The standout revelation from Jon Richardson’s Celebrity Trash Monsters was not how little the ‘contestants’ seemingly knew about the effect of our carbon footprint on climate change, not even that they would go into supermarkets and travel on public transport whilst covered in garbage but that two of them waste so, so much food.
Kerry Katona never cooks anything. Her family live on takeaway food every single day. The children have a full size pizza each, even the youngest, not that they manage to eat it all, so it goes to waste. The oldest child even has takeaway breakfast. Maybe in Alderley Edge, lobster with pasta is the go to takeaway but for most people fish and chips suffices. Furthermore it’s all delivered to their door and probably not by electric vehicles. The Katona family’s sheer disregard for their wastefulness was abhorrent.
John Barnes buys ready meals every day because he apparently doesn’t like to wait more than two or three minutes for food to cook. He has an addiction to food packaging. He’ll buy almost anything if it looks ‘interesting’ consequently he had a fridge/freezer packed with out of date ready meals that will ultimately end up in landfill.
Jodie Kidd’s ‘big sin’ was eating too much fresh meat but to be fair the move to plant based diets to reduce global warming is a relatively recent concept. However getting her to serve foraged food and fried crickets to diners at her country pub was meaningless. Fine for a few people in rural locations but try foraging for food in an inner city area. We’ll need to be in post Armageddon Mad Max territory before the populace will turn to eating weeds and insects.
Okay, so this was meant to be an entertaining way of getting an important environmental message across. Did it work? Partly. It was however too ridiculous to have celebs in garbage filled Sumo costumes to be taken seriously: at times it was like watching an episode of The Goodies.
Katona and Barnes are such extreme examples of wastefulness that most viewers would, I am sure, not associate themselves with their situation. They may even consider themselves to be so much more aware than those two that they may not feel the need to do more. And having a comedian delivering the message, even though Jon Richardson is earnestly committed to saving the environment, gave the whole production too much of a comic edge.
