Supermarket Morrisons' apology over "non-EU salt and pepper" raises an important philosophical question about nationalist and communist chickens – Scotsman comment

Before the famous meeting between soon-to-be-disgraced US President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong in 1972, the US had a strict embargo on goods from China.

Are chickens have a sense of their nationality? Do some hold communist beliefs? (Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

So much so that US consular officials in Hong Kong would have philosophical debates about whether a chicken hatched in the then UK colony from an egg imported from China qualified as a ‘communist’ chicken.

Of course, they didn’t mean the chickens themselves were calling for proletarians of the world to unite and the overthrow of the capitalist hegemony, but it’s funny to imagine that they were.

Fast forward 50 years, and supermarket Morrisons finds itself in a spot of bother after it prominently labelled a “Salt and Pepper Chicken Crown” as being “made from British chicken and non-EU salt and pepper”.

Outrage ensued with claims of anti-EU bias and the firm apologised, promised to change the packaging “immediately” but insisted regulations meant it was required to state the non-origin of its salt and pepper somewhere in the blurb.

It was not entirely clear if this is a correct reading of the rules, but the row isn’t quite as appalling as it may first seem – at least, to those not appalled by the EU and all it stands for – as “non-EU” is a hangover from our membership of the European Union. It is due to be changed to “non-UK” next year.

So this was probably not anti-EU propaganda deliberately designed to pander to the worst Brexiteer sentiments.

However, for all the benefits of eating local produce, is it really necessary for food to be quite so covered in flags and obviously nationalistic? It was not ever thus.

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