Guardian

‘After last week’s excellent debut in Afghanistan, this series about conflict zone cuisine stretches its mandate a little this week by visiting South Korea, a country which hasn’t heard a shot fired in more than half a century. In search of a frisson of hazard, presenter Stefan Gates investigates South Korea’s infamous quasi-legal dog-meat industry. It’s compelling viewing: Gates visits Korea’s biggest dog farm and a dog restaurant, trying to square his epicurean’s curiosity about eating dog with his western-conditioned reflex of viewing dogs as pets rather than livestock. This is terrific reportage: thoughtful, unpatronising and very gently provocative.’

Guardian - The Guide, 22/07/06

Telegraph

‘At first glance, a cookery programme set in Afghanistan might seem akin to a Syrian version of What Not to Wear - unlikely, and bordering on the tasteless. But what the makers of Cooking in the Danger Zone have understood is that in developing countries, food is politics. “in Afghanistan, half the children are said to be malnourished,” said TV cook Stefan Gates, as Sabra, a widow with six kids prepares her meal with her World Food Programme rations of lentils, wheat and oil (no rice). “we are often hungry,” she said as her children tore through their food. Meanwhile, guests staying in Kabul’s first five-star hotel certainly didn’t go short. “Those prawns have to be flown in,” said that maitre d’ as fancy food was wheeled through to the nameless “ambassadors and investors”. Stefan observed that the $300 it cost per night was the annual wage of your average Afghani. But then, it was the only place where you didn’t feel he might bet randomly killed. After visiting a tank graveyard full of rusting Soviet military detritus (including Scud missiles), Stefan noted it was blown up the very next day and two people killed. Even when he retreated to the hills to prepare kebabs using meat and testicles from the fames Afghan fat-tailed sheep, you could see the army helicopters humming by. The suffering and violence was pervasive, but what of the future? “I want my daughters to go to school,” said Sabra, a desire so humble that it was heartbreaking. An insane idea, but a fascinating film.

Abi Grant. Telegraph 19/7/6

Independent

Stefan Gates at times functions as Ant and/or Dec in his attempt to broaden the range of species Westerners are prepared to digest. Last night he was in South Korea, a country whose consumables include eggs from the inside of the chicken (rather than the inside of a shell). dried frogs and dog meat. Cultural objections(dressed as moral ones) centred on the fact that dogs were kept in poor conditions, but in farms of up to 2,000 they were looked after well and seemed content. Gates revealed that dog-oil cream is very good for the skin, while spiced dog penis is a delicacy, so expect a surge in the queue outside Battersea Dogs Home this morning.

Peter Conchie 26/7/6

Times

After Ben Anderson and Simon Reeve’s travelogues from some of the world’s most troubled countries comes this new twist on the formula. Stefan Gates, a TV cook, considers himself to have pretty adventurous tastes, which is just as well — in this first epsiode he visits Afghanistan, where even kite flying has a dangerous edge. Testicle kebabs, a street vendor’s pancake (“We’ll take him to hospital later,” jokes Gates’s guide) and the legendary fat-tailed sheep are on the menu, but there is time for some serious comment too, particularly in Gates’s meetings with women.

Radio Times

The second in this series of hybrid food and international reports sees foodie Stefan Gates turn reporter to investigate the Korean dog meat industry. He's treading in territory so sensitive that his efforts to uncover what really goes on attract official scrutiny and a local TV news crew. Dog lovers will be appalled, as Gates is at times, but he also discovers differences of taste and opinion among Koreans themselves. This fascinating take on cultural norms builds to a natural climax: Gates is known for cooking and eating anything, but will he reach for his chopsticks when served a bowl of dog stew?

Geoff Ellis

Guardian

Part three of Stefan Gates’ excellent culinary tour of the world’s trouble spots. This week, the chef visits northern Uganda, where a brutal war has raged between Uganda’s military and the Lord’s Resistance Army, a ragbag militia of rapists and child-snatchers led by a fundamentalist Christian. Gates’ fpcus on the universal preoccupation of food - in this part of Uganda, this involves a depressing anount of bringing ingenuity to bear on aid rations - helps to humanise and explain a conflict which otherwise might well glaze the eyes of the casual viewer. Terrific, again.

