Sun, Jan 3, 2010
Five British youths, avid fast-food consumers, embark on a journey to South Asian countries producing five of the main ingredients, to experience how they are harvested and processed. They start on the trail on tuna-fish on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi (formely Celebes). Conditions in the cannery prove exhausting, due to the heat resulting from EU-export-required hygiene norms and profit-crucial productivity. The native Nigerian participant is duly expelled by unanimous vote for breaking glass while manhandling his Bengali-sired colleague Manos. Both remaining boys embark on a fishery ship, where cramped conditions and pay are even worse.
Sun, Jan 10, 2010
The Brits join prawn fishers on Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. The native nursery workers live in miserable jungle swamp huts without any amenities, surviving from their own harvest. To prevent the prawns being swept away by tides, lengthy earth ditches must constantly, hastily be (re)build. Even when strong young farm-boy James joins the team, thus again six, the backbreaking toil proves beyond their strength, yet a native team filling in for their backlog does as much in about a sixth of the time. Next they participate in harvesting, which has to be done at night. Finally to the processing plant, where similar hygiene and productivity standards for export to the EU again result in frustration, especially for Manos, who also rebels against the rude supervision style.
Sun, Jan 17, 2010
In a poor, desolate Thai region, the six Brits experience the hard life of rice growers. They make the grave mistake to rent the best, most expensive house, spelling trouble to pay for food. Thei first task, collecting rice plants to be replanted, proves so backbreaking in the scorching sun that Thai laborers must help, so their pay is halved. Even a satisfactory second day, despite Manos repeatedly straying, can barely make up the rent backlog. So they're starved even worse when moved to the processing plant, where only James' tireless toil can make up for general weakness and Josh's incapacitating foot inflammation. A chicken donates by neighbors forces weak-hearted Manos to confront his favorite dish's fate. As the harvest season ended, they must follow poor locals to wait for the next in a Bangkok slum, desperate for work.
Wed, Jan 20, 2010
In Bangkok, the six British youth are supposed to try some of the seasonal laborer job. Only James has the stomach and courage to start on arrival in a fish processing workshop, a ghastly experience of constant stench, squalor and backbreaking discomfort. The others, feeling guilty in their hotel, try to join in the next day. Manos gets squeamish, especially in their next job, a modern plant where countless live chickens are killed, gutted, cut up and packaged at murderous speed. Josh needs emergency hospital help before his festering leg infection would have required amputation, a real risk for Asian field laborers. Once home, the youngsters try to adjust their resumed luxury lives, each in their ways.