Spot the war profiteering disguised as charidee

Don't forget the profit opportunities

A few weeks ago, flicking through my Twitter feed, I came across a retweeted contribution from one Douglas Carswell, the newly-elected – and first – UKIP MP.

In just 147 characters, he managed to mention both “sofa government” and “citizen consumers”.

The former is all about government policy being made by senior ministers and a handful of advisors.

The latter refers to an idea that citizens, via their consumption, can ensure that companies make ethical decisions.

It has been done. In the 1980s, declining sales of aerosols producing CFCs forced manufacturers to rethink the products and come up with less environmentally damaging solutions.

But apart from such high-profile campaigns, how much can it work?

For instance, will enough people to make a difference boycott companies that pay such low wages that the taxpayer has to top them up in order for workers to be able to afford to live?

Underlying it all is the ideology of deregulation: if the consumer makes the choices, no government intervention would be needed. And, of course, The Market, given free rein, will provide the ‘perfect’ results (as though the market were somehow not entirely dependent on human intervention, including political intervention and decisions – but that’s a different subject).

All of which sounds lovely, but is as divorced from reality as telling people that, if regulations are removed and those at the top were just allowed to do whatever they want in order to make money, the increased wealth would ‘trickle down’ to everyone else.

It also supposes that the majority of people are, when being consumers, able to make ethical choices that often mean spending at least a little more cash – or that most people have the time or inclination to investigate the ethics behind every purchase that they make, which itself often means digging quite deep behind the façade of corporate bullshit.

Blingtastic way to remember the war dead

In terms of affording the ethical, the fallacy of trickle-down is a major factor in why incomes for the majority have fallen, putting increasing numbers of people in a position where they can less and less afford to look for those ethical options.

Research in the US suggests that consumers (or at least some) want the companies that they buy from to be involved with ‘causes’.

I’ve dealtwith ‘cause marketing’ on this blog previously, but this is just another take on the same thing, spun a little differently and taking it to the level of political ideology.

Over the weekend, there appeared on my TV an advert from Sainsbury’s, linking that store with the Royal British Legion’s poppy appeal.

The company offered, among other things, to recycle your poppy if you return it to the store after use. The advert describes a commitment to the past – and the future – with images of an elderly man (a veteran, presumably) and a young boy (a future veteran?), while also noting that stores sell a range of poppy-related objects (such as an umbrella), with proceeds going to the Legion.

So, is Sainsbury’s doing all this out a genuine sense of charity/patriotism?

Well, it might be. It is entirely possible that the company’s head honchos feel a deep commitment to remembrance and to the wellbeing of veterans.

But on the other hand, that’s not why it’s being advertised in such a way. It’s being advertised to show the company in such a light that it will encourage customers to shop there.

That is not ethical: it is nothing other, at core, than trying to profit from war.

Oh, Sainsbury’s might not make a penny from any poppy-related purchase or act of education or recycling – some of these might even cost the company money. But all that is an investment.

The chances of someone responding to that advert just to pop this year’s used poppy in a recycling tub (instead of in the recycling bag or box they get from the local waste collection service), and not then doing some shopping there seems a tad unlikely.

Will people really decide to make an extra shopping trip just to go to Sainsbury’s – when they do not do so usually – to buy a poppy brolly – when you can choosefrom seven different poppy umbrellas at the Royal British Legion’s own online shop – and then walk out and not pick up a few odds and ends for that midweek supper?

This is about persuading the ‘citizen consumer’ to shop at Sainsbury’s because it shows obvious, outward support for a cause that that shopper cares about. The adverts are deliberately placed to coincide with the annual remembrance ceremonies and Armistice Day.

They won’t be appearing next April, with a message that Sainsbury’s is still caring about remembrance and veterans, even when no poppies are on sale and no commemorations are scheduled.

Poppy pizzas from Tesco

If Sainsbury’s cared about remembrance and veterans, and not profits, it wouldn’t spend hundreds of thousands of pounds creating advertising campaigns on the issue. It could donate that cash to the Legion instead, without making a hoo-ha about it that simply screams: ‘just look how good we are by doing charidee stuff’.

This is cause marketing, aimed at the citizen consumer, and with the prime intent of increasing footfall and, with that, profits.

Of course, Sainsbury’s is far from being alone in such behavior. Indeed, Bill King spotted Tesco selling ‘poppy pizzas’.

A Tesco pizza is probably tasteless anyway, but this takes it to a whole new level.

And there will be be countless more companies playing the same sort of games.

So perhaps the ‘real’ citizen consumer should, then, deliberately refuse to spend money at companies that so blatantly exploit the war dead to make a buck.

They might also consider that the Royal British Legion needs funds to help veterans, because governments that send people to war rarely seem much interested in those veterans once they return, and thus the public is left to fill the pick up the pieces via charitable donation.

But then again, all this would involve real and meaningful ethical or moral choices: and that is not what the concepts of ‘citizen consumer’ and ‘cause marketing’ are remotely about.

A little pot of, err, sugar

Yesterday afternoon, my hopes were raised of a pleasant mouthful or two of free fodder by a notice in the office tea room saying that there were yogurts in the fridge and anyone could take one.

