Safety In Numbers

I’m a fussy type. I like my food to be cooked just so, my beer to be the right temperature and I spend hours adjusting my car seat by minute degrees to get the perfect position. Even then I’m never happy – my pursuit for delight is a miserable existence because nothing ever hits the mark.

Worse still, I open myself to unbearable lows. I hunt for the ideal pint by sampling lots of strange, unheard of beers. Somewhere the best ever pub meal is waiting for me, but on the way to finding it I have to sample some utterly disgraceful fare and wash it down with something that tastes like it was brewed in Satan’s bladder.

My lager and burger quaffing friends meanwhile look on in amusement. They are always happy – every Big Mac tastes pretty much the same and every pint of Foster’s is equally lacking in flavour. They are never unhappy and, apparently, usually satisfied.

Therein lies a major problem with society as a whole – and in particular British society. We are on the whole happy to settle for mediocre. But why is this? I put the blame solely on the shoulders of marketing…

The current adverts for Foster’s proclaim: “Well you wouldn’t want a cold beer would you?” Heaven forbid! If it were less than mega-super-ultra-chilled it might actually taste of something – and that something may offend the taste buds. What about what should be the important factor when selecting a drink – taste?

The fact is that none of the major brewers can compete on the grounds of taste with better quality beers (and I am including lager in this). Instead they choose unusual, somewhat ethereal concepts to gain ground over the competition. Let’s look at a few:

• Budweiser (the Anheuser Busch one) claims that it is “fresher” than other beers. Surely a vital basis for choosing your pasteurised, dead product?

• Stella Artois is “reassuringly expensive” and advertises with French connotations. Interesting as the originally Belgian beer is now brewed in the UK.

• Carlsberg claims to be “probably the best lager in the world” – heaven help us! It also advertises with a slightly upmarket laddish image to make it seem aspirational… maybe one day I can drink Carlsberg and be cool.

In the UK we have settled for style over substance. We choose our drinks because of what they say about us when we drink them. I am as guilty as anyone – I choose drinks with good taste because it says that I too have good taste… making me a snob!

It is the same with food – we eat things that the French or Italians would not feed to their dogs and we are happy. Why on earth would anyone choose Turkey Twizzlers?

How about cars? Many people choose their form of transport for what it says about them rather than for how good it is.

Sadly these days we are so hooked in by branding and image that we have forgotten what is really important – product quality. What a shame that we aren’t a little more like the European neighbours that we so often deride.

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