Can We Eat Like a Farmer? Gastronuts

-OK, Gastronuts, let's find out what our task is this week.

-Oof... Agh!

Can we eat like a farmer?

The Gastronuts joining me on this week's show are...

The best thing about being a farmer is like,

seeing all the baby chicks and baby animals growing up.

If I had a farm, I would keep a monkey,

because they like to play and have fun.

The best thing about being a farmer...

because my favourite animal's a pig,

so it would probably be looking after pigs.

The down side of being a farmer would be cleaning up all the animals' poo.

Coming up on today's show,

the Gastronuts make sure their milk is udderly fresh.

It's disgusting! Eurgh!

They squeal, as they come face-to-face with their lunch...

-Oh, my gosh, it's a pig!

-..and go down to the forest

to gather a little firewood.

-Now, where does our food come from?

-The shops.

Before it comes to the shops?

-The farm.

-The farm, yeah. How do farmers farm food?

-They milk cows.

-They get eggs from chickens.

-From chickens. Do you think a farmer

-ever has to go to the shops?

-No.

-Do you think we could survive

-living on a farm?

-Erm...

-Maybe.

Do you think we could get our own food from field

-onto the plate?

-We could try.

-Yeah.

So, if we want to learn how to live like a farmer,

-we need to ask a farmer really, don't we?

-Yeah.

-That's handy,

because I have one, right over here. Follow me.

Gastronuts, Harry.

-Harry, Gastronuts.

-Hi, there.

-ALL: Hi!

So, Gastronuts,

Harry is a brilliant farmer

and this is his farm.

Harry, what's the life of a farmer like?

Great, in weather like this, can't wait to get up in the mornings.

Winter, cold, wet, still get up at 6.00 in the morning. Not such fun.

Being a farmer is just pulling a few bits of vegetables out of the ground

-and chucking them in a truck, isn't it?

-You have to be a mechanic,

a gardener, a forester, you have to be completely multi-talented.

-Gastronuts, would you like to learn how to be a farmer?

-ALL: Yes!

-Do you think you could teach us to do that?

-I think I can.

-Can we help you make breakfast?

-OK. Let's go. Let's make a start.

We're going to make a full farmer's breakfast

just from food we find on the farm.

First up, it's time to see if Mrs Hen has kindly laid us an egg.

Wow! I found two.

I found one over there.

It's such fun on a farm having chickens running around.

They're all like personal friends.

Sometimes, they lay eggs all over the farm.

Sometimes, you'll find one here. Sometimes, you'll find one there.

Every day, you have to look for a different place.

-Are there other uses for chickens?

-Of course there are.

Of course, the primary use is food.

We all know what that is,

and the other thing is,

chicken manure is very fertile.

It's very rich in nitrogen.

If you kept one of these eggs, would it naturally hatch?

No. Basically, an egg will need a chicken to sit on it

for about 21 days.

Will you use these eggs to eat, or will you leave them to hatch?

On the whole, we tend to eat them here,

because if we hatched every egg, we would be overrun by chickens.

We'll help Harry out and cook up some of those eggs for breakfast.

Next on our list, it's milk, but we don't need to go to the shops,

as we have it right here on teat.

Who have you got there, Louise?

This is Goldie, she's nine years old and she's our milking cow.

She's a Jersey cow, so she gives really good milk,

with lots of butter fat in it.

-Do you guys all have one of these in your fridge at home?

-No.

-No.

-No cows in the fridge?

-No.

In the old days, they used to milk cows by hand,

-but now, we do it on machine.

-Can we help you get some milk?

You can, do you want to try the old-fashioned way first?

-Yes.

-OK. We'll put a bucket underneath to catch the milk.

If you just squeeze the teat, the milk will shoot straight back up

into the udder, so you have to stop the milk

going up into the udder first with your fingers

and then squeeze it out of the teat like that. All right?

-It feels like a sausage.

-THEY LAUGH

-Yay!

