So if you don’t like shepard’s pie, that’s fine – but make sure people know that before casting aspersions on a reasonable, if certainly not gourmet,  product.

The holy trinity of appetite triggers.  In one fine serving.  It’s specially chosen, it’s french, and it has salt pepper, and perhaps other ‘mysterious’ seasonings.

The dining precipice off which one would fall on witnessing the microwaved results must be high, and the drop terrible, and the stop just crushing.

How?  Why?  Why do they do this?  Bastards.  Recycle them into Fresh Selected Bastard Pie.

I’d choose an M&S/Waitrose/similar own brand product over most name brand (although let’s be fair, we’re only talking marginally better, I’m not pretending it’s a whole different world). The same may be the case at Safeway actually, just realised I haven’t been there in what must be 6 years, I could be judging them unfairly – I’m just going on my personal experience.

The only thing they’re all equally bad at is fruit and veg. Unsurprisingly storing fresh produce in carbon dioxide for 6 months takes its toll. Supermarket veg actually often makes me mad – I’ll be honest.

Someone put it better than me elsewhere on the internet just yesterday: “It’s a race to the bottom with the only loser being you”. We demand cheaper prices, and that’s what they deliver. By the time everyone realises that they’re buying absolute crap it’ll be too late; we’re not far off as it is.

/ rant apparently not over yet

I hate to sound pretentious but if you’re buying own-brand from any of the ‘cheap’ supermarkets (namely Asda and Tesco, ESPECIALLY Asda) – then you’re almost definitely buying shit. It’s that cheap for a very good reason. It’s also where they make all the cuts to be able to offer the ‘lowest prices’.

If you have to feed a family of 4 on £20 a week, then fair enough – otherwise it’s a saving at the cost of your own pleasure.

I care about this because even better supermarkets/food shops have joined this ‘offer the cheapest prices game’, and I’ve already seen products I enjoy start to lose quality, all for the sake of a marketing competition and at the expense of suppliers and consumers. So I saved £3, but hated my meal; how does that benefit me?

/rant over

In the meantime, the blooper reel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_O31uCoXV4

tasted a bit like frothy styrofoam

My other half has a strange yearning to eat styrofoam. She usually satisfies it with rice cakes. 

I can’t see the box well enough in the photo to tell whether it’s there, but here in the states, the FTC (IIRC) makes (at least used to make) packaged food makers label their spectacularly optimistic package photos with those words.  Most used the smallest, lowest-contrast font they could find, of course.

The idea was to dash our ever-hopeful consumer expectations, warning us that what was inside wouldn’t really look anything like the picture – excuse me, the “illustration.” 

I’ve seen a lot of frozen “food” that barely looked the part, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen it look quite so much like – uh, yeah.  That.