Skip to main content

What's the best way to raise a chickpea?


Packaging copy here that must surely rank as some of the worst I've read in a very long time.

"Organic chickpeas raised in Turkey... So they grow in the radiant Middle-Eastern sun... So it's not only bouzoukis that will be playing on your taste buds."

When they raise these chickpeas, I do hope they ensure they're given plenty of stimulation and not just stuck in front of the telly all day.

And there's absolutely no need to mention bouzoukis.

I know Turkish belly dancers often have some very eye-catching assets, but this is a family blog. There's clearly some attempt at a joke in this final segment of the copy, but I don't have a well enough developed sense of houmous to get it.

When we turn to the back of the packet, the text takes an even more bizarre turn.

"Of the ingredients that can be organic, 100% are organic. Salt and Water cannot be organic."

It's too late at night for me to begin to pick this nonsense apart in detail. The first line makes a weasel seem like a very straight talking kind of fellow. And given that salt and water are naturally occurring substances, surely they have a greater claim to organic status than most ingredients?

The good news is that the product is suitable for vegetarians, vegans and coeliacs. The bad news is that it gets a red traffic light for fat and salt.

Excuse me while I go away and blow my head off with a bouzouki.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.
1 comment
Read more

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...
3 comments
Read more