-Well done! So, how long do you think it would take

to fill a bucket like that, Joel?

-Hours.

-Yes, it would, wouldn't it? Which is why

most cows are milked by machine these days.

-Oh...

-Come on, you can do it. That's it. Well done.

-Look at that!

It's disgusting! Urgh!

It's like a sausage!

Oh!

-Does Goldie enjoy being milked?

-Yes, she does,

because she's uncomfortable before she's been milked,

because there's a lot of milk in her udder.

-Is it hot when it comes out of the udder?

-Yes, it's warm.

It's like the temperature you would wash your hands at.

-It feels warm.

-Does it?

So, to do this on an industrial scale,

to get enough milk for all of us to have in our fridges every day,

-what happens?

-OK, I'll show you.

We couldn't do it by hand, it would take far, far too long.

-And there's the milk flowing.

-Pretty quick, isn't it?

She's probably really relieved to be getting rid of this lot.

So, is this what happens to millions of cows

-on a daily basis round Britain?

-Yes.

Are we talking two pints, eight pints?

You're talking about five to eight litres a day.

-Wow!

-That's a lot of milk.

A big black-and-white animal,

a Holstein or a Friesian, you're talking two, three times that easily.

They produce a lot of milk.

OK, we're about done.

Wow! That's a lot of milk. How much do you reckon is there?

-About five litres.

-Now, when you get milk from the shops,

it's usually pasteurised, so it's heated up to kill all the bugs

and germs inside it. But this is raw, isn't it?

-This is raw.

-This is straight from the cow.

-So, you guys, I'm afraid, aren't allowed to try it, but I am.

-Oh!

'Unpasteurised milk can carry bacteria, but thankfully,

'I'm so used to eating weird food, my stomach is stronger than most.'

-It's still warm. Straight from the cow.

-It's really sweet too.

-Who wants to smell?

-Me!

-It smells creamy.

-Yes. Like creamy...

-Mmm.

Here's to Goldie.

-Aaah!

-THEY GIGGLE

That is fantastic.

It's really good, isn't it? Wow! That's me sorted

-for the whole day.

-I know. It's absolutely sweet as anything.

We've got our milk, but do how do we turn it into butter for our toast?

-So, this is the old-fashioned way of making...what?

-Cheese.

-Butter.

-Butter. It's a butter churn.

You would have lots of cream inside there and you would slosh it around

until all the solids came together to make butter.

I thought we would try and make our own butter, but we'd use something

that you guys might have knocking round your house.

What we've got to make our butter with is...

a bog brush.

-Ugh.

-However, these aren't just normal bog brushes

we've pulled out of my house, these are brand-new clean ones.

You can't use one that's already been used to clean toilets with,

-because that would be disgusting!

-Yeah.

What do we need to be able to put in there to make butter from?

-Milk.

-Cream.

-Cream, exactly. Not really milk.

You have to take the top of the milk off,

and the top of the milk has cream.

It's a really thick creamy substance. You can try a little bit,

put your little finger in there.

-There we go.

-Nice.

-It tastes really creamy.

-Really creamy.

Nice and fatty. And you know that's good stuff, don't you?

We need to put some of our cream in our bog-brush holder.

Ugh! Now, what you need to do is churn away.

So, you need to pump that cream.

So, let's inspect how far you got.

That's brilliant. All of that stuff there is butter.

So, what we need to do is scrape off all of this butter

from the brush and pour it onto there.

It feels like butter.

-THEY LAUGH

-Aah-ha!

-It moisturises your hands!

-Woops.

You guys have done a brilliant job.

Does that look like proper butter yet?

No. It looks like it's not together. It's like...all separate and sloppy.

-Yeah.

-So, what we do, we pull up all four corners

and then we turn the base. So, what have we got here, guys?

-Butter.

-That is butter. OK.

So, mould it together into a nice ball for me.

That is brilliant. You made butter!

