Marketing at its brightest – the winter warmer edition

Ah, what a wonderful thing is Twitter. It is actually, but that’s for another time.

Last week, yet another in the regular stream of promoted tweets landed in my account, from Innocent (of smoothies fame) and advertising their veg pots.

According to the tweet, these are “anti-winter food” and all you need to do is: “1. Buy veg pot. 2. Heat up as per instructions. 3. Put in face. 4. Beat winter.”

No food in the history of humankind has ever ‘beaten’ winter like these pots – which have the added benefit of offering to supply you with three portions of your recommended daily fruit and veg intake.

Obviously prices will vary slightly, but at present, Ocado has them at £3.90 a pot or £6 for two.

They vary in weight between 380 and 390g per pot.

Looking at one of those that is advertised in the tweet, the Mexican sweet potato chilli veg pot (390g) contains:

Cooked Brown Rice (17%)[Water, Brown Rice], Tomatoes, Water, Carrot, Pinto Beans, Red Kidney Beans, Sweet Potato (5)%, Onion, Potato, Red Peppers, Red Onion, Sweetcorn, Spinach, Vegetable Oil, Marinated Jalapeno Peppers (0.8%) [Jalapeno Peppers, Water, Vinegar, Salt, Sugar, Spices], Cornflour, Coconut Sugar, Lime Juice, Garlic, Cajun Seasoning [Spices, Herbs, Mustard Seed, Salt, Sugar], Sea Salt, Smoked Paprika (0.2%), Coriander, Green Chilli, Black Pepper.

Now even a fairly cursory glance at this list will shows that it’s not exactly chock full of junk and additives – that’s not an issue, although pre-processed vegetables do lose nutrients the longer they wait between prep and consumption.

The question that’s worth looking at, though, is the cost, so let’s look at that in some detail.

Next – water. Well, I’m not going to calculate that, for fairly obvious reasons.

Felicity Cloake, in her ‘how to’ series in the Guardian, suggests using 450g of basmati for four people – 112g per person – and this seems to tally with a variety of other sources.

Let’s take Waitrose’s ‘easy cook’ wholegrain rice essential, which is £1.79 for 1 kilo (18p per 100g).

So our 17% of 390g is 66.3g is just under 10p – and remember that the ingredients list states honestly that that rice also includes the water that will have swelled it during cooking.

Next up, tomatoes. If we’re going for convenience, then let’s have another tin – Waitrose ‘essential’ chopped tomatoes in juice – 400g for 55p (100g = 14p).

It’s more difficult to calculate since we don’t know what percentage of the ingredients it represents, but it’s less than 17% and more than 5%, given it’s position between the ingredients for which a specific percentage is listed.

This is, incidentally, also a good illustration of why ingredients lists are not necessarily as easy to read as you might expect.

So on those tomatoes, let’s pretend it’s 10% – we can, as you’ll see, afford to err on the side of generosity. That would be about 39g of tomatoes, rolling in at around 5.46p.

So, after the main two ingredients, we’re on just under 15.46p.

We’ve calculated for just 27% of the contents.

The only other individual percentages given add up to just 1%.

Let’s allow another 2% for everything else – all the seasonings and the vegetable oil – and we have a new total of 29%. In which case, let’s make things easy and pretend it’s 30%.

We need to find 70% of that 390g from the remaining vegetables and pulses.

Let’s say 10% for carrots – 10.4p.

10% for each lot of beans – 0.09p and 0.078p. We’re up to 60% now and a staggering 26.028p.

Thankfully, we know that sweet potato constitutes 5% and, at an Ocado price of £2.52 per kilo, for 19.5g, that would cost a whopping 50p (rounded up).

So that’s 65% and 26.52p.

Vegetables. Chopping board. Knife. Not rocket science

Let’s call the onion and potato 10% each. Then the red peppers, red onion and sweetcorn all 5% each.

More Ocado prices: onion (80p per kilo), potato (90p per kilo), red peppers (£9.94 per kilo), red onion (£1 per kilo), sweetcorn (17p per 100g).

Onion = 8p. Potato = 9p. Red pepper = 50p (rounded up). Red onion = 5p and sweetcorn = 0.008p.

So, we’ve made up 390g – and it’s cost us just 98.528p.

For the sake of this very rapid experiment, both the red pepper and sweet potato prices are probably higher than you’d need to pay because I had to look at bags in order to get a weight.

