"Pricking Science's Silly Sausages"

The irreverent Jeremy Clarkson looks dubiously at food shortages and other food "science."

There are food riots in Haiti and Bangladesh. In Kenya hunger has driven half the population to set fire to the other half. In Bolivia they are fighting over vegetables. And even in Italy people took to the streets to complain about the price of pasta.

So you might imagine that all of the world’s scientists are currently in their bunkers, desperately trying to figure out why the world is running out of food all of a sudden and, more importantly, what can be done. For sure, they had a stab a while back at genetically modifying wheat so that it would grow – with no water, sunlight or soil – into a prepacked, presliced loaf. Sadly, though, the whole thing had to be abandoned when some antiGM food activists turned up in white boiler suits and rolled all over the experiment.

My favorite passage: All of which brings me on to a bunch of boffins in Australia who are warning people not to flush their tropical fish down the lavatory.

I know several people who keep such fish in England and none has ever felt the need to put his often very expensive collection in the khazi. Apparently, though, that’s what they do in Oz; and now one particular breed, called the platys, has made it to the ocean, where it’s causing havoc.

It was bred to live in an aquarium because it suffers from what I call Hammond syndrome – an inferiority complex resulting from the fact that it’s about 6ft short of being a shark. It is also tough and bright. Not only is it capable of dealing with the complexities of a U-bend, but it can also swim through several miles of Australian faeces just so it can get into the Pacific, where it is now decimating fish stocks, eating frogs and generally running around shouting: “You’re going home in a f****** ambulance.”

*laughs*