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.