Fact-Check: How Genuine is Video of UK’s “Miracle Meat” Genetically Produced from Human Flesh?
Claim: A viral video claims that there is a British food factory that produces a large amount of genetically engineered human meat, called “Miracle Meat ” in the United Kingdom.
Full Text: On Monday (24 July), Channel 4 aired a new “documentary” from the Masterchef presenter, with the unassuming title “Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat.”
Gregg Wallace is a British English broadcaster, entrepreneur, media personality, writer and former greengrocer known for co-presenting MasterChef, Celebrity MasterChef and MasterChef: The Professionals.
In the said documentary, the episode description reads: “with food prices soaring, Gregg Wallace investigates a controversial new lab-grown meat product that its makers claim could provide a solution to the cost-of-living crisis.”
Wallace, 58, is shown visiting an alleged human meat-harvesting plant in Lincolnshire, where he meets some of the donors. Looking around the factory, he explains that “under EU law, we couldn’t possibly operate machines like this due to legislation. But now we can harvest people and pay them for their flesh.”
The host then travels to London, where TV chef Michel Roux Jr cooks the “meat” for him at his Michelin-starred restaurant Le Gavroche.
The cook tries the so-called human meat and attempts to guess which person it came from in a line-up.
The video has gone viral on social media, especially among Nigerians on Whatsapp, and shared with this caption, “May God help us oooo, I saw this and I am so scared. The world has come to an end indeed.”
Verification: PRNigeria Fact Checkers watched the video from beginning to the end and discovered that the video was by British television channel depicts that there is a development in food technology by which a British industry produces a large amount of genetically engineered human meat.
However, probing further, a search engine result of the keywords revealed that the video has been labeled as a “mockumentary” based on a satirical essay, “A Modest Proposal, by Jonathan Swift” in 1729 that urged poor Irish people to sell their children to the rich as food.
The Independent, a British online newspaper provided additional reporting clarifying that the show in question was actually a mockumentary created by comedy writer Matt Edmonds.
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But the UK’s Daily Mail verified in its report that viewers weren’t sure whether the disturbing investigation was real while watching it on July 24 and some complained to Ofcom.
The Office of Communications, commonly known as Ofcom, is the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom. It has wide-ranging powers across the television, radio, telecoms and postal sectors
The broadcasting regulator confirmed to MailOnline on Wednesday it had received 393 complaints which mainly objected to the theme of the mockumentary, a development UK’s Mirror also confirmed in its own report of the matter.
Reacting to the backlash, Wallace himself said: ‘It’s satire – so I suppose that was the point. Everybody was an actor. I was acting. None of it was real.’
He told the Telegraph: ‘I thought at some point people would fall about laughing but they didn’t. People asked how I could put my name to this documentary but I didn’t – it wasn’t a documentary.’
A mockumentary is a television programme or film which takes the form of a serious documentary in order to satirize its subject. It is a work of fiction that’s presented in the style of a documentary. Its linguistic roots lie in the conjunction of the words “mock” and “documentary” (i.e., mock documentary, or fake documentary).
Conclusion: Verification by PRNigeria reveals that the video is a satirical documentary that was tagged as “one of the best hoaxes in media history.” It is also being simply described as “a sociopolitical mockumentary, a straight-faced, grimly cannibalistic satire on the cost of living crisis.”
PRNigeria therefore concludes that the viral online video portraying a British food industry that produces a large amount of genetically engineered human meat, called “Miracle Meat” is a mock documentary and not real.
