The words used to describe food are ridiculous and unhelpful

[StLevanBlackcaps]

Just heard an ad where every other thing was described as ‘cheeky’ or ‘a treat’. The current Costa one does my head in with the idiot girl claiming you have to ‘be good’ on Mon/Tues, you can be ‘naughty’ on Wed/Thurs but you have to admit it and on Fri you can stuff your face 🙄

Anything about diets or nutrition is full of cliched crap about ‘grabbing some crunchy veggies’ as a healthy snack or uses stupid ott descriptions for perfectly ordinary things - ‘fresh, creamy milk’ etc.

Restaurant menus are full of similar stuff to make their (often) mass-produced microwaveable junk sound ‘healthy’ - hand picked this and garden fresh that.

I love words and I love food but this stuff drives me bonkers - it’s misleading, insulting and doesn’t help anyone trying to just eat normally.

Personally I dont think language is flowery enough. I like watching Nigella Lawson for this reason, she is quite flowery about food

Conversely, we have over wordy descriptions for quite common sense basic things which dont fit right, certain jobs like shelf stacker have some convoluted description or bin man etc

Not to mention behaviours, particularly for children.

Adding moral value to food does my head in.

Costa's ad for 'hand-crafted coffees' - delusional.

I hate anything which tries to label foods as good or bad. It just breeds problems.

Attitudes to food are really really fucking weird

i was with some friends at the weekend and who are what and when was a main and reoccurring topic of conversation

what particularly interested me was the conflation of food and class and huge extrapolation of character based on attitudes towards “good food” what is healthy and how awful anyone who eats the occasional sausage role is as a human.

I despise that Costa advert! I turn the radio off when it comes on! Have you heard that other radio advert where the woman says the word moist over and over again?

Oh my gosh yes, I've often thought this. It's all so infantalising. It's not "naughty" to have a chocolate, that's grown adults speaking to themselves as if they're a small child. And why can't a tomato or a lasagne be a treat.

For me it's "dirty" dirty fries, dirty rice etc

It's appalling.

I think the weirdest thing about that advert is the whole premise is that everyone hates the word moist!

So there was a meeting where someone said "you know that word everyone hates? we should say it loads. That'll make people like us and want to buy our products"

And every one else went "Brilliant, do it!"

I do agree about labelling foods as "good" Vs "naughty".
However I don't have a problem with descriptions such as fresh, creamy milk - that's just adjectives.

Same with restaurant menus, it's their marketing and they want the meals to sound appealing and worth the cost. Maybe you're going to the wrong restaurants if they're serving you mass produced microwavable junk.

So all chain restaurants are the ‘wrong’ restaurants in your view then? They all serve mass-produced food.

I love lasagne and it is such hassle to make, it really is a treat.

OP is complaining about the fact that restaurants serve mass produced junk, but market it as hand picked and garden fresh. So yes if a chain restaurant is doing that, it's wrong. It's not something I've personally seen - just looked at the manu for wetherspoons and Prezzo and there's nothing like OP is describing.

A lot of foods that are advertised as somehow virtuous are highly processed anyway.

We do a thing called lazy lasagne. Basially put the cooked pasta on the bottom of an over dish, Mince and sauce on top, white sauce and cheese on top of that, and stick it in the oven.

Tastes just the same and you don't have to mess around with all that layering nonsense!

Our work canteen used to have a "tasty" dish of the day. So you could have 2 options not described as "tasty" and one that inevitably was "tasty" and every single day someone would point out that of course they were going to eat the "tasty" food over the non-tasty food.

I love food, cooking, eating out, all of it really, but I find descriptions around food really silly a lot of the time. It’s either childish (“crunchy veggies” - like we need to cajole ourselves into healthy adult food, “yummy”, “superfood”), takes itself too seriously (sourcing, curating, etc.), laden with unnecessary description (“pan-fried”) or weighed down by value judgements.

I like simple menus that state what the ingredients and method of cooking them is. But then I’m not a fan of those cookery books that are half recipe half memoir and have more arty photos of Armenian orchards and the writer’s grandmother in her youth than text/instructional photos either.

