Uri Geller

This week's Uri Geller Jewish Telegraph column. Call back each week !

Why I didn't let a jungle meal bug me

STICK insects don't taste nice. This is a major understatement, because maybe you're breakfasting right now, and it wouldn't be easy to keep chewing on that toast and marmalade if you were thinking about the flutter of wings like paper fingers and the needle of scrabbling legs inside your mouth.

I shall say nothing about grubs and larvae. They are not like spaghetti, though by an act of sheer Mindpower I convinced myself I was eating pasta as I shovelled them into my face on the jungle gameshow I'm A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here.

It's never pleasant to watch another man eat pasta - maybe that's why one of the presenters, Dec Donnelly, went a shade of green to match the foliage.

And I cannot make light of the witchetty grub. I don't know what happens to witchetty grubs when they grow up - maybe they emerge from a cocoon with immense translucent wings and soar above the rainforest like painted hawks.

Or maybe they stay greasy and yellow and fat, and just get bigger and bigger, until they become TV executives.

What I do know is that I slaughtered one with a knife and fork. Killing it felt worse than eating it.

I've been a vegetarian for 30 years. Since the Seventies, without any lapse, I have banned fish and flesh from my diet, and been remarkably healthy on it.

More important even than that, I am Jewish. And bugs are not kosher. "All the things that swarm upon the earth are an abomination; they shall not be eaten."

I had my Torah with me as my jungle luxury, and I could look it up: Leviticus 11:41.

So to abandon my principles for the sake of a gameshow was almost impossible. One of the other contestants, the Radio One veteran Tony Blackburn, who is also vegetarian and went on to be King of the Jungle, left me in no doubt that he was revolted and ashamed by the ordeal I had accepted.

"I wouldn't have done it, mate!" he kept saying. "You should have stuck to your principles. I would have!"

Well, pious-tastic, mate!

What sustained me, when the aptly-named Ant and green-faced Dec lifted the first of the stainless steel lids on a table laden with platters of bugs, was the knowledge that the whole show was for charity.

I had volunteered to spend two weeks apart from my family, in the wilds, with seven strangers and an army of technicians, without a roof, without a phone, and with every kind of poisonous insect and snake.

My family kept joking I would be eaten. They had no idea I should be more worried about eating than being eaten.

Hunger was the first problem we hit. Anxious and hyperactive, we arrived in camp ravenous on Day One and devoured three days of basic rations.

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson came to our rescue by standing under a shower of maggots and beetles to earn eight meals, but much of the food was wasted in a squabble. When Nigel Benn was unable to complete his challenge the following day, we started to suffer.

It was imperative that I complete my ordeal, no matter what. The camp needed food. But that motive was not my driving force. Nor was my desire to show, on primetime television, that the human mind could master any nightmare.

I was there for charity. Not the nebulous, feel-good, cause celeb kind of charity that Smashy and Nicey smirk about. My mind was focused on one specific need, and that need is embodied in one little boy.

The thousands of people who voted for me to endure that Bush Tucker trial have already helped kids like this lad. I cannot tell you who he is, because he has been hounded out of more than one school and it is essential that his identity remains anonymous.

But I swear that he is a real child, eight years old, and what he has endured in his short life surpasses all the suffering that I could ever have imagined.

I shall call him John. I met him when I took Michael Jackson and David Blaine to my football club, Exeter City. This little lad ran up, begging to meet Michael and have his photograph taken.

Later, his mother called me and told me John was her adoptive son. I had guessed he might be, for John is black and his mother is white. She said John's birth mother had died from AIDS. And she said John was HIV-positive.

There is still no cure for AIDS, of course. Drugs can keep its worst ravages in check for a long time, if the sufferer is lucky enough to get them. But the disease has a horrific long-term fatality rate.

And despite the best efforts of campaigners such as Princess Diana, there is no cure for human intolerance and bigotry.

John's mother has an older son, who has taken the lad to his heart as a real little brother. They are exceptional people.

But many of John's neighbours and classmates, and especially the parents of his classmates, have been cruelly prejudiced.

This little boy has been forced to find new lodgings and new schools, not just a couple of times but over and over. Meanwhile, the family survives on benefits and charity.

They are not alone. John is just one of hundreds of British children, excluded from society because they were born HIV-positive.

It is to this cause I have pledged my charity earnings from the show, and for this cause that I steeled myself to swallow live bugs.

After all, I reminded myself, I would gobble the grubs down fast enough if I had AIDS and the insects were a cure.

As I write, it is the beginning of the Jewish New Year. The sun has gone down in Queensland and this is the eve of the first day of the month of Tishri. It is Rosh Hashana, New Year's Day.

Rosh Hashana commemorates the creation of the world, and it is the day when God passes judgement on every human being. It is also a day of self-examination.

Looking into my own heart, I knew I had stepped aside from my vegetarian principles, and I believed I had broken Jewish laws. This for the sake of a gameshow, if you like - but a gameshow that was raising money for children who deserved and needed it desperately.

As I was brooding, the phone rang. The voice in London said: "Uri, this is Pini Dunner."

I don't believe Pini had read my mind - but God must have, because Pini is a rabbi, and he was calling to tell me the answer to my heart's riddle. I had not breathed a word of my unease, but Pini seemed to know that I needed reassurance.

"If you're worried about those gruesome grubs," he exclaimed, "there's something you should know!"

Rabbi Pini talks this way - he is a cool rabbi. He runs the Cool Shool, the Saatchi Synagogue in Andover Place, London.

His ministry is aimed at young Jews in danger of drifting away from the faith. His website features a drawing of him standing in an open-top Cadillac, with a guitar at his hips.

He's cool. And he knows more about Jewish law than any man in Britain.

"Have you heard of pikuach nefesh?" he demanded. "Literally it means 'saving a soul in danger'. Pikuach nefesh is special dispensation from God to break any law, if a life is at risk.

"Remember, Jews live by the Torah, we don't die by it."

So can I invoke pikuach nefesh? Does it matter what I ate, kosher, veggie, whatever? I had to earn food for the camp.

Well, no, I didn't. The camp wouldn't have starved that night. Pikuach nefesh is no defence there.

But there are souls in danger, lives at stake. John and his family are not Jewish - maybe he was born to Muslim parents. Maybe his birth mother was Rastafarian. Or Darwinist. What does that matter?

He is a soul very much in danger, and I was doing what I could to help him, and others like him.

My heart's instinct was right. I wish I'd been voted to consume sackfuls of that stuff. Pikuach nefesh.