Scoff Off!

Scoffology has moved to Blogger. Yes, it’s the opposite way round to what most people are doing. But most people don’t consider Ginster’s Buffet Bars to be the mythical fifth food group.

Anyway, we’re now at www.scoffology.com. Yeah, all posh like. Come and visit. You have nothing to lose but your precious time. (So make sure you look while you’re at work.)

Marsgate – an end to the pain

So Mars have backed down thanks to pressure from the Vegetarian Society and reversed the decision to add rennet, from calves’ stomachs, to their chocolate. Which means the following morsels are still veggie friendly and will be forever:

Mars

Snickers

Galaxy

Maltesers

…and all the related ice creams, too.

A happy ending for veggies everywhere. Now to continue with our campaign to get chicken labelled a vegetable. And Pot Noodles labelled as a superfood. Well, we can dream…

Fact-U-Like of the Day 20/3/07

DID YOU KNOW that the people of Ghana enjoy bread made out of winged termites which are fried, then baked into bread? Since insects are a great source of fibre, this would probably be a tolerably healthy choice. Insects are underrated. So they say – we don’t eat anything with a proboscis.

Colour Us Surprised!

Did you know that ripe oranges are green? Or that 7-Up used to be brown? Check out this Slate article on fake food colours for more of this interesting nonsense.

Jammie Dodgers Shed the Fat

Well done clever clever Burton’s! The UK’s second-biggest biscuit maker has ditched all trans fats. Mind you, most of Burton’s biccies are layered with indecently thick chocolate, so don’t expect your cholesterol levels to dive just because you’re eating one Burton’s a day as if they were Yakult. Okay?

Foodwitchery!

We’d be remiss in our foodographical studies if we didn’t link to this spectacular diss of everyone’s favourite Scots oat-eater Gillian McKeith by Bad Science guru Ben Goldacre. If you’re looking for some reasons why the healthy eating ‘industry’ is way out of whack, this is a very good way to start.

By the way, the You Are What You Eat cereal bars taste pretty good, especially the citrus ones. The list of ingredients doesn’t obviously mark them out as healthier than the competition, though. See? That’s unbiased journalism, or blogalism, or whatever.

Ish.

Update: We heard better.

Well, okay, we heard different. Now it seems that the meat Bernard Matthews imported from Hungary could be to blame. The beeb are now saying that nobody knows how chicken AIDS made it to our shores. Could it be the Hungarian Mystery Meat? Or the Rogue Woodpigeon Through the Airduct? Or Reverend Green with the Spanner in the Closet? Who knows? Not us!

So the, uh, new verdict is – legally Bernard seems to be covered. But legal won’t stop you dying from bird flu. But there’s no risk. But there might be. But there probably isn’t. Aarrgh!

So will you die?

In the hysteria around the CHICKEN AIDS epidemic, it seems that punters are thinking about staying away from Bernard Matthew’s turkey products so they won’t be infected with CHICKEN AIDS too. None of the man’s food has been recalled so far, but the plucky – hah! – East Anglian is set to suffer from a lack of people prepared to die for the sake of sweet, sweet turkey ham. So does avian influenza actually kill you through the medium of the golden drummer?
This BBC website page has a sensible list of questions. Cooking kills the virus and therefore any precooked meat is fine to eat.

The verdict: Eat of the processed turkey. There’s no danger! Until we hear better. And then it’ll be too late.

CODE RED – Biscuit Alert

Biscuits don’t usually get much press here – that’s for the immortal www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com – but this just has to be tackled. Butterscotch McVities Milk Chocolate Digestives. WHY WERE WE NOT INFORMED? This is basically a way of fitting more sugar into the biscuit area of the digestive, giving it an overly melodramatic mouthfeel, like a cross between Baileys, molasses and uranium-57.

A bridge too far – which is why they’re a limited edition – but one for the collectors to look out for.

This may have been out for years, by the way – the biscuits were crumbly and the pack was suspiciously scuffed. Perhaps they escaped from a top secret biscuit testing lab, somewhere in the middle of Dartmoor.

It’s no McVities Caramel Milk Chocolate Digestive, put it that way. Far from it.

Trans Fats – WTF?

So while we’ve been away, the world’s discovered a new supervillain: Dr Trans Fatty Acids, scheming away in his evil mountain hideaway, invisible to normal food labelling and a man-made scourge of society.

If you’re not hip to the jive, trans fats are created when food companies hydrogenate their vegetable oil (which they often do to make margarine-like products for use in processed food). Hydrogenating is a cheap fix, cheaper than lovely real butter – but it creates a whole new type of Terminator-like fat which has no place in the human body.

It’s apparently responsible for everything from coronaries to fertility problems in women – and the worst news is that it’s in pretty much all the cheap, nice food you like, such as pastries and cakes and cheap, cheap biscuits.

Boo, trans fats, boo! Watch out for the main offenders – and the media cobblers associated with a food scare – in the near future.