No travels with no goat
Lotje Deelman was editor-in-chief of ELLE Eten, has been working for Allerhande for almost 15 years and worked behind the scenes on television programmes such as MasterChef, Worsten van Babel On Tour and De Nieuwe Lekkerbek. She ate pig’s trotters with Anthony Bourdain and flirted with Gordon Ramsay in his Aston Martin. Lotje is the (co-)author of more than ten cookbooks and, in her kitchen in the Drenthe countryside, is never afraid to set something on fire. Every week on FavorFlav, Lotje shares what’s on her mind. This week: auditioning for a television programme.
Last spring, I received an email from a television producer who was looking for foodies from all over the world for a completely crazy programme. Travel with a goat, it was going to be called. Two culinary experts travel together for a week in a strange country with a live, edible animal. At the end of the trip, a butcher or a tribe is waiting to slaughter the animal, but the two foodies can also decide to keep it alive.
The idea is to make a not-too-moralistic contribution to the discussion about eating meat this way. And, of course, to make a pretty funny programme. In Kenya, Peru, Oman or Kazakhstan, for example. The question was whether I had any tips for participants. The email ended with: “By the way, I’ve also put your name on the longlist.”
‘Fuck it’
After forty-five minutes of doubting, biting my nails and fierce inner conflict, I thought: fuck it. I’ll just apply. Living a grand and eventful life, that’s your motto, right? Put your money where your mouth is, then, Lotje Deelman. And so it came to pass. With my heart pounding. I made it onto a shorter list and was asked to make a video. About myself, obviously. In English. “It can be funny.” So that’s what I did. I drove towards the camera endlessly many times along the same stretch of Drenthe heath on my custom built chopper to introduce myself. I had myself filmed while training with extremely heavy Bulgarian bags and battle ropes (yes, I really do that) and supposedly shooting pheasants out of the sky with an air rifle (no, I never do that in real life).
Including a fake goat
I munched on rainbow Swiss chard from my then still very promising vegetable garden and, wearing a South American poncho, drank wine with a fake goat around a campfire while fantasising to the camera about the best flavourings (Garlic? Rosemary?) for goat meat. Definitely no Oscar winning movie, but it did make for a weekend of a great deal of laughter. So I sent off the video, with the accompanying text including:
Keywords: good sport
Motivation: wants to travel with a goat because: love to travel, love to cook, love to eat, love making tv (behind the scenes usually), in desperate need of new impulses & weird adventures, show sounds like good fun and making sense at the same time. Love to make some sense, every now and then.
General info: no vegan
Among my suggestions for participants were, by the way, Janny van der Heijden, De Worsten van Babel, Emma de Thouars and Action Bronson. If I wasn’t selected, I hoped at least to see one of them again with a resisting goat on a rope in Africa.
Do I really want this?
When I didn’t make the selection, it was both a disappointment and a relief. I had been prepared to say b(aaah), but in the meantime I had also become a little scared. Do I really want this? On television? Can I even do that? What do I wear? By the way, I think my answer to the question “Followers on social media: 2, maybe 4” may have done me in, given that it was for an online television channel. In the meantime, I’m cautiously working on that too—on my online presence.
Travel with a goat started last week. On Insight TV. Do watch it. I’d apply again in a heartbeat. I don’t think that goat would have made it with me …
