Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat

Channel 4 describes the theme of the film: "With food prices soaring, Gregg Wallace investigates a controversial new lab-grown meat product that its makers claim could provide a solution to the cost-of-living crisis." The CEO of the company, Tamara Ennett, explained the procedure of collecting the flesh as "pain-subjective". The meat samples were grown in the laboratory, and genetically modified using the flesh cells to produce large pieces of meat. Wallace remarked: "under EU law, we couldn't possibly operate machines like this due to legislation. But now [after Brexit] we can harvest people and pay them for their flesh," and concludes the film: "So it's no surprise eating children seems a more likely path for our country." Wallace then travels to London for a taste test at Le Gavroche with Michel Roux Jr. Trying out three different samples of meat, they agree that the best was the "premium", later revealed to be from children under age seven who had just played to relax their muscles, as Wallace explained: "Like livestock on the way to the abattoir, any stress could affect the quality of their meat." == Revelation and reactions ==

It was later revealed that the documentary was a parody based on Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal, written in 1729. Swift had suggested that poor Irish people should sell their children to the rich as food. The essay was also shown in the credits. Good Harvest was a fake factory. It received 400 complaints to Ofcom. In a review in The Guardian, Lucy Mangan described it as "cleverly executed" and expressed her initial surprise, "It took a shamefully long time for me to work out what was going on... But for anyone even more gullible than I am, and especially if they have read their Swift, the next twist leaves no room for doubt about what is – quite unexpectedly on a weekday evening from mischievous Channel 4 and writer Matt Edmonds – actually happening." Neil Armstrong of BBC Culture, compared the mockumentary to the 1992 horror mockumentary Ghostwatch, Chris Morris's Brass Eye satire series of the 1990s, and The Great Donor Show which shocked the Netherlands in 2007. Anita Singh reviewed in The Telegraph with a critical comment, saying, "It would have worked far better as an advert for vegetarianism. Instead it played out like a Black Mirror episode stripped of cleverness and subtlety." Armstrong on BBC Culture also noted that "a couple of members of Parliament condemned it and some who watched insisted that, even as satire, it had been – forgive the pun – in poor taste." == References ==