Man Vs Food @ 10am and 2pm Wednesdays, Dave

As human beings, every so often we need to ingest a combination of carbohydrates, fats, protein, sugars, salts, vitamins and various other (technical term alert) things to keep our body functioning it properly. When they’re together in one product, we call them food. Food is our ally. Food is our friend.

Except, in Man Vs Food when food is made into an enemy that must be eaten and eaten and eaten and eaten and eaten until there is nothing of it left and we stand triumphantly over a mountain of carcasses and plants. Yup, this is the deadly sin of gluttony in HD.

Naturally, the show comes from America where competitive eating not only has TWO governing bodies but is also occasionally aired on sports broadcaster ESPN and the Fox Network.

The premise of the programme is that Adam Richman, actor and food enthusiast (at what point does “food enthusiast” become “greedy, fat bastard?”) travels around the USA sampling food and…well, that’s pretty much it really.

Essentially, the half hour can be broken down into two parts; local culinary history followed by glutton by the plate load and lots of shots of Richman sweating profusely; the quality and quantity respectively alluded to in its Wikipedia page.

To be fair to Richman, somewhat obviously, he does really love his food. He really knows how to verbally express the tastes of food and would make a decent food critic. This makes the first half of the show eminently watchable as he enjoys local delicacies or age-old family recipes that are invariably fried.

But there is a reason that Man Vs Food has racked four seasons worth of offerings now and it isn’t food/travel documentary-ing. It is watching a guy inching closer to a coronary one French fry and one segment of what used to be a pig at a time.

The second half of the show involves Richman attempting some manner of food-eating task; a variant on something being really hot (chicken wings, chilli, sushi etc.) or really, really big, like a pizza as large as the wheel of a cart, a burger bigger than Richman’s head, enough catfish fillets to cause a problem for the local ecosystem, those kind of things.

In this afternoon’s episode, for example, the challenge was to consume 6 pounds worth of meat and bread with a side of a pound and half of French Fries. All in all, it would be like eating a less hairy version of my cat. Pork and ham and turkey and beef burger and sausages and some more pork, each smothered in BBQ sauce, all come together to form a burger type object as thick as a man’s thigh.

“A human can’t fit that inside him” Adam exclaims as the monstrosity emerges from the kitchen before proceeding to try. Perhaps he has the memory of a goldfish. Or the stomach of a whale. Or both.

Either way, neither physical mutation aids him in his quest as the 45 minutes elapse with only two thirds of the food clogging up Richman’s colon and making for an uncomfortable morning the next day.

This is where the slight ethical dilemma that the show presents becomes apparent; leftover food and eating for the sake of eating. Despite Richman’s end of show sign-off (“In the endless battle between man and food, this week, man/food is the winner”), some people could quite do with that leftover food. The issue is less apparent than if the show was half an hour of Richman eating a pizza the size of a paddling pool and shouting “NO FOOD FOR YOU! ALL FOOD IS FOR RICHMAN!” in Ethiopia whilst locals look on. Even racists wouldn’t watch that. But still, the issue kind of lurks over the whole affair.

The other slight concern/ reason for watching is the physical condition of Richman himself during the challenge. Whilst not being noticeably fat, an hour on a treadmill a day sees to that, clogging up one’s arteries with the various fats that only a six types of meat sandwich can bring cannot be contusive to a healthy lifestyle. But, hey, he’s having fun as this clip clearly demonstrates. Besides, it wouldn't be the same if he was eating tonnes of healthy food like four bushels of apples or a trough of pears or a barrel of carrots.

In a way, Richman is like the Charlie Sheen of the food world; people tuning in to watch him slowly breakdown and threaten possible death through ingesting way too much of an item into his body.

As he chugs through the half cow before him, sweat develops on his brow, the breaths are deeper and more strained and some twitching occurs; almost as if the bovine’s last seconds of life are being recreated in the body of the man eating his corpse.

It’s all strangely mesmeric, compelling and quite an addictive guilty pleasure. And so is the show.