When I looked, they were gooseberry flavoured – hmmm, gooseberry.

But, my Homer Simpson moment over, I decided – being me – to risk looking a gift horse in the mouth and check the ingredients.

Sure enough, these “low fat” yogurts had a lengthy ingredient list – lengthy for a yogurt with fruit, anyway.

So, what does a Tesco low fat gooseberry yogurt contain?

The following is exactly as listed:

Yogurt (milk) 75%, Gooseberry 8%, Sugar, Glucose-fructose syrup, Gooseberry juice from concentrate (4%) modified maize starch, flavouring, Thickener (pectin), Nettle concentrate, Spinach concentrate, Curcuma concentrate

The last one is related to the spice turmeric.

In other words, as well as the natural sugars occurring in milk and the fruit, it had added sugar, added glucose-fructose syrup and added fruit juice – which, in concentrating fruit, increases the sugar content.

Y’know, just in case you want to train your sweet tooth.

Doubtless the spinach is there for colour, as may well be the case for the nettle too. Thickener is presumably required because the yogurt is left so insipidly thin after the fat is stripped out.

Heaven alone know why the addition of an extra, and somewhat mysterious, “flavouring” is required – doesn’t the gooseberry taste of anything? Or the fruit juice? And that’s without mentioning the nettle and spinach which presumably make some contribution to the overall taste.

And there’s enough sugar in a single, small pot to keep Willy Wonka happy. Of a 125g portion, 17.4% sugars, which is apparently 19% of your daily recommended allowance. In a tiny pot.

On the other hand, that same small pot has just 2.4g of fat – which is 3% of your RDA.

So remind me – this, by virtue of being “low fat”, is a healthy product, right?

Yogurt – healthy.

Fruit – healthy.

Low fat – healthy.

It’s that easy, although this is a perfect illustration of why people are confused.

And it should go without saying that Tesco is hardly the only company marketing in this way – it's a widespread issue.

On the other hand: take some fruit – rhubarb’s in season at this time of year – and cook it down gently with a little sugar and a small amount of water.

Decant into a sterilised container and allow to cool. Pop it in the fridge.

Take some plain, organic, full-fat yogurt with no additives.

Spoon some into a bowl. Add some of your fruit compote.

Consume with pleasure.

Oh, and I declined the offer.

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.

I'll horsewhip anyone who nags about food quality

It was always a question as to whether it has been to any avail for me to shout myself hoarse about the awfulness of the dominance of our grocery retail sector by supermarkets.

But then the news broke last night about the discovery of pig and horse DNA in some ‘beef’ burgers provides the perfect chance to do so again, and the subsequent mass whinneying on the matter makes me think I was right all along.

‘Neigh, neigh and thrice neigh,’ I hear you cry.

Ah, but yes, yes, yes, missus!

In the UK at least, the big headlines concern the discovery, by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), that 37% of ‘beef’ burgers that had been analysed by the authority had horse DNA in them.

We Brits can be very sentimental about our four-legged friends. The country might see vast amounts of cruelty and neglect against animals every year, but we do like to think of ourselves as a nation of animal lovers, and obviously superior to the likes of the French, who eat, err, horse.

On this side of the Channel, we include horses within the special pantheon of ‘the paw ones’* that we consider to be beyond use on the plate.

Which animals you eat and which you don’t is almost entirely cultural, of course. Although that’s not to decry that – personally, I have absolutely no desire to eat dog and I most certainly could not eat cat: precisely because, for me at any rate, they’re family, for goodness sake, so it would be close to cannibalism.

Horse meat? Well, I’ve not had the chance, but wouldn’t mind trying. Then again, the last encounter I had with a nag was on the Isle of Skye some years ago when, on the first opportunity I’d ever had to try riding, it threw me and I ended up seeing stars and with a fantastically bruised hip and thigh.

So you’ll excuse me if I don’t feel any great sentimental tenderness toward horses and would quite probably be prepared to tuck into one with interest if nothing else.

But let’s get back to the facts of the case.

Setting aside the finding on horse DNA, the bigger point is actually that 85% of the products tested by the FSAI contained pig DNA.

The burgers were produced by Irish processors Liffey Meats – perhaps a rebranding as Iffey Meats might be more apt? – and Silvercrest Foods, together with Dalepak Hambleton on this side of the Irish Sea.

According to The Grocer, of the 10 ‘beef’ burgers that tested positive for traces of horse DNA, the Tesco Everyday Value ones won by a length with 29.1%, while in second came Oakhurst burgers, sold at Aldi and containing a rather pitiful 0.3%. Tesco all the way.

A selection of 31 other beef meal products that were tested – such delights as lasagne and cottage pie – revealed 68% showing pig DNA.

One possible reason for the presence of pig DNA is that meat from both pigs and cattle was tested in the same plants – but that’s a big level of contamination. And the FSAI doesn’t even bother to suggest a comparable explanation for the presence of horse DNA.

The stores, of course, are obviously dismayed. Tesco alone saw its share value hit badly today. So the upset is genuine.