'Incredibly, we have managed to make our very own bog-brush butter,

'just by sloshing about some cream.'

-There you go, Harry. We're nearly there.

-Great.

-We've got eggs,

butter, milk, what is missing for breakfast, guys?

-Bacon.

-Bacon, we like a bit of bacon, don't we?

-Yes.

-OK, where do we normally get our bacon from?

-The shops.

The shops, exactly. Where do you get your bacon from, Harry?

We'll see if we can find Louise, see if she can help.

OK, Gastronuts, it's time to face up to one of the realities

about what happens on modern farms.

Louise, who have you got there?

This is Prudence. This is our Tamworth sow.

-Everyone like pigs?

-I love pigs!

-Cool, aren't they? What do people

have pigs like Prudence on farms for?

Prudence is a provider of meat.

-So, she's basically there to be eaten?

-She is.

-Yep.

It's a bit of a tricky one, this, isn't it?

Because Prudence is a pretty thing,

and looking at her and thinking about her as something

you're going to eat later on is a bit tricky, isn't it?

-But who has bacon for breakfast?

-ALL: Yeah.

-Well, if we like eating bacon, we're going to have to do what?

-Kill it.

You have to kill it and eat it.

What I would like you to do

is to choose which bits of the animal are which.

-Do you like eating ham?

-Yes.

I'd like you to put a sticker on her so we can find out where her ham is.

'Pigs are incredibly versatile and provide a real variety of cuts,

'including ham from the back legs, back bacon from the...

'well, the back, streaky bacon from the belly,

'roasting joints from the leg and shoulder, and even tasty cheeks

'that are delicious when slowly cooked.'

PIG BARKS

She's barking. She's like a dog.

So, guys, now that you have met Prudence and managed to find out

which of the different parts of her

-are the different bits of meat, do you think you could eat her?

-Yes.

-No.

-No, yes?

-It depends.

-You kind of think of her as a bit of a friend.

-She's my best friend.

-She's your best friend.

But these animals are grown for meat, so it's tricky.

What will happen to Prudence when she's ready for slaughter?

Well, she'll be too tough for all the tender roasting joints,

so most of her will be made into sausages.

So, pretty much every part of her will end up being eaten.

Every part can end up being eaten.

If you have seen in the pet shop, the pigs ears, dried out for pet dogs...

-Oh!

-Even the ears get eaten.

Can't you eat the snout?

-The snout, have you ever tried eating snout?

-No.

-No.

I think you guys need to come with me.

OK. It's a big one. Follow me.

'If you don't like seeing just how much of a pig can be eaten,

'then this will be a good time to pop outside

'and think about becoming a vegetarian.'

I give you...a friend of mine.

-This is Fred.

-THEY GASP

Oh, my gosh!

-It's a pig.

-That is Fred.

And you can eat ears, you can eat cheeks, you can eat the head.

-Bacon, before it's been sliced up. What do you reckon that is?

-Tail.

-It's the trotter. Pig's trotter.

-That's the heart.

-That's the heart.

-What are these?

-Kidneys.

-Kidneys. Exactly.

-I'm not eating the heart!

It's time to give Fred the ultimate send-off.

The best way you can show your appreciation for an animal

-that's been raised and that's died for us?

-Eat it.

To eat it. I can't recommend this stuff enough.

This is called head cheese, and head cheese is when you boil up

a pig's head for about three hours and you take away

all of the edible bits out of it, you have to finger through it

and pull all the little bits off,

and you pack it all together and it makes this.

-Head cheese. So, everybody...

-You're kidding!

-You are kidding!

What do you mean? You've eaten a sausage before, haven't you?

-No, but eating the inside of his head!

-Yeah,

you'll find all that stuff in a sausage.

-OK. Grab a little bit.

-Urgh!

You can't say urgh, you haven't tried it yet! So...

It smells of cat food... Disgusting!

-OK... Urgh!

-Mmm!

Salty.

-Very salty, isn't it?

