Food

Brandwatch: Marathon (and on and on)

Marathon is back! Back!! BACK!! : Mars have cashed in one of their longer-standing “free goodwill” chips by restoring - however briefly - 70s/80s icon Marathon to its brand portfolio (whether it’ll completely replace Snickers, and for how long, are unknowns).  The comments on this Brandrepublic story are withering - how unimaginative, the marketers scoff, how short-sighted.

AS IF! Not that I feel the re-re-brand is anything other than a deeply cynical move but it’s a well-timed one and likely to succeed in the short-term without damaging the brand in the long term. The cohort of consumers who identified with Marathon are now getting beyond the age where they buy countline confectionery - how better to get them to at least re-try the product? Nostalgia - especially for a cheaper age - works well in times of economic difficulty - and so does the parochialism which Mars is tapping into by jettisoning its ‘global’ Snickers brand. It’s a bit of free publicity in a sector where headline-making innovation is thin on the ground. And it’s sufficiently long after the Marathon brand was dropped originally for the move not to look like any kind of admission of error by Mars.

Manga Review #2: Addicted To Curry

For my next go at manga I decided to try one that isn’t famous - Addicted To Curry in fact hasn’t been licensed for publication in English-speaking countries, so I was reliant on online “scanlations” - fan translations on scanned images. The amount of work and dedication that must go into producing these is phenomenal so thankyou O unknown copyright infringer!

I chose Addicted To Curry on title alone. Here is what it’s about: a schoolgirl has been left in charge of her father’s curry house, which is failing because she can’t cook. She saves a dying man in the street who turns out to be an amazing young chef and an old friend of her father’s. Together they work to make the curry house a success! Every episode features: … read on …

KFC AM: Breakfast Chicken Watch

There is a time for fried chicken and I am fairly sure it is not breakfast. (”Speak for yourself!” - massed ranks of FT pubgoers). KFC is launching its new “KFC AM” range this week in London. The menu is “aimed at working men” - it will contain bacon and the “AM Twister” shown on the cover of this week’s marketing suggests….A SAUSAGE IN A TWISTER WRAP???

KFC, listen to your core chicken constituency. KFC AM only makes sense if you mean ONE AM and what you mean is some kind of gravy bucket dirty chicken deal. I can only think that the indie sector has you rattled in this new chicken 2.0 era of the long tail (”Long tail? Stick it in the chicken popcorn maker.”) At this rate SF and HF will be making you a laughing (chicken) stock.

IN SALAD (of all the) NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM(s)

huntin for images of BRANES in pulp culture i came across THIS via boingboing: “In November 2006 Till Nowak created the image SALAD. For this image he created 12 digital vegetable models in 3ds max using photographic references. They were combined to become a tribute to the fantastic biomechanical creations of H.R. Giger and the vegetable portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.”

full size here

Come Dine With Me – Awesome

The Guardian’s “not Nancy Banks Smith” TV reviewer Sam Wallaston is a reliable sort of guy. I watched last night’s Come Dine With Me and was agog. “This is the best thing I’ve seen on Channel 4 in a long time” I exclaimed while watching between my fingers. Sure enough Wallaston’s review: “the worst programme on television”. He didn’t like it. And that’s why I read his reviews. “Never knowingly correct” goes his strapline. (Don’t get me started on his “ha ha geeks eh, this IS complicated and silly” he did the other day on Battlestar Galactica.)

Anyway… COME DINE WITH ME. Last night’s was more than awesome. This show has grown — a day-time staple, it’s gathered celebrity editions, and now it comes in a new format. No longer a short show every day of the week covering 5 people — they now compress 4 people in to a one hour show. It’s a sensation. Well for something that’s come from day-time. (It even has a rip off version on the beeb hosted by Simon Rimmer who seems to be trying to be on telly every day of the week for an entire year.)

