Crisp Reviews Go MAINSTREAM

Since Scoffology established the template for ULTIMATE POPULAR FOOD REVIEWS*, things are getting out of hand. Check out magic Charlie Brooker with his ramshackle review of Walker's mob-rule-based reality-TV crisp-ocracy right here.


*And then sort of just abandoned it, yeah, whatever
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THE STRAIGHT DOPE ON BMI

If you care about your weight, you've probably found out your Body Mass Index. But is it any use at all, and do you really need to CUT YOUR LEGS OFF to attain your 'ideal' BMI? The Straight Dope has the straight dope on BMI right here, with some interesting fact-u-likes. Did you know that the BMI concept was invented between 1830 and 1850? And by someone called Adolphe? Trueness. Here's NHS Direct's own BMI calculator for you to go crazy on too. No more Oreo milkshakes for YOU!
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IT BEGINS - M&S START CHARGING FOR BAGS

Marks and Spencer are to start charging 5p for every plastic food bag sold from 6 May. The money goes to their environmental charity Groundwork, and they'll give you a free long-life bag if you shop there the month before. Is this the start of the Big Change that will get all the supermarkets charging for bags in the UK? Could be!
Edit: Looks like we were right...
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BREAKING NEWS: IF YOU EAT LOTS OF NUTELLA YOU WILL BECOME A FAT CHOD

A Nutella advert on UK TV has been withdrawn after complaints it made its terminally sugary choco-gack loveliness sound healthier than rice cakes. Embarrassing details after the jump.
The ad ran: "Surprisingly, each jar contains 52 hazelnuts, the equivalent of a glass of skimmed milk and some cocoa." Not so surprising, really, but worded in such a way as to make you think that maybe you'd had Nutella wrong all these years. But since eating 52 hazelnuts, a glass of skimmed milk and 'some' cocoa is not actually, you know, a healthy thing to do, 53 people complained and the ad was withdrawn.

Which? got involved too. Their health and food campaigner Miranda Watson said: "We think it is highly irresponsible of Nutella to imply that their spread is healthier than it actually is, especially as the ad clearly encourages parents to give it to their children for breakfast."

Only 53 people, though! Imagine what ads we could get banned if we try! If we start writing letters, Coco the Coco Pops monkey-twat could be off our screens in no time. STOP PATRONISING US, COCO, YOU FURRY CRANKSHAFT. Coco is currently persuading parents to feed their kids Coco Pops when they get home from school, thus inventing an entirely new meal between lunch and dinner. Let's call it... Scamch.

Bonus facticle: in the US, you pronounced it New-tella; in the UK, you pronounce it Nut-ella. Let's call the whole thing off. Continues here

EEELVES!!!

It's time to lay the smackdown on some of Cadbury's most sinister creations - the Cadbury Magical Elves. Who they, you ask? What that? Where find? Find is after the jump. You have nothing to lose but your sleep!

So. The Cadbury Elves are eight happy-go-lucky, forever-friends sprites, dedicated to aiding Santa and filling the mouths of children with chocolate and popping candy. Each little bar is a different elf, and inside is a Freddo-style choc mini-slab studded with popping candy. In fact, they're pretty much your only big-brand source of popping candy. Which is odd, when you think about it, given that it's like sex in the mouth. Only not like that, pervert.


What's much odder are the eight elves themselves (six of which are shown above, although the chocolate inside is identical). Why are they named after really obscure minerals, like Wulfenite, Sunstone and Peridot? And who on earth decided that they should have different-coloured eyes? It's like looking at a group of stunted, leering David Bowies. The Magical Elves are terrifying. Not officially acknowledged on the main Cadbury website, they form a sort of Elven Underground all on their own. Although they were genetically engineered for Christmas, you can find them in disreputable newsagents still, huddling around the sherbet dipdabs and supersour Chav sweets.


Tasty as they are, the Cadbury Elves have been responsible for too much of this sort of thing:
“Billy, go back to sleep.”
“But mum, I had that dream about the Cadbury Elves again. Their hideous bicoloured eyes were gleaming, and they giggled “WE DONE AWAY WITH YER PARENTS, SONNY!” Then they shrieked like banshees and tried to jump into bed with me, their tiny, cold hands skittering like cockroaches under the duvet.”
“No more popping candy for you, Billy. Just Ritalin from now on.”

Want more elvishness? Click here for a random Canadian Cadbury's site full of wallpapers, character profiles and, sadly, more.

Well, that's all there is to say about the elves for today so... wait a minute, one of the lovable scamps has clambered on to my knee. What's that, Feldspar? Major Tom's a junkie? You little scamp! Stay away, Feldspar! Not my eyes! AAAAARGH!
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Fact-U-Like of the Day - Breakfast of Champions

'Breakfast of Champions' was the slogan of the US Wheaties cereal... but it's more famous as the title of the 1973 novel by Kurt Vonnegut. For why? Find out after the jump.