I used to write ads for a living. There are a few reasons why these food ads often come out sounding like this.

1. Regulations around how you describe food and drink are relatively strict here in the UK. Especially things that are high-sugar or highly processed, are taste-alikes for something else (like oat ‘milk’ or vegan burgers), are restricted by age (ie alcohol), or are seen as potentially appealing to children.
2. (Related to 1) A lot of times, such regulations or laws force you to signal in an ad that the product shouldn’t be consumed on a regular basis. Using words like ‘treat’ or ‘cheeky’ are ways of doing this without finger-wagging at people, which doesn’t work in advertising.
3. FMCG companies don’t tend to pay good money for experienced copywriters. There are a lot of copywriters who will simply ram in another adjective if they can’t describe something sufficiently. Ditto clients; sometimes I’ve been forced to add in extra adjectives to an ad because the client lacks comprehension and thinks the copy would be ‘boring’ without it.
4. For radio especially, salience beats pretty much any other technique. It’s better to be annoying than well-crafted because people remember annoying. Even if they don’t like it. (That’s also why the insurance comparison site ads are they way they are, incidentally.)
5. There is a kind of cultural shorthand in the infantilisation of adults around food. Terms like dirty burger, cheeky Nando’s, nom-nom-nom etc caught on in a big way 10 to 15 years ago and have lodged in the collective consciousness. Like it or not, subconsciously a lot of people equate being treated like a child with comfort and safety. At some level it’s an easy win to use language like this in food advertising because it triggers people’s subconscious. Even people who in their conscious minds wouldn’t want to be infantilised. Actually, in their non-conscious minds, they do.

It's the cooking of pasta, mince, and cheese sauce separately and then baking in the oven that is the faff for me (and the subsequent clearing/washing up) the layering part is the least of my worries. But I do love lasagne. DH made a vege one recently that I was sure I wouldn't like but it was great. It took him about 3 days though!!🤣

YANBU.

Its really damaging language, food should never be seen as a ‘naughty’ to eatZ

MN props this crap up usually. The competitive under eating threads, telling women who eat poached eggs and chia seeds are consuming 2,000 calories and saying a packet of crisps are something that ‘shouldn’t’ be eaten, are all terrifying. People with undiagnosed eating disperse do seem to lurk and scare other people with their unhealthy views. I get quite angry at those threads. And the worst thing is people justify their unhealthy attitudes and crap advice by saying “there’s an obesity pandemic” - yeah and you’re NOT helping dickhead!!!!

@Fizbosshoes I found this ‘lasagne’ quite a nice hack: amp.theguardian.com/food/2022/jan/29/sausage-ragu-lasagne-chicken-salad-cinnamon-toast-crumble-yotam-ottolenghi-recipes-for-one

Even more annoying when someone refuses cake etc., because ‘I’m trying to be good.’ Especially if they’re a parent of a teen girl with an eating disorder - hardly the best example to set.

The most purple-prose menu language I’ve ever seen was in Australia - lovingly hand picked at dawn by Vestal Virgins, washed in mountain dew, artistically hand-crafted into batonettes, etc….
I once ordered cheese instead of pudding, that was described much like this - when it arrived it was a piece about 3 cm square, just dumped on the plate, no garnish. I burst out laughing.

I lost considerable amount of weight and this was doing my head in.
"Cheat day" the fuck am I cheating???

Lots of negative connotations around normal food which are just not a daily type of food.

No, your one slice of cake a week is not naughty, cheeky or cheating ffs! It's a one slice of cake, it's just notmal kind of eating🤷🏻

Totally helped me to get away from any dieting topics everywhere. Very happy after that

I just stick to my SEE food diet

If it's food I eat it

Sure I find food talk weird these days but won't stop me eating something if I want it

But if you need 50 words to describe a dish maybe you need help cooking? And what the heck is a food 'journey'? Not asking for na answer on that one

I agree, there is something wrong with the way we describe food. The worst one for me is when something is cheeky or naughty, which always comes in sentence as "99% of the time I am trying to be healthy, but I allow myself cheeky chocolate bar" etc. So when you eat chocolate, does it make you ill, your health's gone, that's it?