Ingrid Howes

I was really looking forward to this, I love international food (especially Greek,Vietnamese and a good old fashion roast!). I never thought I could ever even think this about a cooking show - but It honestly felt more like a political statement than the Inclusive international cooking show I was hoping for. The first episode was intentionally edited to be Australia v China - (from the editing, you can clearly see it could have been in any order) and that wouldn’t have been a problem, if the judges were not so pathetic (and they have seriously lost all credibility in the first episode!). The Chinese dessert looked absolutely awful and an extraordinary amount of viewers obviously agree, this show was after all made for the Multicultural Australian audience. Rather than being inclusive, I sadly feel it has actually been divisive 😕, purely down to the judge’s and Channel 7. In hindsight, the desperation was obvious when Manu posted a controversial post regarding himself and the poor Pete Evans THE DAY BEFORE this show aired. This post on Manu’s Instagram raked up nearly 800 comments the last time I commented on it, mainly from Pete’s “conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxers” (perhaps that’s now Manu’s “target market”?) As Manu’s posts generally rack up 10 - 50 comments (yes, I used to follow!) this was clearly a publicity stunt...so sad. I notice this morning all comments on that post have now been deleted and commenting has now been blocked. Glad to see neither Gary or Matt posted about George the day before- I guess they have far better PR teams! Epic fail 👎🏼