It’s called the Christmas Tinner and consists of nine layers of
processed festive food, as demonstrated in the picture below. Apparently
the chain has actually trialled this product in its Basingstoke store
and is considering a national rollout “if there is enough gamer demand”.
How said “demand” will be measured remains unspecified. Although we
do know that it will cost £1.99 per tin if it comes to fruition.
A “without sprouts” variant is available for those who dislike brussel
sprouts. But like the idea of an entire Christmas dinner in a tin.
"The flavor called pumpkin is surging toward a record season in processed
foods, with Mars introducing Pumpkin M&Ms, Planters dusting
“pumpkin spice” on its almonds and Starbucks bringing back its annual
Pumpkin Latte. Sales of last year’s pumpkin offerings climbed nearly 20
percent to more than $290 million, Nielsen reports, and people in the
flavor business say the trend has a powerful demographic wind at its
back: strong popularity among millennials."
For some, it was a different picture that Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) published to accompany its weekly recipe on Sunday.
Under the heading 'Have a pastry for' the entry was meant to tempt readers with 'homemade favorites' for the upcoming Christmas holiday. But to Swedish Television (SvT) the neatly laid out photograph appeared to show pastries in the shape of swastikas. The photo has since gone viral on social media with SvD reportedly receiving many comments on its publication – which may explain why the article can no longer be found on the paper's online site.
After SvT picked up on the story it asked a staff member of the paper what she thought about the image leading to thoughts of things other than holiday treats. "We never thought of these as anything other than cookies, Christmas stars.
But now that I look at the picture, I can see how you might see that,' Stina Cederholm, features editor at SvD, said. The broadcaster pressed further: SvT: How did you come up with it? Cederholm: "To me, this is a cultural item from another world, a piece of cooking history. If you'd never seen stars, maybe you'd think, 'Oh, what a weird shape.' But our idea was just to show great cakes from the past.' Svt: Great cakes from, say, the 30s? Cederholm: "No. Just a pastry. I've got to laugh. It's funny. I do not know what to say. Our goal was just to give our readers delicious cookie recipes for Christmas."
The story soon spread to neighboring Finland, where people wondered what all the fuss was about. Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat observed that a few Finns gave SvT some feedback on its Nazi angle, including one commenter who pointed out, "This
is not a new creation, but the most common and traditional pastry offered in almost all Finnish homes at Christmas for the last hundred years,
if not more. No one in Finland has ever seen it as a swastika." Indeed, the Nordic Recipe Archive website has a page devoted to these sweets. Check it out: Star-Shaped Christmas Pastries.
First the terminology: the Black Country is an area of the English West Midlands, north and west of Birmingham and south and east of Wolverhampton.
As for fag and faggot, in England a fag is a cigarette, whereas faggot is a traditional dish made from pork, often pig's heart, liver, belly meat and/or bacon all minced together and served with peas.
Keeping that last bit in mind, perhaps Facebook's decision would be more understandable if nutritional concerns were behind it.
Wendy Jones from Cradley Heath was one of the first people to learn that people were being banned for referring to ‘faggots’.
She
said: “I couldn’t believe it when I heard people were being banned. We
were only talking about the food we loved. I think it’s absolutely
ridiculous.”
And she claimed members had also been banned for
saying they were from the Black Country, as it contravenes the website’s
policy on racist posts.
“All of my family love faggots and peas and we are always having
them,” added the 45-year-old mother-of-six. “I think something needs to
be done, as people will just keep getting banned.”
Another regular user who says she was banned was Janet Wilkinson, also from Tipton.
She
said: “Faggots have been around for more than 100 years and while I
appreciate it may have a different meaning in other countries, to us
it’s just a type of food.”
A spokesman for Facebook claimed a
single post had been removed due to an error, adding no-one should have
been banned and all users should find their accounts back up.
If you are curious about how to prepare the cardiac arresting dish, here's a BBC video clip of the late chef Keith Floyd mincing away with the Faggot King in a kitchen full of lovely, hot faggots:
By the way, Keith Floyd was a chain smoking, hard drinking TV chef, who died from a
heart attack on September 14, 2009 only a few hours after a lunch to celebrate being given the all clear
from bowel cancer.
