Will’s World: Chicken campaign is one in the eye for beef
© Lee Boswell Photography It’s sad when your cultural references become outdated, and I’m well in the midst of being left behind.
If I mention a TV programme or musician from my youth, let alone some of the tropes that were big in the 1980s, my numerous daughters look at me as if I had been brought up in a cave
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For example, quicksand. A slow and torturous death by quicksand was everywhere back then, especially in children’s films.
So much so, in fact, that I estimated I had an at least a 50% chance of dying that way when I grew up. Thankfully, it hasn’t happened yet, but give it time.
Black and blue
Black eyes were another. Whether it was Grange Hill, Tom and Jerry cartoons or comics, rarely a storyline passed without someone gaining a black eye.
As a fully paid-up subscriber and proud member of the Beano Fan Club, I was exposed to this on a weekly basis.
Even now, my favourite coffee mug has the Bash Street Kids on it, and one of them proudly boasts a shiner. But he’s not the only one, because currently so do I.
The fact that the present Mrs Evans has just begun a women’s boxing class is purely coincidental, by the way. Scurrilous rumours to the contrary should be treated with the absolute contempt they deserve.
No, as usual, I wasn’t fully concentrating on what I was doing when sorting some cattle and walked squarely into an open steel gate, end on, at a reasonable speed.
The square corner of the gate perfectly met the round corner of my eye socket, and I’m temporarily left with a face that makes Sloth from The Goonies look like Tom Cruise (what did I say about my cultural references?).
As I sat in the kitchen with a tea towel full of ice pinned to my mush by the world’s most heavy-handed and least sympathetic nurse, it suddenly occurred to me that what people used to use for black eyes was a good, old-fashioned, raw beef steak.
Seriously, youngsters, look it up. Or ask AI or whatever it is you do these days, though it’ll probably tell you that you’d die from E coli if you were to attempt it, or some other namby-pamby nonsense.
But even if you were feeling particularly brave, could you afford one, because the price of beef, like a lot of other things in the current economic climate, is getting a bit silly.
Cry fowl
I read an excellent but worrying piece recently by Justin McCarthy about McDonald’s latest campaign across the UK and Ireland that encourages customers to “betray your go-to” by swapping their usual Big Mac beefburger for a McCrispy chicken.
The marketing is obviously framed as a playful break with routine, but is, in reality, a highly calculated margin-protection strategy.
When one of the largest buyers in the global beef supply chain starts actively encouraging their customers away from beef – their core product for the entire length of their existence – those of us in the sector should be extremely concerned.
Five years ago, the price gap between beef and chicken was manageable, with beef roughly twice the price per kilo of chicken.
Today it’s closer to three times the price and is rapidly moving away from being a regular item in shoppers’ trolleys and into the premium product market.
And if that’s the case, is an industry that’s seeing dramatically fewer suckler-bred calves and far more dairy crosses focusing hard enough on eating quality? I don’t think so.
If we’re not very careful, we’ll all have a painful black eye.
