An Overview of Grow Your Own Christmas Dinner by Jimmy Doherty

Most people will know Jimmy Doherty from the hit documentary Grow Your Own Christmas Dinner. Jimmy Doherty’s Grow Your Own Christmas Dinner is a TV show that goes behind the operation that puts food on the tables of UK families. The documentary is about how workers in sprout fields, pudding factories, and turkey farms go into overdrive with the aim of meeting supermarkets’ demand. In the documentary, Jimmy compares the mass production of today’s foods to the days when all the food was home-grown. Jimmy then tests the different offers to determine which is better, with his friend Jamie Oliver doing the cooking using identical Christmas menus for the mass-produced ingredients and the home-grown ingredients.

Jimmy Doherty spent months growing the home grown food used in the documentary. He bought the mass produced food from giant supermarket factories and farms. In the documentary, the 1845 recipe for Christmas pudding with cow stomach and silver trinkets, which requires maturing for months before it is served is cooked and compared with microwaveable modern pudding. Oliver also prepares potatoes, carrots, and sprouts he has grown and compares the vegetables with graded, washed, and uniform counterparts from supermarkets.

The star of the show, Jimmy Doherty, was born 1975. Jimmy is a farmer based in Suffolk as well as a BBC TV presenter. Jimmy studies in Newport Free Grammar School and he has a degree in Animal Biology from University of East London as well as a PhD in entomology from Coventry University. Jimmy is a trained pig farmer. In 2002, he met runner Furney as the filming of Channel 4′s Jamie’ s Kitchen was taking place in a farm where he was working. Jimmy and Furney set up a pig farm, The Essex Pig Company that uses free range meat production practices for rare breeds. Their efforts have been followed by several fly-on-the-wall documentaries on BBC 2, some of the latest being A Farmer’s Life for Me, Museum of Life, Jimmy’s Global Harvest, and Jimmy’s Food Factory.