Yes, those despicable food suppliers are at it again. Deceiving Joe Public the most gullible of shoppers.
Just recently we have had the shock horror of discovering horse in those cheap supermarket own brand beefburgers. God only knows what else is in those burgers, but now we KNOW there is horse. This was followed with the amazing disclosure that Findus have near 100% horse-flesh content in their lasagna. It’s obviously not a bad thing as presumably Joe Public was happily buying and consuming this product. Joe’s sensitive and discerning palate didn’t notice a change in flavour or texture, perhaps because there was none.
Joe Public is obviously getting bored with the horsey story which, after all, has been running for a couple of weeks. Bit like all the horses I’ve ever backed. Anyway, in their rush to keep the ball rolling the Daily Mail is now initiating a belated crusade to alert us to the underhand tricks that food manufacturers employ to hide the real content of their products.
For instance, did you know that well-known brands Ferrero Rocher and Lindt are high in sugar and fat ?
I mean, come on ! Is there a single dumb idiot on this planet that doesn’t know that sweets and chocolates all contain vast amounts of substances that are bad for your health. That those sweet canned drinks rot your teeth. The point is they don’t care. They buy them because they like them and the products make them feel good.
Furthermore, the Daily Mail would have you believe that those nefarious food manufacturers are deliberately hiding ingredient information behind peel back labels. The implication being that Joe Public is too lazy to peel back the label, too lazy to read the ingredient information. In this I sympathise with the manufacturer.
On the one hand they are jockeying for brand position on the supermarket shelves. They are desperate to get their brand in the most prominent eye-catching position. On the other they are having to meet the ever-increasing and ever-changing regulations. Regulations which vary from country to country and in some countries from state to state. These regulations require more and more information to be displayed and declared while at the same time the available label space is either unchanged or in some cases is actually reducing as Joe Public and the legislators declare war on waste. So in this the manufacturers are between the rock and the proverbial hard place. There is a real likely hood of the brand name being forced off the product just to show the regulatory information. Won’t that look pretty.
In addition the Daily Mail, further casts aspersions about Joe Public and his IQ. Claiming that the food manufacturers are trying to confuse poor old Joe by hiding behind the true chemical names of substances found in our food. Has the Daily Mail forgotten that Joe attended school where, certainly in my day, they taught such things. i.e. Sodium / Salt, Sugar /Carbohydrate. Perhaps the Daily Mail should be lining up for another attack on the educational standards of our schools.
Or perhaps they should run a campaign to get the supermarkets put up handy conversion guide over their shelves to help us poor thick shoppers.
The good old Daily Mail. Forever ready to stand in the defence of its own idiocy.
(On this topic I saw an amusing email the other day. There was a picture of some cows in a field and one had a speech bubble saying “Bloody horses. Coming over here, stealing our jobs”. It did make me chuckle.)