah, I think every goat farmer would like everything to be sold.
- Well, it's a huge waste.
- A massive waste, yeah.
- Go on.
- What do I do? Just do that? Oh, no! I'm actually just pouring it over his face! - You are washing my goats with milk! - Sorry.
Coming up, I join the crusade to get Great Britain going for goat.
- It's billy goat.
- Billy goat? - Yeah.
- Goat? - Yeah.
- Oh! I've discovered that Britain's love affair with goat's cheese and milk is leaving some farmers with a surplus of male goats.
In the past we've reared billy kids and you end up sat on the phone trying to find butchers and restaurants to try to take them.
With a distinct lack of demand for goat meat in the UK, some other farmers are being left with little choice but to put down healthy male goats.
'However, there is a solution on the horizon.
' - Hello, mate.
- Hello, mate, how you doing? Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
'I've come to Thornbury near Bristol to meet James Whetlor, 'who's set up a company to fly the flag for goat meat.
' All I've done really is create a link between the farmers who have this product but no-one to sell it to and the British food market that is always looking for new products.
So it'll go from being quite a niche restaurant thing to hopefully having much broader Yeah, up until now we've mostly been selling to the London restaurant market and catering butchers with some nationwide reach.
Once you crack supermarkets, it's a huge market out there.
'To ensure the continued expansion of the goat meat market, it needs the thumbs up from consumers.
' So what do you think people will make of it? People's association with goat are the older mutton version.
They're expecting it to be a really strong flavour and then because these are the young animals, it's a much more subtle flavour, so people are generally quite surprised.
'To put his theory to the test, James is cooking up some goat chops 'and we're going to carry out a blind taste test on the locals.
' All right, James, bring out your meat.
Would you like to try these chops? - Pick the biggest one, why not? - Yeah! - Tell me what do you think.
- Straight in there.
What does it taste like? - Tastes all right.
- Yeah? - Quite nice.
Tastes delicious.
- What do you think that is? - I don't know.
Pork? Boar or kangaroo or something.
- Lamb, maybe? - Is it not lamb? No, it's not lamb.
It's billy goat.
- Billy goat? - Yeah.
Goat? Tastes all right, doesn't it? I usually have curried goat, but this is a first.
I probably would buy it, but I'd probably be put off because you think somehow goat's nice, you know, in your garden, maybe.
- So you're not put off by the name? Goat? - No, not at all.
- No? - How was that for you? - From something I wasn't really looking forward to, that's really positive.
I'm really pleased.
So come on, Britain, if you like your goat's cheese, could it be time to try the new kid on the block? I've been looking into sustainable fish and I've discovered that when it comes to farmed salmon, the waters are a little murky.
What is it specifically? The waste and the pollution around the salmon farm cages.
That comes from organic waste, kind of chemical waste.
'I've been told there's an alternative here, 'that you can definitely eat with a clear conscience, 'but I'm nowhere near the coast.
' This is not exactly what I was expecting when on the search for sustainable fish.
It's an industrial estate in east London.
'I'm meeting the head of this urban operation, Tom Webster.
' - Oh! - Kate.
Tom, nice to meet you.
- Hey.
- How you doing? - You haven't got fish back there! - Well, come with me, I'll show you.
- Have you really? - Yeah, yeah.
If you'd like to come with me into the fish farm Look at these tanks! - Look at those! - This is tilapia.
'Tilapia is a freshwater fish native to Lake Malawi, 'where they thrive in tightly packed conditions, 'meaning that they can be farmed at a much higher density than salmon.
' How many have you got in there? There's about 250 fish in there at the moment, so one of the reasons that tilapia is quite a sustainable fish to farm is that we can do it in a much smaller space.
- Right, shall I feed them? - Chuck it in.
- OK.
There we go, guys.
Oh! Wow, they're lively, aren't they? One of the reasons tilapia is really sustainable is because they're omnivorous, and that essentially means they can have a completely plant-based diet, so it means we can feed them less fishmeal to get the same sort of growth.
'But I'm told the real bonus is what happens to their poo.
' By farming them in tanks, it means that we control where the water and the waste in the system goes.
It looks like you're boiling up pasta for the 5,000.
No, you definitely don't want to eat this.
'These capsules contain bacteria 'that eat the ammonia in the fish faeces.
' So on this little plastic cog - Yeah.
- There are, what, thousands of bacteria? Thousands of bacteria.
The bacterial weight in this tank alone would be about the same weight as me, so all the air, my body mass equivalent in bacteria, in this tank.
And that bacteria convert the ammonia, which is excreted by the fish, into nitrogen.