AM 29/7/6

An extraordinary review from the Mail on Sunday

There’s no easy way to say this, but cooking on television has got completely out of control. Not only do cooks clog up terrestrial TV like fat in an artery, but their numerous spin-offs and repeats pepper the digital schedules with their stove-based idiocy as well. Cookery has become TV’s default setting, and no idea, it seems, is too daft for transmission as long as there’s some catering involved. Fans of comedy will recall the scene in which Alan Partridges attempts to rescue his TV career by pitching a series of ill-considered programme ideas to his former boss at the BBC. After Monkey Tennis and Inner-City Sumo the increasingly desperate Partridge comes up with Cooking in Prison. Now, reality draw ever closer to parody as the BBC brings us, in all seriousness, Cooking in the Danger Zone.

    The irony, though, is that as ridiculous as this programme sounds, it turns out to be very good indeed, so much so that it even works as  kind of antidote to the mundanity of the rest of culinary TV. Each week, Stefan Gates, one of the few TV cooks not yet bloated with his own self-worth - travels to the world’s trouble spots to discover what people eat and how they go about getting it. If you have ever tired of Jamie Oliver sourcing ingredients from cheery locals, then watching Stefan navigate raw sewage and ammunition dumps in search of a square meal is, figuratively speaking, a breath of fresh air.

    Rather than simply being a cheap picnic in someone else’s misery, Cooking in the Danger Zone manages to successfully blend the political and social realities of its locations with the nitty gritty of its subjects’ nutritional needs. Having made kebabs in Afghanistan and taken stock of a Korean dog farm, this week he pitches up in Uganda for what turns out to be the most interesting programme in the series so far.

    Although Uganda is one of the most fertile places on earth, civil unrest means that millions of its people are confined to refugee camps. Its to these places that Stefan goes to find out how you cook for a family of 11 on rations that make up just 63% of the minimum amount of food recommended for basic sustenance and survival.

    What could be grotesque and patronising turns out to be informative and occasionally shocking. It say something about our relationship with the media that its easier to absorb information about world poverty from a cookery programme than it is from the news, but that’s what this show does so well. The need for and the ability to appreciate food unites us all, and these excursions into the extremes of cuisine highlight what we have in common with people whose lives appear to be utterly different from our own.

Michael Holden 30/7/6

Sunday Times

For such a diffident-looking chap, the food fanatic Stefan Gates has been very bold in this excellent travel series. He concludes by visiting Burma, easily the most hazardous “danger zone” yet, smuggling himself into the jungle where the Karen people are a fighting vicious guerilla war with the Burmese army. He discovers that having mined the fields of the local villages, the soldiers must catch what animals they can. Let’s just say it’s another episode that will not thrill the World Wildlife Foundation

Sunday Times 04/03/07

Independent

In the final episode of this absorbing series, Stefan Gates steals into the perilous eastern jungles of Burma, where he patrols with the Karen rebels and finds out how their crops have been devastated by the Burmese army

Independent 3/3/7

Sunday Times

Stefan Gates, who presents this excellent show, has agreed in advance to refuse all food from Chernobyl lest it be contaminated with radiation. Faced with an insulting 80-year-old whose soup he won’t taste, Gates politely tucks in, despite audible instructions to the contrary from his producer. His bravado quickly loses its sheen, however, when doctors find raised levels of radioactivity in his stomach.

Sunday Times 4/2/7

Sunday Times

This excellent series continues with Stefan Gates in Venezuela the day after the radical Hugo Chavez was re-elected president, First on the menu is a confusing post-election press conference, washed down with a riot and seasoned with tear gas and gunfire. Chavez channels oil into assisting the poor, and the presenter visits one of the 6,000 state-funded soup kitchens that feed one million a day.

Sunday Times 24/2/7

UISA PEARSON

Cooking in the Danger Zone, BBC4

'I AM a TV cook" announced Stefan Gates, "and I like to think I'm pretty adventurous when it comes to food". Here I hold up my hands and admit I'd never heard of Stefan Gates. Gordon Ramsay, yes, Ainsley Harriott, of course. But Stefan Gates? No.

As it turned out, Gates seems to be more a foodie than a chef. He's written a book about exotic foods and presented the BBC's Full on Food, but as far as I can tell from his online CV, he hasn't spent any time in a professional kitchen. Still, as far as his new series, Cooking in the Danger Zone is concerned, Michelin stars wouldn't be much help. For this show is a curious hybrid, where current affairs meets cookery in a travelogue format.

In the western world, canine meat is taboo, a step away from cannibalism. Keen to discover whether dog meat had been given a fair trial, Gates set off to Korea, boasting that the nation shared his own philosophy: "they'll eat pretty much anything". And that includes about one and a half million dogs a year. Gates might be adventurous, but would he be able to stomach a serving of Fido?

