There appears to have been a shift in TV adverts selling food. And it seems to have happened rather abruptly. One day I am being bombarded with the health effects of buying and eating certain breakfast cereals, snacks, yoghurts and the like eaten by perfect people and perfect families in beautiful natural surroundings, and the next I am being ushered into witness the delights of the food factory and/or fields themselves.
Selling food on TV has always had a strange fascination for me – perhaps because I like food, or perhaps because I find it strange that we have so much food and so many different brands that cheese can no longer just be cheese. When I was 8 or 9 I would draw the final snapshot of TV food adverts. My favourite was “Du pain, du vin, du Boursin”. Even that advert has now had to change to differentiate itself and become darkly humourous with the addition of “du Tracteur” to the end of the sentence. I’m not sure why anyone would link being run over by a tractor with a French soft cheese, but then I’m writing about it here, so it must have made an impression….
Anyway, back to food factories. Anyone who has ever been to a food factory will know that they are interesting places. My first visit was to a frozen pizza factory in Germany when I worked there for a year as a trainee accountant. I didn’t eat frozen pizza again for a long time. This was not because the factory was in any way dirty or unhygienic. Quite the opposite. It was spotlessly clean and sterile. All the employees were covered from head to toe. There were, in fact, more machines than there were people anyway. And my lasting memory is of huge vats of tomato sauce and grated cheese. In short, it completely destroyed my view of how pizza should be made (in a stone oven, outside, somewhere warm in Italy). I was horrified by the industrial nature and scale of food manufacturing. And it is a memory that has stayed with me for a long time.
Recently this memory was compounded by my other half’s visit to a chicken factory. Once again he said it was spotless. But the way he described the chickens being killed, plucked, sliced and diced and then packaged put a grim picture in my mind. Mass production of food is not pretty.
Yet the TV adverts say otherwise! And that is where my problem lies. The images portrayed to us by many food producers selling their wares on TV at the moment are simply not factual. Bakers dancing round a warmly lit bread-producing factory with smiles on their faces and loading individual pieces of dough into baking tins; salad growers picking individual salad leaves by hand whilst singing; chip manufacturers adding a dash of seasoning to individual frozen chips in a factory that looks more like it should be on a children’s cartoon. Food factories and commercial agricultural farms are simply not like this. And spare a thought for the workers in the factories and on the farms. I can guarantee they do not spend their days laughing, dancing and singing. In fact of the 1 billion poorest people in the world, I understand that over 50% of them work in food-related industries.
So is this a form of false advertising? Perhaps. There are many other issues at stake here as well, such as society’s demand for fast food that is not fresh. The demand for cheap food. The necessity of feeding nearly 7 billion people – it can’t necessarily all be done organically on local farms.
But that’s not really my point here – it’s the false image we are providing to the potential consumer of the product. Everyone should have the opportunity to visit a food factory and make their own minds up, but we should ultimately all be aware that food production is no different to the production of any other commodity these days.
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