Feasts is a British food and travel television documentary series produced by Plum Productions in which epicurean and author Stefan Gates joins three very different cultures and immerses himself in some of the most extraordinary feasts and festivals on Earth.
The series originally aired in the UK on BBC Four from 20 May to 3 June, 2009. There are three hour-long episodes in the series.
Feasts premiered in South Africa on DStv's BBC Knowledge channel on Friday 4 December 2009, at 21h30. New episodes air weekly.
Repeats
Saturdays: 02h55, 23h00
Sundays: 07h40, 18h05
Mondays: 08h55
Synopsis
Festivals are the one time of the year where families, communities and whole nations come together to celebrate. But what do these ritual festivals tell us about people and their cultures?
In this globe-trotting three-part series, intrepid food writer Stefan Gates finds out.
Travelling to Japan, India and Mexico, Stefan follows the build-up to some of the most important religious and cultural extravaganzas, and joins in the extraordinarily lavish affairs that can last for days at a time.
In India, Stefan takes part in the ten-day Onam Feast, which culminates in a huge all-day feast called Onasadya, a 13-course meal served on a banana leaf.
Stefan also visits Mexico where he takes part in The Day of the Dead – a wildly colourful three-day festival welcoming the deceased spirits back to Earth.
The focus of the festival is making altars decorated with the best possible food. But this food is not for human consumption, but to lure the spirits back home.
Finally, Stefan visits Japan where he takes part in the Inazawa Hadaka Matsuri Festival, which culminates when a massive rice cake is paraded through the town and is eaten by villagers for good luck.
Along his way, Stefan also attends smaller feasts celebrating weddings and funerals, but above all, he discovers how, even though times and tastes change, people's cultural history remains alive in the rituals that make up their feasts.
Episodes
Episode 1: India
Stefan makes a journey across India to discover how feasts and celebration divide - and bring together - a turbulent nation that can be riven by religious tension and extremes of wealth.
He is shocked to see how much extravagance and social engineering there is in an expensive showpiece Rajasthani Hindu wedding, yet how little emotion is actually expressed.
These events are spectacular, and the scale is terrifying for a father of two young daughters.
In Kerala, Stefan experiences the bewildering festival of Onam, a Hindu celebration that brings this massive state of millions of people together, Hindu and Christian, rich and poor alike.
Over several days he joins almost all of the entire 32m population in sitting down to exactly the same meal - an 11-portion feast eaten with fingers from a banana leaf.
Stefan joins in the Pulikali, the tiger dance, and is apparently he first westerner ever to take part. It is the most physically uncomfortable, gruesome day of his life.
He has his body hair shaved off with a dry razor, then spends five hours being painted with several layers of household gloss paint, holding on to two sticks to keep his arms outstretched as he dries out.
He is then covered in a sweaty, sticky mask and a pair of bordello pants, and packed off into the streets to join his team in dancing like a maniac around the baking-hot streets of the city of Thrissur for four hours.
Episode 2: Japan
Stefan attempts to get under the skin of the traditional Japanese reserve by joining in some amazing feasts and festivals, a journey which culminates with Stefan and 10,000 Japanese men wearing nothing but loin cloths in a drunken rampage at a sacred Shinto temple.
He starts his trip by helping a Shinto priestess carry a six-foot wooden penis around a suburb of Tokyo, as she bemoans how kids today seem to have lost their traditional Japanese reserve, before joining the Baby Sumo festival where parents compete to get their children to cry first, to give them good luck for the rest of their lives.
Finally, he embarks on the most extraordinary event of his life - the Naked Man festival.
He meets up with Mr Kosaki, a man from the classic Japanese mould who has never told his wife he loves her, who has forsaken his love of music to become a salaryman, and whose work consumes his life.
He is as different from Stefan as anyone could hope to be, until his friends arrive and everything changes.
They get wildly drunk, practically naked, and stuff themselves with sushi. Then those still standing head off on a terrifying, barrier-wrecking festival that finally allows the Japanese man to reveal himself as passionate, expressive and loving as anyone.
It is all rooted in centuries of Shinto food-related tradition, but is really a huge primal scream from men who spend their days unable to express themselves.
Episode 3: Mexico
Stefan goes on a wild emotional and spiritual rollercoaster ride, starting with a teenage girl's bizarre coming-of-age ceremony and ending with the Day of the Dead, a cacophonous cross-cultural festival of the senses during which Mexicans truly believe that their loved ones come back from the dead for three days every year to spend the day with them.
In Oaxaca, he is dressed up as a dead woman and made to dance like a lunatic at the head of a procession as it makes its way through town.
He is turned into an emotional wreck at the moment the dead return, bursting into tears as Dias de los Muertos makes him experience grief and loss for the first time.
But then in the next breath, the family Stefan is living with teach him to celebrate and laugh at death. They turn his views on their head, allowing him to embrace and conquer his fear of death through an extraordinary sensual onslaught of food, flowers, songs and smells.
The sight of the graveyards overflowing with flowers and mescal-drinking revellers is a truly life-changing experience.