-Salty, yes. It's really nice.

-It's a bit like, what?

-Gravy.

-Can I spit it out?

If you really don't like it, you can spit it out.

Are you sure you're all right?!

What's weird, is it the fact it's head cheese,

-or the fact that it tastes odd?

-Just...both. The taste.

It's the idea of it, because you've never tried it before.

I'm not surprised that it's a weird thing to try.

Now, and I know this is going to be a bit weird for you,

because you've probably never tried it before,

-can you have a little pig's ear?

-No!

-I'll go for it.

-Oh, it's still got hair on!

Yeah, it's all good stuff, that is.

Oh, disgusting! How you can eat a pig's ear?

I've got a particularly hairy bit here.

I like that, because I've got quite hairy ears.

-Mmm. That's really nice.

-Interesting texture.

-You're not big on that?

-Chewy.

-How can you eat this?

-It's crunchy, yet soft, at the same time.

-It's really nice.

-Yeah.

We start at the nose.

-What's at the other end?

-The tail.

I know it's quite a weird idea,

-but would you just have a little try of the tail?

-Yeah.

-OK. Everyone, grab a little bit of tail.

-I can't reach.

-Have a little bit of tail.

-The pink stuff is really nice.

-Chewy.

-It's good, isn't it?

-That's really nice.

-Hair!

We've got all the actual bits here, we've got the limbs and the head and

the stuff, what else is in there in a pig, that sort of feeds it all?

-Blood.

-Blood. Can't make anything from blood, can you?

-No.

-No.

Or can you?

Follow me.

OK, Gastronuts, what have we got here?

-Blood.

-That is a bucket of blood.

-So, what can we make out of blood?

-Wine.

-Vampire soup.

-Blood porridge.

-Very close. You can make a kind of blood porridge.

-It's called black pudding.

-Oh, yeah.

'Black pudding is a traditional breakfast treat,

'and to make it, you need to take some warm blood and add oats,

'barley, cooked onions mixed with back fat,

'some seasoning, a little cream and then mix it all together.'

-Now, what do you think sausages are cased in?

-Skin.

-Skin.

What's the skin from?

-Pig.

-Any idea which bit of a pig the skin is from?

-Bum!

-Not the bum.

Actually, it's related to the bum.

-The bum cheeks.

-Intestines.

What we do is we take them out of the pig, we clean them through

and they end up looking something like this.

On there is a few metres of pigs intestines

all fed onto the end of that.

We're going to take our black pudding mixture,

push it through the mincer and the mincer will push it

-into the skin...

-That's really good.

-..and we're going to make

-our own sausages out of it. OK?

-Oh, wow!

-Yes. Exactly.

OK, that's perfect.

So what we do there, is we turn it round, like that.

Give it a good old twist. Keep twisting. Very good!

-You've made a black pudding.

-Feel it blowing up.

-Brilliant, Joel.

-It's squishy.

Urrrgh!

It's quite greasy, isn't it? Good! That looks like a set of sausages.

So what we do then is chop that off. Put a little knot in it.

What we need to do is poach those, and then we pan-fry them.

-They smell really nice.

-It smells good doesn't it?

-Are you ready for breakfast?

-Yeah.

-OK. Follow me.

OK, Harry, we've finished the black puddings.

-I'm blooming starving.

-THEY LAUGH

I haven't eaten since this morning.

That's a good breakfast, isn't it?

So how does it feel to have grown and cooked your own food?

Really good. You know you made it and it's really good. It's been nice.

Now I know not to waste my food because like,

it's like a pig died for you, like, so you don't starve.

-That's right. You have to give it some respect.

-Yeah.

Great things eggs, great with sausages

but even better with hot air.

I have another flask, and another hard boiled egg.

I'm going to light three matches.

What I'm doing is I'm heating the gas inside the flask, and when the

matches go out and the air cools, that sucks the egg into the bottle.

