Food - Bee Wilson isn't swallowing Iceland's ad campaign
When politicians get desperate, they start attacking politics itself. By the same token, when super- markets get desperate, they attack the whole process of commercial food retail, trying to tar all their competitors with a single brush in order to emerge, innocent and unscathed, but with vastly boosted profits, without ever appearing greedy or cut-throat. This, at least, is my explan-ation of what's going on at Iceland.
Think of Iceland and you think of chilly aisles jam-packed with cheap frozen cheesecakes and hamburgers, with the occasional packet of cakes or ice-cream wafers to fill up the space. The people at Iceland want to correct this impression. So they've launched a campaign called "Food You Can Trust". They want you to know that not only is Iceland fresher and more "natural" than you think, it's also more trustworthy than any of its competitors. "We aim to bring a breath of fresh air into the stuffy world of supermarket retailing and we're succeeding in our own innovative way," says a promotional booklet.
The lynchpin of the ad campaign is the boast that Iceland removed GM ingredients from its own-brand goods in May 1998, "long before the media, the government and most of our competitors even recognised there was a problem". The chain is also removing artificial colours and flavours from its own-brand goods. Iceland now prides itself on "honest" labelling, and even seeks to protect you "against common cancers such as bowel, stomach and throat" with its range of frozen vegetables. It wants you to know it has a "mission" to sell "better food". Its leaflet warns about the dangers of tartrazine and mechanically recovered meat. It is emblazoned "The Battle Goes On" and comes with the approval of Greenpeace and the Hyperactive Children's Support Group.
It's stirring rhetoric. But "better food" is only relative and Iceland doesn't say better than what. Better than roadkill? Better than rubbish? Test the firm by the foods it promotes, not its rhetoric, and "better food" no longer tastes so appealing. On a recent visit to a local store there were two-for-one offers on Chicago Cheese Feast Pizza (£2.69), Viota Bakewell tarts (85p), Ragu White Sauce (£1.35), Bernard Matthews Spicy Indian Crispy Crumb Turkey (£1.69) and many more. If you want to buy this junk, you may as well get it cheap at Iceland - but it's hardly "food you can trust". There was a McVities Pina Colada Party cheesecake (with E numbers 401, 450, 471, 475 and 500) reduced from £4.99 to £2.99 to £1.99. There were brontosaurus-sized "fresh" turkey drumsticks (£1.99 for three) and terrifying frozen sacks of beige-coloured sausages (2kg for £2.99).
Iceland uses only "quality cuts" of meat because "nobody wants to eat anything which can't be defined". I would define its GM-free quarter pounders as thoroughly unpleasant, oozing grey juice. Its "reformed" and breadcrumbed own-brand scampi smelt a bit funny. A rhubarb crumble I tested contained old stalks of bitter rhubarb, tarted up with annatto to look like young pink shoots. The crumble was made with "butter oil" instead of butter. None of this is surprising supermarket practice. It's just that if you're going to make inferior products like these, you shouldn't bang on about "honesty" and good food.
Iceland's campaign is powerful only because of the public's superstition against GM foods, which makes us blindly think of all non-GM foods as automatically healthy, even when they contain hydrogenated fats and the flesh of unhappy animals. But GM or not, Iceland chicken nuggets (£2.99 for a packet of 30) are not and will never be natural food. To pretend otherwise is an insult to consumers, an insult to genuine whole earth campaigners and an insult to food itself.
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