I haven’t even attempted to calculate the cost for spices and seasonings, because these are the things that we have in our cupboards and use over varying lengths of time – but certainly not just for one quite small lunch.

The point is that an Innocent veg pot doesn’t cost anything like £3.90 (or even £3 in a special offer) to produce.

Of course, you’re also paying for the container, for the wrapper, for the advertising and other marketing (including someone promoting tweets about it); for the wages of those who manufacture it and the profits for the manufacturer and the retailer and any transport company in between (and there’s nothing inherently wrong with profit).

You’re paying for the development of the product, for design and for the upkeep of the machinery that makes it.

On the other hand, you could just throw together some veg and some herbs and spices, cook and then divvy out into a microwavable container. Take it to work and shove in the office microwave (if you have one). Then “put in face”.

The calculations above make me almost dizzy – but that’s what the marketing people want. Then you won't think what you're paying for.

It’ll be far, far cheaper – you can even use the container again and again too, so it’s more environmentally friendly as well.

It’ll be every bit as healthy and it’ll keep you just as warm against any winter chills as a pot of processed vegetables.

The marketing of this product relies on the consumer believing that £3.90 – or £3 – is actually cheap for the convenience; and not remembering that it takes next to no time to chop some vegetables, cook them, add some seasoning and herbs, and then pop them in a container.

And you really don’t need to give in to Coca-Cola (which owns 90% of Innocent Drinks) in order to enjoy a warming lunch this winter.

Time for a spot of Yuletide dining

Acorn-fed Ibérico pig

This time of the year means festive lunches, and there have already been two thus far.

The first saw us back to Blacks for a third successive year, and where I’ve had issues with the food in the past. Fortunately, this was much the best visit in culinary terms.

A salad of hard boiled egg, endive and beetroot was pleasant, with a nice contrast between the richness of the egg and the bitter endive.

The game pie with red cabbage that followed was – if nothing like what you would expect of a game pie, being in a dish topped with puff pastry, and if having rather too much liquid in it – was perfectly edible and pleasantly filling.

A very slender slice of lemon tart with red berry coulis was pleasant without being overly exciting.

The second lunch of the week saw another return visit – this time, to Eyre Brothers on Leonard Street near the City of London, which describes itself as a tapas restaurant, no matter how very English the name sounds.

I started with grilled, smoked salmon, red onion, and crushed new potatoes with capers, dill and mustard.

Salmon, onion potatoes and dill

A very nice salad indeed – although from a personal perspective, probably with too much potato, since I get full very quickly. But the flavours were exceptionally nicely balanced.

After that, it was grilled fillet of acorn-fed Ibérico pig, marinated with pimentón, thyme and garlic, and served with patatas pobres – oven potatoes with green peppers, onions, garlic and white wine.

The restaurant advises that the pig (which had been feral) is grilled to medium rare, so I went with that too.

I can't say that I could taste the acorns, but that meat was a knockout – stunning flavor that packs a massive punch. Really very good indeed.

And we enjoyed caramelised, onions, roasted butternut squash and almonds, and spinach on the side.

Ginger and dark chocolate ice cream brought the meal to a close very pleasantly.

Citron tart

This was all washed down by a Lavradores de Feitoria, 2011, Douro, Portugal – a very pleasant red wine indeed: not too big, but fruity and with a lower alcohol volume than many other wines.

They don’t mess around with any ‘festive’ menus at Eyre Brothers, but continue to do what they know and what they do best.

Frankly, that alone is refreshing, when so many other eateries are going down the Christmas route.

I’d happily recommend Eyre Brothers – it’s smart, very good-quality dining, at prices that are lower than one might imagine.

Indeed, dinner on both days cost approximately the same, yet there was a substantial quality difference between the two.

That probably tells you something, although I’m not entirely sure what.

Enjoy the cake and stop feeling guilty

Cake in Venice: how much marg do you think it contained?

If ever there was a revealing comment about food and varied national relationships toward it, it came on Wednesday night in the shape of BBC4’s Patisserie with Michel Roux Jr.

It was an interesting programme anyway, ranging from the revolutionary work of Marie-Antoine Carême (1784-1833), the first celebrity chef – who also wrote books that included the immortal phrase: ‘You can try this at home’ – to some of Paris’s finest pâtissiers plying their skills today.

One, for instance, works with a top perfumier to create new delicacies.