If we take a bowl of vinegar, and what I'm going to do is put a couple

of eggs into vinegar and then wait overnight.

Something amazing happens.

And here are our vinegar-soaked eggs.

Look at what's happened to this egg.

They have gone completely squodgy.

What's happened is the vinegar has dissolved the eggshell so the

egg has been cooked or pickled

in the vinegar and it's now this funny squodgy, bouncy thing.

Great things, eggs,

but how are we going to get the egg out of the flask?

We're trying to find out if we can eat like a farmer.

So far, the Gastronuts have learned how to make bog-brush butter.

Pump that cream.

And bust a gut to make some black pudding.

Next they try to fuel a car on some cooking oil.

-You want to ruin my car, don't you?

-Yeah!

And go the whole hog with their spit roast.

We've started learning how to eat like a farmer, but they don't

just grow food on their land, they can also grow their fuel.

-Who likes fried food?

-Me!

What do we fry food in?

-A saucepan.

-That's good.

-Olive oil.

-Oil. Exactly.

Now where does oil come from?

-Sunflowers.

-Yes, you get sunflower oil.

Have you ever seen the big fields full of yellow?

-Yeah.

-OK. That's called rapeseed and that's this plant here

and that's a young plant that is still flowering.

After it's flowered and all the pods come out,

this is what you get, and this is rapeseed.

So grab a big pod of rapeseed.

Try and open it up and see if you can dig out

some of those little seeds.

Can you see the seeds here? You have loads there.

Now you have squished them, what do your fingers feel like?

Do they feel greasy?

-Oil comes out of it.

-And this is where we get the oil to cook from.

I know they are tiny, it seems like a lot of effort,

to get oil out of something that difficult,

but when they've grown and dried out, they look like this.

And these are crushed in big industrial plants,

-and when the oil has come out, it looks like that.

-Wow.

OK, so let's have a little taste of the rapeseed oil.

Everyone grab a little piece of bread. Dip into the oil.

-It tastes quite nice.

-Yeah. Nutty.

-Mmm, yeah, nutty.

-What else does the word oil conjure up for you?

-Well, cars.

You refine oil and you make petrol, you make different things out of it

that you can run a car on, so oil could be fuel as well.

-Yes.

-Do you reckon you can get power out of that?

-No.

-Yes. If we burn it.

-If we burn it. Let's give it a try.

To make an oil lamp, you take an empty jam jar,

poke a hole in the lid, soak a strip of cotton in oil for use as a wick.

Add more oil to the bottom of the jar.

Poke the wick back through the hole in the lid

and finally, light your lamp.

If you want to attempt this at home,

make sure you have an adult on hand to help out.

Energy that has been grown in the field has been distilled

into this substance which you can actually use to power things.

I've got a very interesting idea.

Let's see what Harry can do with it.

OK Harry, we've tasted rapeseed oil

and we wondered what else would a farmer power with this kind of oil?

Try that and stick it in my car.

You try pouring that in.

You're pouring vegetable oil into Harry's car?

Yes. It's really fun.

You want to ruin my car, don't you.

-Yeah.

-Bad luck, you're not!

Because this car has been converted so it can use vegetable oil.

Hang on, so we could fry eggs in this and pour it into Harry's car?

I give you 10 yards before the car stalls.

Bye!

A farmer can grow rapeseed to power his vehicles,

but there is something else he can grow to heat his house.

Harry, you've got massive woodland here,

trees must be a right pain for a farmer.

Do they get in the way of the cows and the crops?

They're the best thing out. Those trees will keep me warm.

Why do you think I cut them down?

I cut one down and put seven in to replace it.

-So you cut them down and use them for fuel?

-Yes.

How long does one tree last you?

If I'm going to be burning one of these trees,

it'll last me four days, five days.

-To fuel your house?

-Our house and the farm as well.

-So the whole place is run on trees.

-Yes. The whole place is run on,

-the heating is on trees.

-Can we chop one down?

-Yes.

