I do not breathe your politics

"Comment is free but facts are sacred." (C.P. Scott)
Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Miscellaneous dust-busting thoughts

(Yes, another long gap, but not two years this time!) I think:
  • Perhaps it's a message when a list of foodstuffs contaminated with a potentially lethal industrial dye contains things like 'Ultimate Pork Sausages & Mash', 'Hollands Multi Portion: Rover's Return Lamb Hot Pot', 'Best Outdoor Reared Pork Chipolata Sausages', or the ominous sounding 'Chinese Chunks' or 'Diced Tex Mex'. Increasingly, these brand names take on an air of newspeak.
  • Just how do you rear a pork chipolata sausage, outdoors or in?
  • Which is the more likely to kill you - the food dye or the food?
  • It must be quite depressing for an aid agency worker to see that the only mentions of 'Sudan' in the British press refer to a food dye turning up in mass produced consumer foods sold in vast bulk at low price to an increasingly gluttonous population of western europeans.

posted by Michael at 2/22/2005 08:46:00 PM  

1 Comments:

Tim said...

Seconded on all counts. The level of "fundamental particle" in foodstuffs has risen in collective consciousness over time, I think.

Of late I've made an effort to keep my kitchen contents moderately healthy - buy food I combine and cook myself, almost no ready-meals. Result: the closest I come to having anything on The List is my one concession to junk-food this fortnight.

ObPedant: the outdoor-reared chipolata is a symptom of the demise of punctuation, particularly the humble hyphen and comma, in common writing: you're so used to not seeing it, a string of multiple adjectives looks confusing.

2/22/2005 11:27:00 PM  

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