But as was pointed out, if you think that’s a bit outré, Carême was playing similar games himself, filling the display stands of patisserie with scents such as rose water in order to appeal to the nose as well as the eye.

However, in one of Paris’s tea salons, Roux met American Francophile Dorie Greenspan for hot chocolate and sumptuous-looking cakes.

Greenspan has written several books about patisserie and she observed that, back in the US, she only ever heard people discuss cakes in terms of guilt: “‘It’s so good, but I really shouldn’t have this’,” she said was what she would hear from fellow Americans when she was back in the US, before then noting that there was no comparable comment that you’d be likely to hear in France.

The French, she suggested, “have a special relationship with indulgence”: they understand that a little regular indulgence is part of living a good life.

It may seem odd to think that we still harbour such a puritanical attitude in the UK, where consumerism seems to be king and where religiosity has declined in recent years, certainly in the mainstream, but we will all have heard similar attitudes voiced.

But as I’ve touched on before, our search for the ‘body beautiful’ creates a secular version of guilt, with new year’s resolutions and then Lent and then preparing for the beach – and then for the winter party season – all pressuring people to give up some foods (the ones that generally are most enjoyable) and, if they don’t, feeling guilty again.

Decades of poor diet advice has added to the guilt and the social pressures that exist around the subject.

So perhaps those are part of the reasons that we have hardly any of the sort of patisseries that you can see on so many French streets, and that instead, as Roux pointed out, we have solid Eccles cakes or Bakewell tarts handed to us in a brown paper bags, as though we’re as embarrassed as if we were hiding an adult magazine.

The French have patisserie shops that are as astonishing as any top-end boutique in the way in which they display the products for sale. And it’s not just Paris – even Collioure has one such shop, plus at least one more patisserie that I’m aware of.

There are little moments of hope: only yesterday on Twitter, ligging into the revival of baking and the apotheosis of the cup cake, Flora had paid to promote a tweet advertising Flora Buttery to bake said morsels.

Now, it’s worth noting that when an advertiser ‘promotes’ a tweet, it gets charged for any responses.

Within moments, as well as the sort of positive responses that Unilever was happy to respond directly to, others were urging people to use real butter and not something full of additives. The myths are being challenged.

For clarification, Flora Buttery’s list of ingredients runs thus:

Vegetable Oils (Seed Oils 82%), Water, Buttermilk (10.5%), Salt (1.5%), Emulsifiers: Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, Lecithin, Flavourings, Preservative: Potassium Sorbate, Citric Acid, Vitamin E, Vitamin B6, Colour: Beta-Carotene, Vitamin A, Folic Acid, Vitamins D and B12.

There are no ingredients lists for a pack of unsalted butter and when making butter (which you can do in your own home) you don’t have to invent a method of making liquid solid, as you do with vegetable oils if you’re going to market them in a tub as something that can be spread as well as used in baking.

But Flora’s marketing is partly based on guilt – and a concomitant belief that using a butter substitute can make you feel less guilty by making you think that what you are using is more healthy, not least if you are feeding it to others as well as to yourself.

Of course, the entire fat-is-bad-for-you myth has been particularly successful in the US and UK.

Fat – the food type that makes for wonderful mouthfeel; that makes food tasty and which helps sate you far quicker than a whopping big bowl of cereal.

The French – who recognise that a bit of regular indulgence is good for you – also consume more dairy than anyone else on planet Earth and, in the south west of the country, have wonderfully fat-laden foods such as duck confit and foie gras available as part of the regional cuisine.

Somehow, I doubt very much that when a French pâtissier makes an Opéra – described by Larousse Gastronomique as “an elaborate almond sponge cake with a coffee and chocolate filling and icing”, any of it will have been made with margarine.

And yet – and here is the supposed ‘French Paradox’ – the French still have lower rates of heart disease than in this country or the US.

It wasn’t before time when, just a few weeks ago, Sweden because the first country to change its diet advice from a low-fat diet to a low-carb diet – a major crack in the wall of the myth that has built up over the last 40-50 years.

The British – and US – attitude is one of fear for health that ties very neatly into a guilt at culinary pleasure (indulgence), which itself is a residue of the puritanism that has affected both countries.

And because we have that deep-seated fear of ‘indulgence’, we distrust anyone who treats indulgence with a certain seriousness and as a genuine and wonderful art, and then when we do indulge, we overdo it (leading to more guilt – see new year’s resolutions again) and often do so on rubbish.

