Veran's odd approach to chicken (2)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 August

For the record (though somehow we are already in summer, following the last Futile Bulletin):

* They are chicken nuggets - devotees can doubtless explain what they have (or lack) that distinguishes them from 'dippers' (and the like)

* Strictly as a layman, and never having considered the question before, how a disc-shaped item can be a 'nugget' now escapes me, but perhaps it is too late to challenge this convention

* I have looked at a packet: below the stated 23 appears 'APPROX.' - which prevents me complaining, because, when I opened it, there were 28

* If it had been 53, maybe I'd have more of an argument about surface-area, and whether it would mean a disproportionate amount more (or less) coating

* At any rate, all of this aside, the packet is sold by mass - its contents are 450g, however many or few of these alleged nuggets there are

* And, quite frankly, the only thing of which they taste is the coating!

* Unless I should take some delight in the visual appearance of the chicken (in a sandwich between one side and the other), the only sensation (they make no noise, and let's pass over the cooking smell) is of something that is hot and can be chewed, coupled with the crisp[i]ness of the outside

* Perhaps those devotees can tell me that this is all bound up in the usual expectations of the word 'nuggets', so more fool me...


PS The packet that the nuggets came in* not only shows that they can be beautifully served by tipping them into a deep white ceramic bowl (cunningly accompanied, in a matching ramekin, by what only looks like a portion of strawberry mousse caked in that quick-setting gel so beloved of those, such as my mother, who used to render bought sponge flans fruit laden with something highly processed from a tin), but assure me that the largely bland product has been 'made with 100% chicken breast'.

Damn, could have sworn it was (a) turkey!


* At around 1mm in thickness (designed, doubtless, to keep in that gorgeous chicken flavour that I so signally failed to detect - or, probably, to stop the 23 items cascading all over Veran's freezers so often), the packets have a much higher specification than the free shopping bags (which are so keen to biodegrade - and earn green credibility - that they have started before you come to use them), but then these terms 'supply side' and 'demand side' do have a meaning.

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Veran's odd approach to chicken (1)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 January

So it seems to me - and, no (following Every Veran helps), I am not always shopping there, just that there is nowhere else (near) to do so after midnight on a Sunday night!

I have bought a pack (in fact, two packs) of chicken nuggets (or pieces, or dippers - some agglutinations, at any rate, in breadcrumbs of fragments left over from whatever gruesome process of 'waste not, want not' our modern food ('food'?) nowadays goes through), and that is just my point:

For I am boldly told that I am purchasing exactly twenty-three of these chicken bites, when I could have sworn that twenty-four was more usual.

At the same time, most bottles of beer (in Veran) are up tenpence (to £1.99, and may be 550ml, or just 500ml - in either case, not a full pint), and the cat, thinking herself addicted to milk with a special formulation for her kind, may have to forgo it, as, even with the better way of buying it (as a three, rather than individual little bottles), it is still 20% more in price than a fortnight ago.

And yet shoppers will, maybe, prove easily spooked by other things than price - being told that my frozen pack of baby kievs contains 15 may seem fine, whereas 19 (one short of a favoured multiple of 10) might not: I stress that I have not seen that product advertised in that quantity, but it does not inconceivable, when I have just bought one short of two dozen of these nuggets (well, with both backs, 46).

Will the packs of sausage rolls (to cook from frozen) be following suit? - or have they already done so? And if enough consumers do react badly to odd numbers (or certain ones), as against even ones, why would that be?

Is some bias or prejudice built into our numerological world-view, as, surely, even the roulette tables ask us to bet on the difference? And an odd whole number, when squared (or cubed), stubbornly preserves its oddness...


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