What’s cool and green and seen all over? Eco-themed television! Green programming is a growing niche in entertainment, and each week, we’ll look at shows that make us shout out “I want my green TV!”
“˜Future Forward’ Inspires Cooks to Recycle Kitchen Scraps
Planet Green’s “Future Food” executive chef, Omar Cantu of the world-renowned Moto restaurant in Chicago, shocks viewers and diners alike with his unusual culinary creations. This week, he was even more eco-friendly than usual, when he challenged his crew to recycle discarded food.
After rendering innocent bratwursts inedible via an incident with a flamethrower, he repurposed the still usable bits instead of tossing them in the trash.
Inspired, he ordered his staff to recycle the potato skins. Success?
First, they made chili cheese fries out of frozen pureed potato skins, crinkle cut, coated in potato starch to stiffen and fried in beef fat. For the chili, they pulverized deep fried peels into a ground beef texture. The “cheese” sauce was even more creative – juiced carrot scraps, eggs, salt, and truffle oil. The final result looked just like regular chili cheese fries, and yes, according to diners, they were delicious.
We viewers may not have the culinary creative skills, or proper kitchen gear, to go this far outside the box. But hopefully the show will inspire a few people to think twice before throwing away their scraps.
Stephen Colbert’s Global Warming Smackdown
The global warming “debate” escalates further between meteorologists and climate scientists this week. A New York Times article reported that 90 percent of climatologists believe global warming is man-made while only 31 percent of meteorologists agree. Sadly, the same article says most Americans trust weathermen for their climate information more than politicians like Al Gore. Aren’t we talking about the same job where it’s OK to be wrong over 50 percent of the time?
On this week’s “Colbert Report,” fake conservative news anchor Stephen Colbert brought the “Science Catfight” to his desk. In one corner was Joe Bastardi, the chief Accuweather forecaster, and in the other corner, Brenda Ekwurzel, a Union of Concerned Scientists climatologist.
Neither got much of a chance to defend their argument in the presence of Colbert. One of our favorites? “The sea levels rising… could that just be because… Americans are getting fatter and going swimming?”
Join us next week – same time, same channel – for more of the latest highlights in green TV.
Jesie Lee