The Grocer reported Tesco “technical director, ex-FSA CEO Tim Smith”, as saying: “The safety and quality of our food is of the highest importance to Tesco. We will not tolerate any compromise in the quality of the food we sell.”

Now, briefly at least, let’s trot off on a bit of a diversion. Did you spot something in that last paragraph, by any chance? Y’know, the bit where The Grocer described Tesco’s technical director as the former boss of the Food Standards Agency?

A few months ago, I read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma, about the pharmaceutical industry. It’s frankly a rather frightening read, in a lot of ways – but very much worth the effort in the interests of self-education.

Anyway, one of the points that Goldacre raises is that of the relationships between the industry and the regulators. This is partly a result, he notes, of quite low wages for regulators, many of whom develop decent relationships with the companies they’re supposed to be regulating – and then move to jobs at those companies, where the pay tends to be considerably better.

Are the links between big food and the food regulators in a similarly confused state? I leave that one with you.

Anyway, back to the burgers scandal.

Of the 10 burgers that tested positive for horse DNA, three were sold by Lidl, two by Tesco, two by Iceland, two by Dunnes Stores and one by Aldi. The ones that oinked if you listened carefully were available in Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Iceland, Supervalu, Dunnes Stores, Spar, Centra, FXB Butchers and Superquinn.

So what we can conclude fairly safely is that the products in question were from cut-price ranges or were sold at cut-price stores.

And it seems unlikely that the FSAI was lucky enough to test the only batch that was affected.

There will, doubtless, be investigations over the coming days, weeks and months, so we can hope to discover how it actually happened. Although it equally seems plausible to suggest that, somewhere along the line in the whole process, was the use of horse and pig meat vital to keep the costs to the levels demanded?

But what we’re left to consider at the moment is whether, beyond sentiment and any concerns among some religious people who want to avoid eating pork, there any harm in what has happened?

Well, it’s doubtful that anyone’s going to die as a result of it.

However, it raises a number of questions about what really does happen in the most industrialised end of the processed food industry – most particularly where the aim is to keep costs as low as possible.

There are already questions that need asking about genetically modified (GM) products entering the food chain via feed for food animals – in the EU, this is acceptable, even though selling GM foods for humans is not.

There’s a great deal of news around about GM, from suicides by Indian farmers who have been persuaded to go down the GM route and found it to be a catastrophe, to scientific work raising some very major questions about the safety of assorted GM products, but while these rarely make it into the mainstream media, it is not a peripheral question.

Not unlinked are issues of food security and sustainability.

And then there’s another thing: how do people on low incomes in particular get a decent diet that doesn’t involve the cheapest possible food that many have been produced in a dubious manner and contain ingredients not only of dubious origin but also of dubious impact on health.

This actually butts into the entire issue of rising obesity rates.

It’s been pointed out before that, in the UK, households spend, on average, 10% less on food over a year than their Continental counterparts, yet we hear constant complaints about the cost of food.

A number of things occur.

• Do we have a negative cultural attitude toward food in general, whereby we regard it simply as fuel and expect it to be cheaper than it needs to be to be of decent quality?

• Is the proportion of income spent on food a direct correlation of the extremely high cost of housing (whether rented or otherwise) in the UK as opposed to the Continent?

• Do we care – or not – about what people on low incomes eat? Is it an issue at all? After all, they’re poor aren’t they and, in a world of ‘skivers v strivers’, it’s almost certainly their own fault?

• Is a negative attitude toward the profiteering highly successful food producers and retailers an illustration of envy and should we in fact applaud anything that they do that enables poor people to afford any food at all?

• Should we view GM produce in the same light? After all, it’s going to feed the world isn’t it, so if one particular form of genetically-altered wheat did cause liver failure, they’d have died of starvation anyway.

There are a few things to think about – and I haven’t even mentioned that if you read the ingredients on a packet, then you should fairly expect that that is exactly what the product contains. Anything else is a lie, somewhere along the line.

Gee (gee) – are you all wound up yet?

If you are, then there’s a relatively simple answer. Simple at least i you have the choice – and many do not – to shop at local, independent shops, where you will have a greater opportunity of being able to check the provenance of a product.

To remove the risk factor, you remove as much processing from the equation as possible.

If you can buy meat direct from farmers, for instance, you can talk to them about feed and GM.

If you don’t care, then obviously that’s fine too. That’s your choice.

But it’s an easier choice than those who do care have. I’m one of the lucky one. I have the likes of Matthew and Henry and Richard – and various others from whom I can buy meat that I consider trustworthy. And I’m very grateful to be in that position, which includes having meaningful choice.

But there are questions that need to be asked – and hopefully answered. And perhaps they’re not the ones that many people will, as the headlines hit and voices shrilled, be the ones that were at the forefront of the reporting of this ‘scandal’, which is being dealt with as though it is, of course, utterly unique.

* Phrase copyright of an animal charity in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

PS: if you are interested in GM issues, I suggest following @JoannaBlythman and @SonnyBeez on Twitter. Both retweet a great deal of interesting and informative information, from a variety of sources, on the subject.

• Tomorrow at The Voluptuous Manifesto: are puns a legitimate form of humour?