Archive — Food

Live well for less

Sainsbury's own brand packaging for trifle sponge cakes

Live well for less

Present&Correct has noticed that the Sainsbury’s own brand packaging archive is now available online.

I did snap up a copy of Jonny Trunk’s Own Label book when it came out. It features a wealth of Sainsbury’s own brand packaging from the 1960s and 1970s. The period marks a shift towards a more experimental, modernist approach to packaging design, “completely different from what had gone before,” according to Jonny Trunk’s foreword.

I find this sort of thing fascinating, because it’s almost telling a social history by stealth. It’s an insight into everyday life in mid-century Britain. When you turn the page and see packaging for broken eggs, you’re not just seeing a history of graphic design.

It’s one of the reasons why I also really enjoy visiting the Museum of Brands.

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Photo — 2018-07-07

Cheese please.

Alex and I were very generously taken out for a lovely meal at Arras in York by good family friends Mary and David.

The highlight was this cheese trolley, expertly and theatrically introduced by the owner of the restaurant.

Alex was more interested in the petit fours.

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Food: a class issue

Food: a class issue

Why Jamie Oliver’s stunts like trying to ban two-for-one pizza offers are counter-productive and damaging to the poor.

…there’s a deeper and nasty question here: if we can’t trust the poor to feed themselves properly, what can we trust them to do?…

The problem is capitalism, not the poor.

Some of you might have an inkling as to why the millionaire Jamie Oliver and old Etonian Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall don’t choose this route.

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Photo — 2017-12-25

I told Alex once that I liked those weird items of matcha confectionary you get at the Chinese supermarket. Now I have all this, including a suspicious item called ‘Collon’.

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I made my shed the top rated restaurant on TripAdvisor

I made my shed the top rated restaurant on TripAdvisor

Brilliantly entertaining article by someone who managed to game TripAdvisor into ranking his fake establishment as the number one restaurant in London.

When he staged a deliberately-awful opening night, some of the patrons asked to come again.

The Shed at Dulwich has suddenly become appealing. How?

I realise what it is: the appointments, lack of address and general exclusivity of this place is so alluring that people can’t see sense.

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How the sandwich consumed Britain

How the sandwich consumed Britain

An absolutely fascinating long read about sandwiches. It finds dozens of angles on the topic, and they all prove to be fascinating.

I hadn’t realised that packaged sandwiches were such a recent invention. This article outlines the way M&S’s innovation has transformed people’s behaviour and expectations.

[M&S sandwich boss Richard Whiteside] confronted the lunchtime queue in Boots and asked people why they weren’t coming to his store. “They said: ‘Well, I am not crossing the road’,” he recalled.

I still treat buying a sandwich as a bit of a luxury. I make sandwiches for me and Alex the night before work, thinking of the money it’s saving.

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