Name: Guerrilla ingredients.
Age: Not new. The tabloids have always loved a something-unexpected-found-in-the-groceries story.
It’s not just the tabloids – I do, too. What was it this time? A woman in Middlesbrough called Chelsea Freer went to Asda and bought some fish fingers from their Just Essentials range for her two-year-old son.
How much? 75p for 10.
Can’t argue with that. And? As she was preparing her toddler’s dinner, she was horrified to find it contained eggs.
Does he have an egg intolerance? I don’t mean egg eggs, I mean fish eggs.
Oh! What did she say? “I won’t be buying Asda’s fish fingers again. Good job I didn’t let my son eat them.”
What did Asda say? “Unfortunately the nature of using fish means that there is always a small risk of roe making its way into the final product.” They gave her a refund and a £5 voucher.
Don’t some people like roe, though? Well, here’s the thing. Freer posted about it on Facebook. While some people were sympathetic – one even said she would have rung the police – others were less so. One person, called Vicky Sole, said: “Caviar fish fingers should be £75 not 75p.”
Vicky Sole, seriously? Yes. Anyway, caviar is usually the roe of sturgeon.
Didn’t she just resign? Shush. Asda fish fingers aren’t made from sturgeon, they’re made from pollack.
Any old pollacks? No, Asda’s are made from minced Alaska pollack (Theragra chalcogramma). But if this is going to descend into fish punnery, let’s talk about some other unexpected ingredients found in supermarket purchases.
Yes, please. There was the mouse found in a tin of one supermarket’s own-brand baked beans. (It’s usually mice, to be honest.)
Mmm, mouse on toast. Then there was the poor woman who found a dead frog in a bag of spinach from another big-name store. The friend for whom she was making the salad was vegetarian and was sick several times.
Ew! Then there were live maggots on a pizza. There have been poisonous spiders in grapes, crystallised slugs in crisps, moths in a bag of rocket salad and bird feathers in spinach. There was even once a cake – described as an almond cake layered with chocolate, butter cream and butterscotch – that was withdrawn because it reportedly contained faecal bacteria.
OK, but these are all disgusting surprises, whereas bonus caviar … As we’ve already discussed, it wasn’t real caviar. Also, I don’t think many two-year-olds are partial to the stuff.
Do say: “Can we get the real thing next time, Mum, from a wild beluga sturgeon?”
Don’t say: “Guess what kind of caviar Alex Salmond likes ...”