Cooking in the Danger Zone managed to find out more about the issue of dog farming than any shaky footage filmed by animal rights activists. The open access Gates received was because he'd come to Korea not to dismiss dog meat out of hand, but to try to understand its place in the culture. We started off at a dog farm where the animals were kept in conditions that Gates said were of a better standard than many European pig farms. Nonetheless, he was still unsettled at the sight of the caged fluffy pooches. He went to a local restaurant to see dog stew being cooked up, but decided he wasn't quite ready to take a bite.

As the documentary progressed, he interviewed people with different viewpoints ñ from a woman who runs an animal rescue centre to a Buddhist monk who said although he wouldn't eat dog meat, the practice couldn't be condemned because it was traditional. Perhaps most surprising was his discussion with some of Korea's growing band of pet owners who spend a fortune on their dogs. Their view was that the subject is all about personal choice, and that dogs can be seen as livestock, just like pigs or chickens or cows.

By taking such an open approach, Cooking in the Danger Zone helped me understand the psyche behind eating dog meat. I'm a vegetarian so you wouldn't catch me touching the stuff, but for meat-eaters, I don't see the problem. What makes a dog more important than a pig? In the end, Gates bottled it. The reason he gave waiting cameras from Korean TV for turning down the dog stew was that he didn't want to give approval to an unregulated industry. I was surprised, especially as he could easily have sourced meat that had come from a farm with high standards. Most likely he just didn't want to return home to sacks full of hate mail.

Cooking in the Danger Zone had clearly raised my viewing standards, because when I turned over to watch Modern Toss, I expected to laugh. It is billed as a comedy sketch show but for 30 excruciatingly long minutes, I didn't laugh; I didn't even smile. In fact I frowned so much that I'm considering sending the programme makers a bill for my now much-needed Botox. The animations included Mr Tourette, a signwriter whose billboards cause offence. Ha ha. I think I'd rather eat dog meat than watch Modern Toss again.

The Scotsman 26/7/06

Guardian

‘This series was an absolute joy when it debuted on BBC4, and it deserves the opportunity of a BBC2 run. It’s rooted in a concept which could have gone horribly wrong - getting food writer Stefan Gates to visit assorted troublespots and heckholes, and explain them through their cuisine. However, Gates proves a deceptively sharp, very funny and gently inquisitive voyager, and this is wonderful documentary television. Tonight, Gates visits the dog-munchers of Korea and the whale, walrus and seal-scoffing Inuit of northern Canada. Viewers may disenjoy the footage of seal-hunting and dog-farming.’ AM. 5/5/07

Times

Stefan Gates is an engaging, thoughtful and unassuming presenter who has fascinating stories to tell. In tonight’s episode, he visits the exclusion zone in Chernobyl, where you can’t eat a meal without getting it checked first with a Geiger counter. BBC Health and Safety guidelines forbid him to eat anything – which he ignores – although he does at least have the good sense to check out the mushrooms he picked with the mayor, which turn out to contain eight times the accepted levels of radiation. In the same programme, he travels to Tonga in the Pacific. Thanks to the local enthusiasm for suckling pig, vast tubs of corned beef and coconut milk with everything, it has the most overweight population in the world.

12 May 07

Times

Looking at troubled parts of the world through something as basic as the food that people eat was an inspired idea, and Stefan Gates was the ideal person to do it. He is articulate, intrepid and sympathetic, and - unlike many foodies on TV - he doesn’t show off. Tonight Gates is in war-torn Uganda where at least there are glimmers of hope. ‘Despite the constant reminders that every aspect of life is still affected by the ongoing violence,’ he says, ‘nothing quite beats eating grilled testicles in the spring sunshine at the foothills of the Hindu Kush.’

19 May 07

Contact: stefan”at”thegastronaut.com

(replace “at” with @)

DANGER ZONE

Blog

About Stefan

Video clips

Reviews of The Danger Zone

Danger Zone extract intro

Danger Zone extract Cameroon

Weird food gallery series 2

Behind scenes Israel West Bank

Behind the scenes: series 1

Behind the scenes: series 2

Behind the scenes: series 3

Behind the scenes: Cameroon

Behind the scenes: Afghanistan

Behind the scenes: Uganda

Behind the scenes: Tonga

Weird food gallery

Burma

Haiti

China

Uganda

Korea

Afghanistan

Chernobyl

Arctic

India

Fiji & Tonga

GASTRONAUT

Gastronaut book

Gastronaut recipes

Gastronaut extracts

Gastronaut food adventures

Gastronaut Video

About Stefan

Images & text © Stefan Gates

Stuff you might like

My main squeeze’s photography

My mate Ewan’s short film

Danny Wallace’s site

BBC’s This World

Crackpot scientists

Olly Smith insane wino