England's Poison Palaces

1740:

Edited by CJ Tointon

Today there's a feast of 'poisons' available to the English in their supermarkets. I visited a Sainsbury's store with notebook in hand and wearing a thick jumper to keep warm in the 'cool food' sections. I was horrified by the sheer quantity of crap food on sale! There are aisles of products deemed suitable for human consumption but obviously unhealthy by any sane standard. 

There's the obvious - the obscene and bloody mess that is meat and sea food. Obvious because you get what you see. But perhaps more insidious is the milk, hidden in so many seemingly benign foods. In England, the ingredients listings on all compound foods have to be listed for each of the preparations which combine to make up each item on sale. Any foods which might contain an ingredient that could have an allergic effect, are listed in bold print which makes it easy for a vegan (like me) who wants to avoid anything with animal content to see if there is milk or egg in any products. But who reads ingredients listings unless they have allergies? I discovered that the ingredients in almost all food preparations that aren't solely 'flesh', are awash with milk and many contain egg.

Let's see what's on offer as we wander down the aisles of a big Sainsbury's supermarket. We start with yoghurts, all primarily milk, of which there are dozens of flavours. They must be popular considering the volume and number of varieties available. Then there are the various butters and spreads laden with saturated animal fats, the sweets and desserts, most containing cream and most thick with sugar to make them invitingly tasty. Another aisle is devoted to an endless variety of sweet cakes that are oozing with cream and filled with milk chocolate. Next is a dizzying variety of soft, creamy confections including ice cream, mousse, cream fool and meringue. There's cream or milk in almost every sweet item, a few of the favourites being Tiramisu, Lemon Meringue Pie, Double Belgian Chocolate Sundae, Sweet Pancakes, Sponge Pudding and Cream Slices. I saw nothing at all for the sweet-toothed vegan!

There's every conceivable variety of cheeses, either locally homegrown or imported from all over the world. There are sauces for every taste, like Apple and Cider Creamy Sauce and Creamy Lasagne Sauce (where I noticed 'milk' appearing in one of the ingredients listings nine times). And there are dozens of products like quiche and custards containing eggs which are almost certainly from caged hens. Even such an obviously cruel and unhealthy item as 'egg' is unlikely to deter the average customer from buying these popular foods.

Leaving Sainsbury's, we go to the food hall of Marks and Spencer's where we find countless varieties of the ready-made-meal. This is big business in England where a complete dinner can appear on the plate within 5 minutes of microwave heating. There's Potato Dauphinoise in Rich Cream and Garlic Sauce, a simple Ultimate Potato Mash topped with Cheese or a hundred other varieties of 'instant' dinners suitable for busy people who are short of time (and brains!).

These mega-supermarkets are places where choices are endless. There's a vast array of meats and meat preparations - Fish Pie, Beef Ragu, Pulled Ham in Mustard Sauce, Aromatic Lamb, Meatballs and Potato, British Beef Casserole, Fish and Chips, Cottage Pie in Rich Wine Gravy with Cheese Mash and endless combinations of highly processed ingredients that make up all the favourite meals remembered from home dinners or from the menus of restaurant meals. But perhaps the most blatantly ugly trio of items I found were Rack of Lamb (with seven of the lamb's ribs protruding from the muscle tissue), Dry Aged Beef Rib (boneless and 28 days matured with Mustard Basting Fat) and lastly and most cynically - Rose Veal Escallops  (from 'calves reared to our own high welfare standards').

This is just a random selection comprising a tiny percentage of the hundreds of animal-based food products designed to attract the consumer. It's obvious, by the huge quantities of such items, that they're selling very well. If English customers are falling for this unethically produced and highly unhealthy so-called 'food', they really don't stand a chance to survive very long before they end up obese, ill or dead! These products look attractive, but they are empty foods and just plain dangerous. There's plenty of profit being made by the big retailers who fill the stomachs of a hungry nation with foods that deplete the energy levels of an already hard pressed population. It's no wonder that as one walks the streets of England, the people one passes look overweight, sluggish and depressed. They just don't seem to get it - that they're being fooled by attractive packaging and rich tasting, fattening products.

And what about us Aussies? It's likely that as soon as the retail giants notice a market worth exploiting here, Australian customers will be just as stupidly delighted with a similarly vast range of food products and we'll fall into a similar state of ill health and compromised ethics as the English have.