This birch is a fast-growing native British tree

and for every one he cuts down, Harry plants seven more,

meaning he'll have a supply of fire wood for years to come.

Oh, oh, oh! THEY CHEER

Now we need to move the tree so we can cut it up into logs.

Time to call in the big boys.

-That's pretty good, isn't it?

-Yes.

-Yeah!

Harry shreds the smaller branches into chippings for use

in his boiler, but we'll need some of them

and some big logs to help us cook up our farmers' feast.

BELCHING

We're building up a roaring fire, below a giant spit.

But just what are we going to be cooking?

This is a real farmers' feast

and Harry has let us have the rest of our friend.

-Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Fred. OK.

-Hello, Fred.

What we need is you guys to help us spit Fred. Everyone take a limb.

Look at his tail!

What was it you wanted to eat? Ribs. There's your ribs.

Really hard.

Does it feel weird handling a pig, like it was once real?

Not really.

We've grew the pig up so it would feed us, that's its purpose in life.

When I was younger I wouldn't expect bacon like to come from this pig.

Did you ever think it came from an animal in the first place?

No, I just thought it came from the supermarket.

You can't think about it, because if you think about it,

a couple of, like, years ago, it would be like running around,

like, free. But now it's going to be someone's breakfast or dinner.

It's just lying here and it just looks so sad.

I'll still eat it because it's food and like we need food to survive.

And we need to celebrate Fred, now he's dead.

We shouldn't just chuck him away.

What we have to do is because you have a big thick joint here

and a bit thin here, thick there.

What we have to do, is put some foil round there,

so all this cooks a bit slower.

I'm going to go over once more.

If you think in the olden days they did it themselves,

they didn't even like, take it to a factory or anything.

Yes, they had to kill it themselves.

Stefan, say it's alive and you want to kill it...

Harry's your man. How would this pig have been killed, Harry?

What they do is electrocute them.

They put a pair of ear muffs over their ears and it goes, pfff,

and they drain the blood out,

that's what make your black pudding and things.

Would Fred have felt pain when he was killed?

No they don't feel any pain. It's so quick, they just go straight down.

-Just...

-It's really weird because when you buy it in the supermarket,

you don't look at it and think this was what it once was.

You don't think of it as Fred when it comes in a packet,

-in a plastic packet.

-Yeah. It's really disturbing.

Time now to put our porker on the pyre.

Fred weighs about 45 kilos and will take at least

four-and-a-half hours to cook.

A piggy like this can feed up to 100 people.

Or four hungry Gastronuts.

-That's cooked all right.

-That's pretty good.

-That smells lovely!

-I'm so hungry I could eat a pig!

-OK Gastronuts,

it's time for the farmers' ultimate feast.

-Wooh!

-It's your whole pig. Dig in!

THEY CHEER

-I'll get through the crackling!

-It's like a medieval feast. Look.

Look at that.

-Mmm.

-Is that good? It's nice and juicy?

That's beautiful.

There we go. Tail?

-Thank you.

-Have a little chew of that.

That's a lot of meat on one pig.

At first I thought I don't really want to eat it

because it was once alive. When you look at it now

and you can smell it and you're eating it

and it tastes so good, you don't really care.

Now I've been a Gastronut I'll think more carefully about

where my food comes from because I don't want to waste

an animal that's just died to give me some food.

I'll think about my food more carefully.

now I've been on Gastronuts,

because the animal gave up his life for you to eat it.

The most surprising thing about being on Gastronuts

was probably milking the cow, because it was so unexpected,

and the teat felt like a sausage.

Now I've been on Gastronuts I'll think a bit more carefully

about where my food comes from, because you can't just buy it

in the supermarket not knowing

where it's come from or what it's been through.

Most of us just nip down to the shops when we need food,

but when you follow the food from the field to the plate,

you realise what an extraordinary journey it's been on and when you

then eat it like a farmer does, you discover it kind of tastes better.

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