YUCK

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