SIRC Media Watch Archive
Comment and Opinion – September 2002

Blanc Sour. Raymond Blanc's recent outburst in the Manchester Evening News (September 17, 2002) is typical of a new genre of culinary 'wisdom'. 'It's a Diet of Danger' claims the head to his column. And the target of his vitriol is sugar, echoing his view expressed less forcibly in the sadly unimpressive Food Junkies TV series a few months ago. Now, however, Raymond has turned from just declaring all British food as being crap to proposing theories of nutrition that some of my chums who know a bit about these things have described as quite barking. Hinting darkly at a conspiracy to prevent the real truth about sugar being known, he recounts a conversation over dinner with an unnamed 'doctor and scientist' Full article.

Cheap'n'Nasty – Pornography and processed food. Take a selection of dehydrated vegetables, textured soya protein and preservatives. Place in plastic pot. Add colourful logo, playful flavour names and a series of nudge-nudge-wink-wink advertising campaigns and – voila! You have Pot Noodle, stalwart component of the student diet, cultural icon and object of national curiosity. Pot Noodle is a dietary phenomenon that just won't go away. It has moved from mid-seventies hi-tech food of the future to stereotypical student bedsit fodder with little effect on sales. In fact, consumption appears to be higher than ever. It is estimated that 300 pots are consumed per minute in Britain. And as Phil Hogan puts it: "The fact is, literally millions of tomorrow's captains of industry, commerce and the arts fell into an inebriate stupor last night with a warming King Pot Noodle inside them." Full article.