{"id":786324,"date":"2026-09-29T12:02:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T12:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/786324\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T12:02:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T12:02:11","slug":"michael-palin-83-refuses-to-eat-food-for-first-time-in-tv-travel-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/786324\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Palin, 83, refuses to eat food for first time in TV travel career"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Palin<\/a> marked a first in his career this year after refusing to eat a dish while travelling in the Philippines – the only time he has done so in four decades of presenting TV travel programmes. The 83-year-old Monty Python<\/a> star confessed one meal was a “bridge too far” for him to try.<\/p>\n

A seasoned traveller, Michael is used to tucking into plenty of local cuisines, and over the years has sampled everything from Peruvian palm wine fermented in human saliva to a cobra that was skinned alive in China. But one chicken dish was simply too much to contemplate trying.<\/p>\n

In his new series for Channel 5, Michael Palin in the Philippines<\/a>, he had the opportunity to try Pagpag – “recycled” chicken, which is taken from bins after someone has already eaten part of it.<\/p>\n

He said on the show: “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.<\/p>\n

“Seeing this, I’m starting to understand why so many people are angry about the inequalities here.”<\/p>\n

\"Chicken\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The chicken is taken from bins (Image: Channel 5)<\/p>\n

He told The Mirror: “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.<\/p>\n

“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 this food for years and years, and no one seems to have died.”<\/p>\n

He added: “I’ve eaten everything on my journeys, but I couldn’t eat recycled food, I’m afraid,<\/a> at that time of the day.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michael Palin marked a first in his career this year after refusing to eat a dish while travelling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":786325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-786324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/786325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}