So ammonia is very harmful to the fish.
When it builds up to certain levels in the water, it will start to burn the fish, so what we do is convert that into nitrogen, which is much less harmful to the fish.
But once the ammonia is removed, the water isn't yet ready to return to the fish tanks.
The waste water still contains high levels of nitrates.
So what do you do with that nitrate? Let me take you next door and show you.
- Oh, my goodness! - Pretty cool, right? Tom, this is like stepping into the future, isn't it? - It is a little bit.
- I've never seen anything like this.
So, what we are doing here is actually called aquaponics.
What happens is the water that is full of the nitrates from next door, we pump that into here and it basically floods underneath these plastic trays and feeds the roots of the plants.
As the water feeds the bottom of these plants, the plants remove the excess nitrogen out of the water and then we return the water back into the fish tanks.
The waste water is not only being used to create more food for us to eat, but is also cleaned and recycled in the process.
- What are you growing? - We're growing a variety of salads.
So this is mizuna.
This is rocket here on your left.
We've got some Right, right, I've got to try some.
- Oh! That is a taste sensation.
- Thank you very much.
That is a delicious rocket.
The cost to set up an aquaponics farm like this are considerable.
It's early days for Tom and his team, but a year-round crop grown from the waste products of fish farming could be the future.
Do you think more and more people are going to be doing this? We've got increasing populations and looking to these high-density ways of growing food is a way of feeding a growing population.
I think it is inevitably going to be part of the future.
Earlier, I was at a jam factory where I discovered how marmalade gets its characteristic flavour.
What gives marmalade its bitterness, then? That's because of the special oranges we use.
So I've come to the very source of this special fruit.
I've come to Spain to find oranges and I thought I would be in the middle of the countryside, great big open groves but I am, in fact, in the middle of Seville in the city and there are oranges everywhere.
The trees are bursting with oranges but everyone is leaving well alone.
Lovely big orange.
Easy to peel.
Despite being a sunshine fruit, it turns out that Seville oranges are on the opposite end of the sweetness spectrum from your regular orange.
They are bitter beyond belief.
Oh, my God! Oh, that is like licking wee off a stinging nettle, which I don't do often.
Oh, that's disgusting.
I just can't resist challenging the public to suck on a segment.
I've never picked such a fresh orange.
It's much too sour.
- Would you try it? - No, no, no.
It's no wonder you can add a load of sugar to marmalade and it still keeps its bite.
So what exactly is it that makes marmalade's raw ingredients so, well, disagreeably bitter? Looks like I finally get to visit an orange grove.
Ten miles out of time, I meeting Javier Bordas at his family-run citrus plantation.
These guys are all busy picking now.
All done by hand? How many oranges do you produce here, then? No wonder these guys work like machines.
These bitter oranges are only in season for six weeks.
So that's why the oranges were frozen back in the factory in Essex.
I mean, they do look just like your sweet orange.
So tell me, what makes the bitter orange so bitter, then? Flavonoids are plant chemicals found in all fruit and vegetables and are thought to be beneficial for your health.
Right, so there's a particular flavonoid that makes the bitter orange, bitter.
- Yes, yes.
- And the sweet orange doesn't have that? So it's the flavonoid, neohesperidin, found in the orange's flesh and peel that we have to thank for our tangy marmalade sandwiches.
- Very juicy.
- Yep, still tastes bad.
Oh, no! These oranges are now off to feed our appetite for the bittersweet stuff.
But before I go, Javier is keen to show me another use for his bitingly bitter crop.
Curiously, he's donned a white coat and is leading me to a laboratory tucked away on his sprawling estate.
We've seen the oranges being picked.
Now once they get here, what else do you get from the orange, then? Hang on a minute! A sweetener from something this bitter? First, they grind baby bitter oranges into a powder.
- Can I taste it? - Yes, of course.
Third time lucky.
- Oh, no! Oh! That's awful.
- Yes.
How are you going to turn that into something that's sweet? From this, the neohesperidin is chemically treated to add a hydrogen atom, turning it from bitter to sweet and the snappily named E959.
- Oh, my God! Oh, my.
That is the opposite.
- The opposite.
That is insane! What is this product used for, then? Turns out this sweetener is found in products ranging from yoghurt and fizzy drinks to alcohol-free booze and even lip balm.
Who would've thought hidden inside this really bitter fruit is something super-super sweet.
Next time, I take to the skies above Israel on a mission to protect their pepper crop.
Me and the intrepid FU crew lift the lid on manuka honey.
So you are saying that I probably need a PhD? And I muck in at the UK's largest leek harvest.
You perhaps ought to stick to the day job.