How comfortable are you with sniffing dairy products? Bringing the milky substance right up to your face and giving a long, exploratory nasal inhalation. I’m asking because that’s what M&S now want you to do. They’ve decided to get rid of use-by dates on milk, replacing them with the comparatively toothless best-before dates so “customers can use their judgment”. And by judgment, they mean smell. You can’t rely on your other senses. It’s far too late if you can actually see the milk’s gone off and, if you can hear there’s something wrong with it, you should think about leaving the building.
So give it a sniff before you chuck it out. We can save the planet one snort at a time. It’s a good idea, though personally I feel undermined. I’ve always been a prudent use-by date observer, while everyone around me has relentlessly proclaimed how fine everything remains for months after the printed deadline. “They just put that on to cover themselves in case you store your food in the airing cupboard,” seems to be the argument. Only in the realm of milk do I have the confidence to sniff and live dangerously – it’s the closest I get to the glamour of a cocaine habit – and now that’s been taken away.
How would you feel if, while sniffing your dairy item, you were staring at a picture of an erect penis? Would that be nice or would it be off-putting? Surprisingly, opinions are divided. The people of the Cerne Abbas Brewery, for example, are very much in favour. Vic Irvine, their head brewer, has declared himself “absolutely disgusted” and “incandescent with rage” about a vintage cheddar being sold without a drawing of a stiffened member on the packet.
I should probably give that some context. The stiff cock the absence of which has irked Irvine is the one belonging to the Cerne Abbas giant. You know, that big chalky drawing in the ground in Dorset of a man with a knobbly club and a hard knob. It’s very old, which makes the erect penis OK. There’s a statute of limitations on rude drawings and the giant is in the clear since he was definitely there in the late 17th century and might have been there in the 10th. It’s a striking image and one proudly used by the Cerne Abbas brewers on all their beers in ballsy refutation of the droop associated with their profession.
But what about the cheese? Well, the Oxford Cheese Company has also adopted the giant’s image for its Cerne Abbas Man vintage cheddar, which is made in neither Oxford nor Cerne Abbas. (It could be made in Cheddar, though, since according to the company’s website it’s from Somerset, which is where the village of Cheddar is located. But they call it “Somerset cheddar”, not “Cheddar cheddar”. Surely they’d have called it “Cheddar cheddar” if it was actually made in Cheddar. It would have spared them the Dorset cock-giant branding shitstorm, or cockstorm, that they’ve got into.) The cockstorm is this: the version of the giant on the OCC’s Cerne Abbas cheddar has had his penis and testicles removed. This has made some people say that they’re very upset.
At what point, over the previous few paragraphs, did the phrase “knob cheese” pop into your head? Or is it just now because I said it? If so, you have my congratulations. For me, this act of penis removal, infuriating though it may be to the locals (by which I mean, those local to the place the product inexplicably derives its name from, not where it is made or where the company that sells it is based), is a very sensible move. Penises and cheese are both excellent things that the world would be poorer without, but they don’t pair well. There are circumstances in which a ripe and pungent aroma can sharpen the appetite and those in which it really doesn’t.
It seems harsh of the Cerne Abbas brewers to insist on phallic imagery in the marketing of cheese. So I was surprised when Robert Pouget, founder of the Oxford Cheese Company, responded to the criticism by explaining that he had been selling blocks of cheddar with penises on them for 15 years, and continues to do so; the cockless packages were created especially for one supermarket chain. “A member of their staff objected to [the giant’s] prominent feature and said it was sexist. The supermarket said please give him trousers.” (They haven’t given him trousers, by the way. They’ve just taken the cock and balls away. There are no trouser legs or hems or pockets or pleats, and the belt line is a line that’s on the real giant which has just been joined up where the penis shaft used to be.)
This raises two questions: first, what were they thinking putting penises on their cheese? I think I agree that a doctored version of a national monument isn’t the way to go, but where did the whole idea of putting a picture that is basically synonymous with its cock on loads of cheeses come from in the first place? The cheddar in question seemingly has nothing to do with the location of this big phallic giant so who decided to put him on there? Why not a picture of a churn or a cow or a cracker or the Angel of the North or the British Transport Museum? These would all be better.
And second, which supermarket complained? Sadly, Pouget wouldn’t let on so we’re forced to speculate. Is Waitrose too snooty for cock? Or does its more affluent demographic of customers take a broad-minded view of fertility-based imagery? Is it amid shelves of bargains at Aldi, Lidl or Morrisons that a big National Trust penis seems incongruous? Would Iceland object because it wants to avoid anyone pondering what offcuts might have found their way into the frozen lasagne? Or does one of the big chains in between, Sainsbury’s or Tesco, exhibit the traditional prudishness of middle England?
My money’s on Marks & Spencer, vendor of the nation’s least sexual underwear. For them, innuendo is totally off-brand. So, if they’re instructing people to start plunging their faces into opaque liquids, they have to keep their aisles free of stiffies.