But then having established a regular format, with often witty and interesting people who occasionally come to verbal blows, it goes HAYWIRE. Remember that first edition of Wife Swap with the foul mouthed racist woman — it was well train wreck. This was much the same but written by Mike Leigh. … read on …

Sandwich Squeeze

Something that became miserably clear to me last week: Marks & Spencers have brutally culled their sandwich range - goodbye most of the black-label “food to go” range which brought us the Steak & Blacksticks Blue sandwich (probably the nicest EVER CREATED by a British supermarket chain) among others. The black-labels have been replaced by an odd range of tortillas, kinda-sorta-open sandwiches and things which look like someone’s started making a wrap and wandered off before the actual wrapping happens. All these new things cost a lot and have visibly less filling - not surprising given the cost squeeze on food suppliers as prices rise.

There’s been another subtle change in the sandwich range though: everything possible is now branded “British”. … read on …

A dinner with the Pentecostals

I don’t know how many of you have ever attended a Pentecostal church service, or hung around Christians of that persuasion for any meaningful length of time. The last time I spoke with someone I knew was Pentecostal was back in Tennessee; apparently in the UK it’s the fastest-growing Christian denomination of belief. They’re not as insular as the Seventh Day Adventists, but they’re at least as driven — there’s still the faint whiff of the cult about them. The story of Pentecost is the story of true believers surviving a day of reckoning through God’s grace; a wind from heaven scorches the earth and, among flames, boiling smoke and a blood-red moon, His followers become prophesyers, visionaries and “dreamers”. Essentially, Pentecostalism promises its followers that when the sh1t hits the fan, they will be superheros. Or at least Aquarians. It’s a strange cocktail of doomsday science and unbridled narcissism that apparently proves irresistable to more Britons each year.

Unaware of these tendencies lurking so nearby, I found myself surprised that upon sitting down to a dinner party in Holloway, the pleasant Chinese couple to my right who were cracking flavoured sunflower hulls and sucking out the contents with nimble aplomb announced to me, apropos of absolutely nothing (which is how these things always come out), that they were “very religious”. And left it there, picking at their seeds intently.

There really is little I enjoy less than discussing my dinner companions’ religious predilictions, but you have to say something, so I did.

“We’re Pentecostals,” he said, the mound of hulls having now grown to the size of a small anthill. She looked at me and said “Christian!”

“For 15 years,” the man said, grimly, I thought. After dinner was over he went out to the back patio and smoked the rest of a half-finished cigar, by himself.

Before that, though — but after the sunflower seeds — the entire table tasted what our host called “1000-year-old egg”. A delicacy in China and Hong Kong, 1000-year-old eggs are created by essentially burying eggs in mud for several weeks or months, turning the shell black, the white a translucent amber, and the yolk a mysterious dark green. A bit like some crash-landed alien, thawed out only in order to be eaten. (But will it change us if we do?)

The Chinese Pentecostals dug in, and smiled at our giggles and hesitant sniffing. They had nothing to fear from a 1000-year-old egg.

baconbaconbacon!!!

from our friend ms llaura llllew, comes this astonishing piece of high quality pig-based cookery!

what’s next? steak plates? lamb chop pans? or just HOVER BACON?

The Joy Of Tunnocks ♥

The Tunnocks tea-room bakery display features cyclists, and best of all, tea-cake owls! Via Anne at I Like!

Nice to see them still pushing the Dark Chocolate flavours, although I think I’m still yet to see a dark chocolate teacake in this ‘ere London. Then again! I am no teacake fan. Get your marshmallows off me bleeergh cough hack splutter. Even IF they are arguably the most fun to eat in their methodology as long as you do it correctly, ie smash the teacake against your forehead first in order to crack the chocolate coatin. If you like, you can shout “Haaaaaaai-YAAAA!” whilst doing so, but hey, it’s not essential. I’d shout “YAAAMAPIII DAAAAAAI-SKKKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII” - or I would - if I liked teacakes. But as I don’t - my confession remains…. unmade. DAMN YOU FOUL MARSHMALLOW.

Best Before

This afternoon the mindreading goblins who decide which ad goes at the top of yer Gmail ceased their Cougar obsession for long enough to point me to a site called “Openanduseb4″. This turned out to be a place which sells pre-printed labels which you can put on things you’ve opened so you don’t forget to use them before they go off. I am of course a great fan of entrepreneurial innovations but it does strike me that in this case the basic idea is really quite replicable to, well, anyone with stickers and a pen.

But really I was just annoyed because of what I hoped the site was: a food science exploration into whether or not a given use-by date actually means it. … read on …