White House cooking show faked the fruit and veg

FOOD NETWORK ADMITS “WHITE HOUSE” PRODUCE WASN’T FROM MICHELLE’S GARDEN

America’s Food Network had a hit on its hands with a special two-hour edition of “Iron Chef America”. Its top chefs met Michelle Obama in her White House garden where she did her bit about how people ought to eat healthily. The chefs then gathered produce to use when they cooked five special dishes.

After a massive build-up, 7.6 million viewers tuned in on January 3rd to watch, a record for the channel. Viewers saw the chefs picking broccoli, fennel, sweet potatoes and tomatillos (a Mexican variant of the tomato) to use in their recipes, which they then cooked on the show.

It turns out, however, that the fruit and veg they claimed came from the White House garden did not do so. They were stunt vegetables, standing in for the real thing.

There was such a gap between filming in Washington and the actual cooking, which took place in New York, that the White House produce would apparently have been rather past its prime. The Food Network admitted the switcheroo but said that their chefs used exactly the same types of fruit and vegetables that they had picked in the garden of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It isn’t only British broadcasters, then, who resort to TV trickery.

Are they fans of The French Connection at the BBC?
British TV shows fake it again