Opinion

Long-term resident

YUCK

THE AS YET UNTOUCHED REMAINS OF THE PIZZA ARE BATHED IN A RADIOACTIVELY BRIGHT LIGHT

When walk­ing the streets of Barcelona or Bany­oles (or any other Cata­lan town), a quick glance at cer­tain ad­ver­tise­ments can plunge me (and surely many oth­ers) into a tem­po­rary state of queasi­ness. The glis­ten­ing ads in ques­tion are in­vari­ably for the prod­ucts of fast food chains.

For ex­am­ple, a well-known chain of pizza de­liv­er­ers is cur­rently ex­pos­ing their cut-price offer for two medium-size piz­zas, the fore­most of which is being in­ter­fered with by a human hand which has popped out of the right of the frame in order to snatch a slice cov­ered in tomato and bacon - both look­ing as if they’ve been coated with lin­seed oil - whereas the as yet un­touched re­mains of the pizza are bathed in a ra­dioac­tively bright light which re­veals un­happy look­ing frag­ments of bell pep­pers lurk­ing amongst yet more shreds of tomato and bacon. This how­ever is as noth­ing when com­pared to a lesser known local chain spe­cial­is­ing in chicken ham­burg­ers in which two slices of bun are pushed apart by a mass of some­thing which could be re­gur­gi­tated wood mould but which must - ac­cord­ing to the poster - be fried chicken. (A much smaller chain, with only two out­lets in Barcelona, of­fers a more straight­for­ward but skinny look­ing ham­burger, crushed as it is by two dif­fer­ent types of ooz­ing cheese and an uniden­ti­fi­able veg­etable).

And now that we’re onto the sub­ject of ham­burg­ers, we come, in­evitably, to an ex­tremely well-known fast food chain which has hun­dreds of ’restau­rants’ all over the world. Their mildest offer is of three burg­ers, each hold­ing one, two or three lay­ers of deep-fried round things whose con­tents re­main a mys­tery, as do the white blobs peek­ing out from under the top half of the bun and rest­ing on some­thing green which might - or might not - be dyed let­tuce.

The same chain also ad­ver­tises an im­mense burger barely held to­gether by the hand clasp­ing it (and on which it is al­ready drip­ping ketchup and may­on­naise); the prin­ci­pal con­tents are two slices of pulled pork (that is, the shoul­der cut of pork, also known as Boston Butt) di­vided by some­thing which would be a slice of cheese if it wasn’t en­cir­cled by a bright red rind; the top part of this dou­ble burger, how­ever, is cov­ered by what is un­mis­tak­ably cheese, heaps of it, melted and seep­ing down­wards over a soggy layer of boiled spinach. This con­coc­tion is rec­om­mended for its ’gust bes­tial’ (no trans­la­tion re­quired).

And so we come to the same chain’s dessert, which any­body who can work their way through the afore­men­tioned burg­ers will pre­sum­ably wish to sam­ple. An­nounced as sport­ing ’ex­plo­sive syrup’ this con­sists of plain white ice-cream topped by a mul­ti­coloured as­sort­ment of small chunks of some­thing or other which in turn are smoth­ered by a sin­is­ter-look­ing pink goo. Now, there is no doubt that each and every one of these im­ages has been en­hanced on a com­puter. This is stan­dard prac­tice at com­mer­cial graphic de­sign com­pa­nies (I once watched a de­signer spend over an hour try­ing, in vain, to make a cup of cof­fee look ir­re­sistible) and in the case of the glitzy food­stuffs men­tioned here, is clearly aimed at get­ting young peo­ple to eat things which are not going to im­prove their health and might, if con­sumed in suf­fi­cient quan­ti­ties, dam­age it.

It took decades for spir­its and to­bacco to be banned from ad­ver­tis­ing. How long will it be be­fore these du­plic­i­tous pic­tures of junk food are shown the door? For the good of the di­ges­tive sys­tems of youth and the eyes of the - ahem - ad­vanced in years?

Opin­ion

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