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Free energy -- is it?
I have the impression that most people sort of casually assume that electricity produced in this way has basically zero cost, and I sort of casually wonder about that.
Specifically, I wonder about the full impact of feeding this guy to power a generator to make a smoothy. I think people would laugh at the thought of powering stuff with, say, lizards on treadmills, so why do we point at the guy on the bike and applaud?
I suspect that only so long as the energy you expend comes from some already-existing caloric surplus does this amount to a net gain. If you've just stuffed yourself silly at The Golden Corral (mooo!) and needed to exercise anyway, then everybody wins -- you stay fit, and use less power off the grid. I strongly suspect, though, that if it comes to the point of you having to eat more to get the calories to burn to pedal the bike, then we get into the realm of some really inefficient power, power that the electric company, say, can generate more cheaply, more efficiently, and, yes, probably even with less total impact to the environment.
It gets really tricky in the particular case of the guy in the show, who may have grown some/most of his own food, contributed his waste to a compost co-op (that facet of his lifestyle came up as a plot-point in the show), and generally probably didn't use a lot of non-renewable resources. But if you have to make an extra trip to Golden Corral to eat enough to power your little treadmill, you should probably just skip them both, and just plug your blender into the wall. :)