Cooking in the danger zone

Just finished watching another episode of Cooking in the Danger Zone on TV. I haven’t been checking the TV guide for a long time and so one night when I was in between switching channels, I caught the trailer for this BBC documentary series and since then I have been glued to the telly for every showing on Thursday night. It’s humbling and disturbing to learn how the scratchy political situations in Ethiopia, Haiti, Mexico and even Afghanistan have affected farming, food prices and food supplies, resulting in food scarcity. This means the poor has to suffer the most. In fact for the Afghan army, *3 meals provided* is an incentive to attract recruits .

Normal cooking shows are about what to cook, what ingredients to buy and how to choose the freshest…all in an environment of abundance, but this cooking series is the opposite; a gross lack of ingredients and the uncertainty of one’s next meal. And even when there’s some food available, the same meal is eaten every single day.