KEY POINTS:
Among the legions of television food shows, here comes one that takes consumer society literally.
In a world where few of us grow or raise our own food, myths and urban legends abound about what we are putting in our bellies.
Then there's the ever-replenished smorgasbord of conflicting
information as yesterday's super-food becomes today's cancer-causing villain.
What's Really in our Food? (TV3, Tuesdays, 8pm) bravely ventures into this minefield and to give us some answers. And who better to host a show about food quality, than the wholesome and straight-talking Petra Bagust.
Last night's debut episode tackled the item that is surely top on the menu of food paranoia, chicken.
Those of us clinging to our cherished belief that too many drumsticks can cause such unnatural phenomena as blokes growing breasts, would have been disappointed.
No hormones are fed to Kiwi chickens and - here's another enlightening fact - New Zealand doesn't import the meat, so what we eat here is raised here.
That normally shy and increasingly sensitive bird, the New Zealand Poultry Association, fronted up to take Bagust on a tour far more exotic than any of those foreign getaways she presented.
The cameras were allowed into the home of your everyday supermarket chook, a barn with about 22,000 residents milling about enjoying the growth benefits of 18 hours of artificial lighting a day and feed containing a dose of antibiotics.
For its half-hour format, What's Really In Our Food?, certainly stuffs us full of information and also packed in a couple of taste tests courtesy of chef Simon Gault.
It couldn't resist decking Bagust out as a 50s housewife for a quick rundown on food-poisoning prevention, but mostly the show was refreshingly light on gimmicks and strong on the facts.
The show also packed in a comprehensive look at what's in the ubiquitous chicken nugget, a junior taste test and varying opinions from nutritionists as to their dietary value.
One question was skipped over rather lightly: why are our campylobacter rates so much higher, staggeringly so in the case of the US, than other places.
But to be fair, that's a documentary in itself.
If you're a shopper befuddled by those enigmatic food labels - what is E110? - this show is a service, although you might not want to know, say, that "emulsifier is a fancy word for a detergent".
What's Really in our Food? takes an appealingly pragmatic approach and compared to much of the junk masquerading as "factual" telly, this is a high-protein diet.