Simple. In the fantastic novel, liberally illustrated with Vonnegut's own crap/brilliant felt-tip illustrations, a waitress character drawls 'Breakfast of Champions' every time she serves a martini. And who are we to disagree? (Hic!) Continues here

Stand By Your Ham!

British farmers are losing £20 for every pig they sell, and they've decided to sing about it. Click here to hear their moving rendition of the Tammy Wynette classic Stand By Your Man, with added bacon. It's a good quality recording too, apart from all the crackling. Yeah, pig farmers, U JST GOT PUND RIGHT BACK!
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Fast Food - Ads Vs Reality

The West Virginia Surf Report shows you what some popular US fast food really looks like compared to the ads. Ach, we'd probably still choke this lot down, sogging up the bun with our shameful weeping.
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Supermarkets' Health Kick

Seems like it's not enough for supermarkets to just offer healthy food. Now Tesco is talking about price-fixing to start discouraging binge drinking, and Sainsbury's are even offering captive doctors to treat you. Do you think they'd give you a Value Checkup? (Balls cupped, one cough, single chalky aspirin).

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Creme Egg Review

Hold the front page! Bunnies! Puppets! Druids! David freaking Attenborough! Scoffology has reviewed the Cadbury's Creme Egg! It's only been out for 37 years! Read all about it after the jump!


There is something gloriously, life-affirmingly insane about a Creme Egg.

Take the packaging, for a start. It's like nothing else on earth. Most chocolate bars shout their clear, iconic message from on high. But the Creme Egg's nonsense-coloured foil packaging is more like the deranged natterings of an ether-addled bohemian genius. You can't even see the logo half the time. It used to have a couple of mad little chicks on. And yet the purple-red-yellow foil wrapper is instantly recognisable from half an aisle away. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that the Creme Egg is an ancient archetype that echoes through the centuries. Did druids at Stonehenge sacrifice shivering slaves on midsummer's dawn in the presence of a shiny rainbow egg? I think they did.

The Creme Egg is also insane by virtue of what it is. It's a bloody egg made of chocolate thicker than your thigh, and inside it is something exactly the same as what's inside a real egg - white and yolk and stickiness. Only translated mysteriously into the sweet world in such an utterly self-confident way that you've never paused to think how odd it is until right now. Does the yolk taste different from the white? Should it? Why does it always feel indefinably wrong to stop and observe the yolk and the white in their gooey glory, like accidentally looking into the wrong sex's lavatory? According to Wikipedia, the fondant is solid when it's first put in the chocolate shell. Then it's injected with an enzyme to liquify it for consumption. An enzyme! Of course it is! We wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Creme Egg was given its unique texture through cosmic rays, or a gypsy curse.

In fact, all the advertising around Creme Eggs has always emphasised the fact that they're clinically bonkers. When they were launched back in 71, there was a TV ad for a schoolboy asking a shopkeeper for 6000 of them. The Spitting Image puppets shilled them in the 90s, and egg-a-like Matt Lucas was the ideal choice to front a campaign in which/ he proclaimed, prophet-like, "I've seen the future - and it's egg-shaped!" And in the US, they're sold by a real rabbit that clucks like a chicken. Check out the video below.



A creme egg is also insane because, as the ad campaigns remind us, there's no right way to eat it. A Creme Egg is impossible to consume with any kind of dignity. It turns you into a snaffling, snorting egg-eating bear creature, pawing at the egg with the kind of gusto that would, if he were narrating you, give David Attenborough's voice that kindly, amused tone that we hope God has. "Using his perfectly designed forepaws, the human unwraps the delicate outer shell. Now, he begins to nibble at the top of the chocolate, perhaps hoping to break through to the fondant and suck it out. But... it is not to be. The human has become too greedy and is attempting to bite the top off the egg. In his haste to feed, the human has dropped the egg on the filthy pavement, leaving our very surprised looking human with traces of chocolate on its face and paws. Inevitably, the human will return to the shop to find another egg, and the cycle... begins again."

So here's to you, eggy-wegg, with your stains and your childishness. You're a symbol of chucklesome fun in a cold, grey world. A signifier of happy humanity. Stalin, we feel, would have no time for a Creme Egg. Well, Stalin was wrong. There, we said it. Let's hope the future remains as egg-shaped as ever. Continues here

Peperami - 150% of an animal?

Did you know that Peperami lists 150% meat as one of its ingredients? Is it because it comes from the fifth dimension? Can we blame EU quotas? Or is it simply some kind of supermeat... like they used to put in Whiskas? It's a modern mystery, solved after the jump.

