EXCLUSIVE: on his latest TV travelogue Michael Palin is in the Phillippines, but he draws the line at one recycled food type in a poverty stricken area and spoke to the Mirror about his experiences.
Michael Palin says the chicken dish was “a bridge too far” for him to eat in the morning of filming
Michael Palin says he had to turn down a food dish in the Phillippines as it was a “bridge too far” for him. The former Monty Python star, 83, normally tries lots of the local cuisine on his travelogues.
But in new Channel 5 series Michael Palin In The Philippines he was surprised by one thing on the menu known as Pagpag. Michael was told that it was recycled chicken which they took after people ate it.
He explains in the programme: “I’ve never seen anything that illustrates poverty quite as clearly as half-eaten fried chicken, which has been taken from the bins of fast food restaurants and then re-cooked. So this is ultimate food recycling. Food that’s already been on someone’s plate has been left behind, and this nice lady goes and collects it. Seeing this, I’m starting to understand why so many people are angry about the inequalities here.”
Speaking to the Mirror about his experiences in the Philippines, Michael admitted he was intrigued by the snack, but not enough to try it.
He said: “It was a bridge too far for me, certainly. Yeah. But it was interesting. The lady who was selling it again, she wasn’t conning anybody. She wasn’t a gangster or something like that showing off. She was a middle-aged woman. She was obviously a pillar of the community. People trusted her, and she’d been recycling these food for years and years, and no one seems to have died.
“I’ve eaten everything on my journeys, but I couldn’t eat recycled food. I’m afraid at that time of the day.”
The food was for sale in an area of poverty called Tondo and on the morning he was there Michael learned that the seller and friends had gone to fast food outlets the night before.
He added: “Any meat that had been thrown away, they brought it back, scraped it off the bone, cleaned it all up, and reboiled it, so everything was sort of officially hygienic, and then sold it the next the next day as little sort of delicacies.”
Elsewhere on his trip Michael gets up to all sorts of other adventures, including travelling through underground rivers and swimming with thousands of sardines in Moalboal.
Under military escort, Michael explores the extraordinary and haunting remains of the destroyed city of Marawi, and on the island of Jolo he meets a member of the terrorist group, Abu Sayyaf.
He said the trip, filmed last year when he was still 82, made him feel young at heart and told the Mirror: “When I actually did the Philippines show. There’s no special sort of conditions because of my age or something like that. I just did it like I used to travel, and it’s extraordinary how your body or your mind can help your body to carry on. And physically, I didn’t feel the strain of the Philippines journey until I came home, and it was a long flight, 16 and a half hours to get to Manila from London, and that’s what really wears you out. It’s the airports and the long flights.
“Time in the Philippines was rejuvenating. I felt great, you know. And I thought to myself, I’ll check on my passport that I really am 82.”
* Michael Palin in the Philippines – starts Monday, September 28 at 9pm, Watch|stream on 5.
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