The Scrivener: Labels And A Load Of Cobbles
…And then we come to the matter of where the product is made. 'Plain label' brands have given way to house brands. This, in turn, means that when we apply a magnifying glass to the small print, we find that asparagus comes from Peru; smoked oysters from China; marmalade from Denmark; Italian chocolates from Mexico; and Scottish marmalade is made in Australia from local and imported ingredients…
Brian Barratt casts an investigative eye on some of the packaged food now heading for millions of microwave ovens.
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Sixty or more years ago, news rapidly spread once a year about the arrival of strawberries. We would all rush into town to buy a punnet or two, or three if we had the money. In those days, the ancient market square of Newark-on-Trent (the ancestor of every Newark in the world) was surfaced with cobblestones. Twice a week, wood and canvas stalls were erected for all kinds of produce. The strawberries, though, were sold from the back of an old lorry.
How everyone knew that the strawberry lorry had arrived was one of childhood's mysteries. Where the market's cobblestones originally came from was another mystery.
Nowadays, we don't have to wait for a once-a-year delivery of strawberries. They are readily available in greengrocery shops and supermarkets. And they are very good for us — 'The berries are excellently good to cool the liver, the blood, and the spleen, or an hot choleric stomach; to refresh and comfort the fainting spirits, and quench thirst' (Culpeper's Complete Herbal, 1653). So now you know.
All fresh foodstuff is good for us and usually tastes better than the tinned, packeted and frozen varieties. Nevertheless, it's useful to have a handy tin of this and a packet of that in the cupboard. As long as we don't forget to read the labels. Let's consider a few examples, disguising the real names in order to avoid legal complications.
A tin of Beef & Wine Casserole. The name, in large print on the label, looks promising. Beef comes first in the name, implying that it's the main ingredient, but how much beef does this casserole actually contain? Check the small print — 11%. That's about one-third, by weight, of the vegetable content. Not very much, but the product in question is quite tasty.
Here's another package — microwave Curried Chicken & Rice. It contains 36% chicken by weight. Now that's very good indeed. But are the constituents really listed by weight? Rice comes near the bottom of the list, after paprika powder. Closer inspection reveals that parentheses and brackets in the list are irregular; they do not accurately group the individual ingredients of the overall dish. However, once again the product itself tastes good.
Some frozen meals, ready for the microwave, contain as little as 9% of the meat which features first in the name on the label. Fish dishes, however, seem to have around 50% fish content, so that's satisfactory. It could also explain why they are so expensive, in these days of rapidly rising prices.
You could spend all day reading the small print. '97% fat free' and 'Less than 5% fat' look impressive. They're true, of course, but they are also a signal for us to check the salt and sugar content. Low fat can sometimes mean high salt, because manufacturers know what our taste-buds appreciate.
And then we come to the matter of where the product is made. 'Plain label' brands have given way to house brands. This, in turn, means that when we apply a magnifying glass to the small print, we find that asparagus comes from Peru; smoked oysters from China; marmalade from Denmark; Italian chocolates from Mexico; and Scottish marmalade is made in Australia from local and imported ingredients.
A tin of peas is labelled Made in Belgium (and they taste yucky). Another, with a nicer flavour, is 'Made in Australia from local and imported ingredients'. The contents are peas, water, sugar, salt and mint flavour. Are the peas grown in Australia or Belgium? 'Local and imported ingredients' adds a touch of mystery.
The centuries-old market square in Newark-on-Trent might also have been made from local and imported ingredients. The inland town once had busy wharves along the river Trent. When sea-going vessels arrived from Scandinavia, the river was too shallow for them to continue. They were weighed down by their ballast of large pebbles, or cobbles. It is said that the ballast was unloaded at Newark to enable the boats to stay afloat. So the cobbles in the market came from Scandinavia. Perhaps.
As for the mystery of the strawberries, well, we had a very good grape-vine, didn't we?
© Copyright Brian Barratt 2009.
Note. The story of boats and cobbles is from 'A look at Newark', a leaflet published in about 1975 by Public Relations Office, Newark District Council.