Look on the back of a Peperami and you'll see the list of ingredients: Pork (150%), Salt, Glucose, Spices, Flavour Enhancers (Monosodium Glutamate, Sodium 5' Ribonucleotides), Garlic Powder, Preservative (Sodium Nitrite).

Rewind a minute - 150% pork?

A curious brother in Scoffness wrote to Peperami to ask why, and got this reply.

Hello from Peperami

Dear XXXX, Thank you for your recent query regarding the confusing labelling on Peperami. Under the labelling laws for processed meat products like sausages, we are required to state the amount of raw meat as a percentage of the finished product -including all the other ingredients like spices, salt etc. For raw sausages, the meat percentage will be less than 100% because other ingredients are added during manufacture. However, Peperami is a cured sausage and weight is lost through evaporation of water during manufacture. This means that the weight of the raw meat we put in before cooking and curing is higher than the weight of the finished Peperami that is sold. The meat content is therefore, more than 100%. As an example - a 25g Peperami is made with 27g of raw meat. I hope that this has helped and if you require any further information orassistance, then please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards, Chantal Barnard

Who knew you were getting 27g of meat for your 25g? Box it up and put it in the solved file, Mulder! We're outta here!

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Shop-ocalypse Now

"Call me neurotic, but I just can’t handle it..."
This is stolen from a Facebook rant which sums up many males' attitudes to modern supermarket shopping. Us, we love us some aisle action, but we feel his pain. See if you agree...

The rant in full:

"In Star Trek, there are some bad guys called The Borg. They’re an intelligent bunch of cyborgs that don’t have individual thought, instead, they think and act as a collective. They don’t usually attack unless provoked, so the crew from the Enterprise can move freely between them until they’re considered a threat. This doesn’t stop the crew creeping around the enemy ship, not wanting to disturb them.

This is how I feel when supermarket shopping. It is in this environment that other women really show their spots. Normally placid creatures discover a fierce confidence and purpose. There is no apparent idea of spatial awareness here; forty-something housewives with body-warmers and Ugg boots bounding in all directions, children weaving between trolleys, seemingly a whiskers length from impact. I’m surprised more serious accidents don’t happen.

Call me neurotic, but I just can’t handle it.

This is why, without fail, when we enter Sainsbury’s in Farnham, I always ask if it’s ok to sit in the Starbucks near the exit with a magazine while my wife does the hour-long weekly shop on her own. She replies a no, without fail; that’s hardly fair, she says. I can smell the rich aroma of coffee as soon as I’ve entered the store, but the FastTrack device is firmly placed in its holder in the trolley and I’m commited before I can pluck up the courage to escape.

It’s not that I’m not a modern, considerate husband, but I find the idea of tackling the many aisles of this gargantu-store really quite hellish. I have nothing to do but scan in each item with the hand-held scanner every few minutes. I don’t know where anything is. Its not that I haven’t been in this shop about 700 times, but the fact that there is no order in the layout of these shops, makes me reluctant to try and commit any of it to memory for fear of an aneurysm.

Another couple pass us, and I look up and catch the eye of the male companion of another woman intently sizing up two packets of identical salad packets. He looks perfectly calm and interested, but in the briefest of glances, I can see shame in his eyes. We’re not supposed to be here. We’re like racehorses who have somehow found ourselves pulling a cart round Central Park. In winter. We both cast our eyes to the floor and shuffle on.

My wife walks off to find something in the first aisle, leaving me with the trolley. I gasp, panicked and look around for shelter from the evil housewives with large metal cages with wheels and no regard for right of way. I shuffle into a corner by the weighing machine, next to the potatoes and pull the trolley close to me, out of harm’s way. Suddenly I’m standing in the most populated area of the aisle, two women making a bee-line for the potatoes, pushing their trolleys towards me as if I’m invisible; hoping I’ll move before their huge metal pain-bringers connect with bone. On of them wins, and reaches me first. I pull myself together and cast her a look. She looks up, and the lights are on, but this woman is shopping. She suddenly springs to life, pulling herself away from her trance and tuts in the direction of my trolley which is now in her way. I clearly don’t know the aisleway code.

So I move to another corner. There are some highlights to this nightmare. I find solace in the magazine and CD areas, spending as much time as possible with the games magazines that I’ve already read at work, scanned and pillaged for quotes. This wastes at least four aisles worth of progress through the shop, and we’re nearly at the beers, wines and spirits section, which means I can practically see the checkout. My mood lightens, and I regain my confidence, even managing a smile. The best thing about this whole experience though, is the FastTrack mechanism that allows us to pay without re-scanning everything, and it’s all over. As we leave the shop, the bitter winter air feels like freedom and I skip to the car in euphoric relief."

Right-thinking hero, or addleheaded Sainsburiphobe? Let us know below.
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