In The Danger Zone

Cooking in the Danger Zone tells the story behind Stefan Gates' extraordinary culinary journey to the world's most dangerous and difficult places. In the course of his travels for this acclaimed television series, the award-winning food writer ate fat-tailed sheep with Taliban warlords in Afghanistan, yak penis with Communist officials in China, UN subsistence rations with refugees in Uganda and drank irradiated wine with the inhabitants of Chernobyl. The result is moving and sometimes shocking television that uses food to understand to world in crisis.

Now, Stefan draws on the journals he kept as each adventure unfolded, to reveal his behind-the-scenes struggles to avoid making a grotesque parody of a reality TV cookery show and gain control of the emotional rollercoaster he found himself on. His account is by turns both hugely entertaining and thought provoking, blending culture and food, ethics and politics, and comedy and tragedy, before teasing some sort of enlightenment out of the chaos.