Putting the PR in Pret a Manger

Let me start by saying that I like Pret. Maybe not as much as the heady days in which I first experienced it as a sixteen-year-old in England and bemoaned the dearth of such wonders in Ireland, but I like it. I think they make tasty sandwiches and salads, their Love Bars are a bewitching amalgam of pistachio, caramel and chocolate, and I like that the sandwiches are made fresh in store everyday.

As such, I, like many post-hipsters of my generation, am a fan of the Pret Christmas sandwich* (which, besides from being tasty, has a reasonable charitable donation as part of the purchase price). As such, I made a trip to the Pret a Manger in Gatwick airport on my way home for Christmas.

Other Christmas sandwiches are available.

While chewing my sandwich and explaining to my long-suffering traveling companion about this great blog I had just started and the ethos behind it, that of trying to counter-balance the mutant archaeological and food science that crops up in day-to-day life, I looked up, and stopped chewing. Another thing I quite like about Pret is the food art they have on posters in store with soundbites on the Pret philosophy. Vaguely memorable ones in the past have included sheep made from cauliflower florets and knitted spaghetti. Here was a butterfly constructed from radicchio and asparagus.

Ain't it cute?

This butterfly accompanied an oh-so-subtle PR masterpiece that beautifully illustrates my beef with the food industry**. If you’ll allow me, I'll present a deconstruction of said PR masterpiece.

Let no man say my artistic skills are non-existent

1. Alchemy: A bit of a weird word to choose here, since the aim of alchemy (from the Arabic al-kimiya, perhaps via the Syriac kimiya or Hellenistic Greek χημία; OED online, January 2016) was to turn baser metals into gold. This could be read in one of two ways: i) this ‘alchemy’ turns unprepossessing raw materials into something delicious or, more sinisterly, ii) said alchemy is turning unprepossessing raw materials into money.

2. “We don’t interfere with nature”. The use of ‘natural’ as the holiest of food advertising adjectives is one of my greatest bugbears. As any anthropologist will tell you, there’s really no such thing as ‘natural’, which exists solely as a Cartesian dualism in opposition to ‘cultural’ (which is bad??). Even if we use the term to mean ‘not interfered with by humans’, it’s still nonsensical when it comes to food. It would imply that that the food hadn’t been domesticated (so no eggs, no chickens, no dairy products) and was completely wild, which I’m guessing would be an unprofitable model for a sandwich company. Under this rationale many of our sandwich and salad foods simply wouldn’t exist: modern brassicas such as broccoli, kale, mustard, rapeseed (whither your fancy organic mayo without rapeseed oil?), and cauliflower are all derived from combinations of three ancestral Brassica species. B. oleracea (wild mustard) alone is the granddaddy of kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower, all of which are actually the same  species^1,2.  If humans hadn’t interfered with ‘nature’ (which, incidentally, we do simply by being constituent members of our surrounding environments) most of us today would not be alive, and those that would would be rather hungry.

These are all the same species, Brassica oleracea, with different traits cultivated by humans to create different vegetables

3. “Nowadays, scientists…” This follows on from the last point: we tend to assume that food processing is a modern convention. When asked to think about the history of it we might just about consider how canned foods are said to have revolutionised wartime food consumption , even the origin of bottling in the reign of Napoleon³. But humans have been processing food for thousands of years. Processing is basically a technique to render food more edible, palatable or to extend its use life. So when you cook meat, destroying microbes that could make you ill, you are processing it. The origins of this practice are currently estimated at about 1 million years ago⁴. You can freeze food to make it last longer, and it wasn’t a process invented by Captain Birdseye. Storage pits are common in the Upper Palaeolithic (that’s from about 45,000 years ago) of the Central Russian Plain, and because permafrost would have covered the ground then, it is reasoned that food would have been intentionally frozen in such pits⁵.  I’m not even going to start on the origins of plant processing technology today, as it’s my Mastermind specialist subject and this blog post is getting on the long side, but suffice it to say that the next time someone tut tuts at my pasta consumption I will be telling them about 4,000 year old millet noodles⁶. Humans are clever animals. Food processing is a clever technique that allows us to extract the maximum value out of food resources that are not constantly available. It isn’t necessarily bad.

4. “The damage these additives do to our bodies is the source of tremendous debate and research”. This is the cleverest spin of all. It sounds like a scary sentence, doesn’t it? Read it again though and you’ll see it means basically nothing. It’s like hiding in plain sight: they are completely right, there is debate and research into what preservatives in our food do. But that doesn’t mean that they are bad. Although I’m getting further away from the archaeology here, I feel honour bound as a chemical engineer’s daughter to state that the whole point of ‘E-numbers’ is that the ‘E’ stands for regulation by the European Food Safety Authority, one of the toughest food regulatory bodies in the world. Oh, and while you’re priding yourself on the fact that your food contains no E-numbers, you may want to check your gums for scurvy, because Vitamin C is regulated as E300 and if you’re avoiding it you may have a deficiency.

I enjoyed my Pret sandwich, but we need to be more critical about food advertising that promotes sticky tropes and preys on our (often unfounded fears). Yes, there are some frankly alarming practices that go on in food processing today, but we need to be careful about separating the good (freezing your garden peas so you can enjoy them in January) from the hairy (literally – apparently some commercial ice cream contains hair to make it soft…). More soon…

*Pumpkin spice lattes, however: No. Never. Absolutely not, even if you paid me.

** I warned you about the puns before

References

1. Cheng F, Wu J, & Wang X (2014). Genome triplication drove the diversification of Brassica plants. Horticulture research, 1 PMID: 26504539

2. Gray, A. (1982). Taxonomy and evolution of broccoli (Brassica oleracea var. italica) Economic Botany, 36 (4), 397-410 DOI: 10.1007/BF02862698

3. Barksdale, N (2014). What it says on the tin: a brief history of canned food. Hungry history webpage. Available at: http://www.history.com/news/hungry-history/what-it-says-on-the-tin-a-brief-history-of-canned-food, accessed 9th January 2016

4. Berna F, Goldberg P, Horwitz LK, Brink J, Holt S, Bamford M, & Chazan M (2012). Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 (20) PMID: 22474385
5. Soffer, O. (2013). The Upper Palaeolithic of the Central Russian Plain, London: Elsevier

6. Lu H, Yang X, Ye M, Liu KB, Xia Z, Ren X, Cai L, Wu N, & Liu TS (2005). Culinary archaeology: Millet noodles in Late Neolithic China. Nature, 437 (7061), 967-8 PMID: 16222289

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