Ah Holland and Barrett - a modern house of worship where we may all bow down at the font of ‘free from’. The place where you can buy pale imitations of the things you actually wanted - pasta, crisps, chocolate, six packs, great hair - for triple the price. Every day people emerge from this apothecary with flushed cheeks, clutching bags of dreams and resolutions about the new kind of person they want to be. Beauty, well-being and immortality awaits! I love to indulge in a packet of powdered self-improvement for £29.99 as much as the next person. But sometimes...just sometimes...H&B pushes the bounds of our credibility a little too far.
1) Squeezy Tofu Pate Spicy Mexican
Tofu has been taken three steps beyond the pale of common decency here. There aren’t many foods that could be subjected to the squeezy tube/pate process and still emerge with their dignity intact. But this is a horrible experiment that should never left the lab. After the nuclear apocalypse has wiped out the human race and aliens are picking through the rubble for clues about our civilisation what sort of message is ‘squeezy tofu pate spicy mexican’ going to send? Because there’s no doubt that if any item will survive to be carbon dated in 50 million years time it’s this. What is it with our compulsive need to put decent things - salad dressing, cheese, bacon - into squeezy form? Our forefathers would be turning in their graves. This isn’t what people fought in wars for.
2) ‘Eat Water’ Diet Noodles
Essential food stuffs for people without taste buds, or stomachs. See also H&B’s range of ‘wasting disease’ chewies for anyone needing to shed those extra pounds before bikini season.
3) Mock Duck - Braised gluten in gravy
What fresh hell? How can you braise a composite of storage proteins? Some sort of specialist equipment must have been involved - possibly a Hadron Collider.
4) Banana Ketchup
See no.1 re: our ‘squeezy bottle’ problem...
5) Everything named by this man:
Some poor bloke (Jeff) has been tasked with inventing approximately 3000 charming alliterative names for H&B’s snack bags. I don’t know who Jeff is or how many bottles of Schnapps he drank during this process, but I would like to commend him on his resourceful and imaginative titles. He has clearly drawn inspiration from a range of diverse sources - each more spectacularly mad than the last.
(a) Hollyoaks Story Lines
(b) Crap Harry Potter Spells
c) Hallucinogens
Jeff...
Where are you going with this Jeff...
Leave those poor raisins alone.
ONLY WHILE STOCKS LAST FOLKS. I hope Jeff gets the help he needs.
Written & illustrated by Jess Bird