I ranted a few days ago about company branding overusing the term local to the extent where it now has less credibility than spandex. But I’ve found a buzzword that I think irks me even more: fresh.
Some food companies have cleverly rewritten the dictionary for the term, making it out to no longer mean ‘recently caught or picked’, as you might assume, but instead to mean ‘not frozen’.
Pizza toppings are now ‘fresh’, boxed sandwich fillings are now ‘fresh’.
Brilliant. On those lines of understanding you could go on to classify all the following as fresh: week-old underpants, roadkill, foodborne botulism, Red Rum.
The other day, having fully exhausted the selection of Parisian charcuteries and bijou brasseries on offer in Sutton, I ventured into what at first appearances seemed to be a vortex to the 1980s, and on second inspection turned out to be a new branch of Subway.
‘Eat fresh’ their adverts urged.
Really? I take fresh to mean harvested or caught and transferred to my plate with the minimum of hassle. So Subways tuna sub, with tuna caught in the south pacific (I’m guessing, because it certainly wasn’t the Humber), processed, mayonaissed and sent in little black pots around the globe isn’t what I necessarily deem to be fresh. Nor is turkey from God-knows-where, cooked, laminated (I think) and sent in soggy little slices to shops from Torquay to Inverness.
Verging on comically, Dominos pizzas now also advertise themselves as fresh.
I have to bite my lip when friends make wrong use of the term ‘literally’, as they tend to, because it then adopts a wholly opposite meaning, (“I laughed so much I literally poohed my pants”). And it seems the word fresh is going the same way. How can a cooked pizza stuffed in a box, driven on a scooter for half an hour and dumped on my doorstep be labelled ‘fresh’? Although, saying that, a few things on the delivery boy’s face were certainly fresh. And by that I refer to my definition: ‘recently picked’.
