2 minute read
Retail Randoms
by 55 North
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
For reasons best known to themselves, the good people at MyDatingAdviser.com – a website that offers “trusted dating advice from the experts” – have compiled a list of the UK’s rudest place names.
Shitterton, Butthole Lane and Fannylane are just three of many towns, villages and hamlets curious tourists can visit, presumably as some sort of weird preamble to copping off with one another.
Interestingly, almost all these potty-mouthed places don’t have a c-store. Painstaking Week In Retail research, which involved gawping at Google Maps for 10 minutes, revealed this.
Further analysis then uncovered a possible reason. After all, would you fancy popping into Londis Lickey End, Wideopen One-Stop, Nisa Willey, Premier Bell End, or Simply Fresh Minge Lane?
NEVER MIND THE BUTTOCKS
ProVeg International, “a food awareness organisation working to transform the global food system by replacing conventional animal-based products with plant-based and cultured alternatives,” has described the South African government’s decision to ban “meaty” names for plant-based alternatives like “Veggie Biltong” as “a major step backwards” in the fight against climate change.
That’s one way to look at it. Another way is to view it as a huge step forward in the fight against the obsession that plant-based businesses have with replicating meat. Instead of celebrating the joy of eating vegetables for their own sake, consumers are constantly reminded that “This Isn’t Chicken,” it’s “Beyond Meat,” comes from a “Meatless Farm,” hasn’t been slaughtered by “The Vegetarian Butcher,” or has in fact arrived on their plate “Incogmeato”.
A clever pun does not a tasty dinner make, which perhaps addresses the (meat-free) elephant in the room: people might want to do their bit for the planet but deep down everyone knows nobody can make a steak quite like a cow can.
Biltong, in case you’re wondering, is dried, cured meat cut into strips, and popular in southern Africa. Interestingly, the word comes from the Dutch bil (“buttock”) and tong (“strip” or “tongue”). Plant-based bum cheek anyone?