Not that the French are alone in creating such fabulous cakes – the Italians aren’t exactly bad, for instance, while the Austrians would probably make the list too.

But would it be stretching things too far to point out here that these countries, and France, have not suffered from puritanism or any other forms of non-conformist pleasure-hating denominations in the same way as the UK, US and others have.

While it produces plenty of its own psychological problems, Catholicism is rather more understanding of of ‘sin’ and pleasure and indulgence – and no, that’s not a pun on something Luther got in a huff about.

The sooner we all learn that a spot of regular indulgence is good for us, the better we’ll feel for it.

Food as fuel – and a Yorkshire pudding challenge

Now that's what a proper Yorkie pudding looks like

The subject of food seems to bring out some very strange attitudes in people – and it’s no different when the context is television and food.

As the finals week began on Monday, the Telegraph managed to publish three articles on the subject of Masterchef The Professionals, all with the chance for readers to comment.

Some of the comments were quite absurd, but also rather revealing.

“There should be less of this daft adulation of chefs, women or men. Period,” stated one reader emphatically.

“It makes me laugh. All they do is cook food and you would somehow think they were performing open heart surgery such is the importance they place on themselves,” said another.

“What amazes me is that people actually watch these programmes ........ it’s only food, and it’s always been perfectly obvious, the more you do to it the less appetising it becomes, and the more expensive!”

“Food as God, another form of self-worship!”

As a little experiment, just try to imagine any of these comments being about, say, art and artists or composers and music. You can’t really, can you?

Equally, can you imagine those comments being made in France?

Masterchef The Professionals remains one of the least dumbed-down programmes on TV; one that celebrates and showcases serious skills, and encourages those on it, without being shouty – and yet some people actually object to that because it’s related to food.

The “adulation” comment received 11 likes: “all they do is cook food” received six.

“… the more you do to it the less appetising it becomes, and the more expensive!” suggests that somebody doesn’t understand what can go on in some high-end restaurants and probably hasn’t actually eaten in one either – certainly none of the ones I’ve had the fortune to dine in.

But “it’s only food” and “all they do is cook food” suggest people who really don’t get the pleasure of good food – or perhaps they merely don’t approve of it. It’s the food-as-fuel argument all over again.

In recent years, new-build flats in the UK have sometimes been designed and built with no kitchen, but just the space for a microwave. The assumption is that people don’t want to cook properly, but only consume ‘ping’ food or eat out.

Also in the UK, sales of dining tables have declined.

As Joanna Blythman noted in Bad Food Britain, when one developer built some holiday homes, they had a problem once visitors from abroad started staying – those visitors wanted and expected rather more than a microwave with which to cook, so the developer had to start installing proper kitchens.

In terms of Europe at least, this attitude to food seems to be a particularly British thing, although it’s changing elsewhere too, with France, for instance, seeing an increase in some people working and eating lunches at desks and increasingly eating junk food.

The root of all this is the attitude toward food that views it simply as fuel, to which can be added a rather puritan distrust of taking pleasure in what you eat, as though this is something inherently bad – or even immoral.

It reminds me of my own mother intoning: “We don’t live to eat; we eat to live” as a warning against too much pleasure in what was on your plate. And equally, her attitude toward teaching me and my sister any cooking skills or any recipes, which boiled down to: ‘you’ll learn when you have to do it’.

It’s a quite extraordinary attitude that pretends there is little or no skill involved in the kitchen, and that there is no reason to spend time learning about it.

It’s an incredibly basic life skill, yet so many leave it to chance.

My mother also pulled me out of any cooking classes at school fairly rapidly, having decided that it was a waste of money.

Perhaps that’s why so many cookery books are sold in the UK each year – because nobody has a clue what they’re doing in the kitchen and they end up trying to use such tomes to fill that gap?

I was in exactly that category myself when I started living on my own. But however well you can read a recipe, if you don’t have those basic skills, you’ll come unstuck.

It’s all very well, for instance, to say: ‘brown the meat’, but how much is right? How hot do you need the fat first? What fat works best? And so on.

My mother’s approach was hardly unique. Survey after survey has shown that cooking skills are low in the UK – few people, for instance, can cook more than three meals without having a recipe in front of them.

A few years ago, Tesco – with no apparent understanding of its own role in this – published a survey that showed that only elderly people really know what to do with different cuts of meat and how to make traditional dishes such as Lancashire hot pot.

People in middle age know less and such knowledge declined even more in still younger people.

It’s as though our parents decided to stop cooking properly the moment that they could grab ready meals from the rapidly expanding supermarkets and with the advent of the microwave.

And this lack of knowledge seems to be repeated in other countries – New Zealand has similar survey results, for example. And these are also countries, like the UK, that have rising obesity.

But there’s not just the health implication – there’s a cultural one too. Do we really care so little about our culinary heritage that we don’t mind if that hot pot dies out altogether, as Tesco suggested could happen when it published that survey?

There are people who claim that British food has nothing to recommend it, but that’s nonsense.

There are plenty of classic British dishes that, cooked well, are superb. That hot pot is just one – it merits an individual entry in Larousse Gastronomique – but what about Yorkshire pudding as another example?

It’s difficult to imagine anything much easier: all you need is to mix together some plain flour, milk, water, an egg, then heat some fat in your oven, pour the batter into a dish and Bob’s your uncle, yet people spend far more than that little lot costs on frozen ones or even on a mix, the latter of which includes stacks of additives.

Here’s the ingredient list for Auntie Bessie’s Yorkie mix – 79p at Ocado for 128g, which makes 12:

“Wheatflour, Dried Egg, Skimmed Milk Powder, Raising Agents (Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Aluminium Phosphate), Salt, Sugar, Potato Starch, Emulsifiers (Mono- and Di-Glycerides of Fatty Acids, Lacto Glycerides, Propylene Glycol Esters of Fatty Acids), Dried Glucose Syrup, Maltodextrin, Stabiliser (Diphosphates)”

The marketing spiel says: “I’ve used only the best ingredients to create my perfect Yorkshire pudding mix. Now it’s over to you! Just add water and whisk to create a smooth batter and bake in the oven for irresistible Yorkshire puddings just the way you like them!”

Now there’s a challenge, Auntie.

Let’s try Delia’s recipe and using some seriously high-quality ingredients.

This is what we need and the prices are via Ocado (so essentially what I would have in and use):

1.5kg plain organic flour – £1.89;

Organic full-fat milk – £1.85 for 2 litres;

Organic, free range eggs £2.18 per 6;

Dripping – 72p for 500g.

For Delia’s measures, therefore:

75g plain flour – just under 10p;

1 egg – 36p;

75ml milk – so just over 7p;

Two tablespoons beef dripping – at 0.13g per spoon, that’s 0.26g of fat, coming in at 19.2p;

Water and seasoning – let’s assume you’ve got these in. You still need the former for the packet mix, but what would you realistically add for the best-quality salt and pepper? It’d still only be a penny at the most.

So that’s a total of 72.2p. In other words, using the really best, readily-available ingredients, it’s still cheaper than a box of pre-mixed powder.

There’s a lot more weight for your money too – 150g as opposed 128g, and that’s without adding the egg and water, which suggests that the 12 that the packet says it will make will be substantial enough for the feast in a doll’s house.

So even with top-quality ingredients, it’s cheaper to make your own Yorkshire pudding mix than buy it, and you also avoid additives.

You’ve still got to whisk up the packet mix, and measure the water out, so it’s hardly as though the packet mix it’s a whopping big time saver – and don’t tell me that measuring the flour and milk is staggeringly onerous, because it’s not.

People have been conned – utterly conned. And if you’re thinking that my example was only a difference of a few pennies, remember that for the sake of this post, it was all top-end ingredients, and remember that those pennies can mean a great deal in a climate where food costs are rising and wage are not.

But how much of this is down to a lack of basic cooking skills and a lack of confidence in the kitchen?

Nobody’s going to watch Masterchef The Professionals to learn cookery from scratch. But the idea that a serious celebration of culinary skills is over the top, and that cooking is “only food” are an indicator of the parlous state of affairs that exists in many British kitchens – and that’s not good for health or pockets.

And if we could only stop thinking of food as fuel, and learn to enjoy it – and why not, since we have to eat? – then how much would that improve the nation's health and wellbeing too?

* If you’re in the Wigan area and would like to learn more about cooking, and about food on a budget, Shirley Southworth at Food Positive can help.

In Liverpool, Can Cook and Happy Go Cooking can help.

In Cardiff, Communities First is involved in schemes to help people learn to cook – Bill King, who I interviewed in the summer, is involved in that scheme.