Great to see that Soylent Green, so rarely seen these days on shop shelves, is back and being promoted by all the discount supermarkets. A tasty and inexpensive snack is once more being made available to the great British public which is great news for all of us who need to feed a family but watch the pennies at the same time.
True it isn’t to everyone’s taste but this alternative to the other processed foods on the market gives the customer more choice and it can be cooked using a variety of delicious recipes (if you haven’t tasted it, most say it is like a cross between pork and chicken). Now it has returned the question many are asking is why has it been away so long?
So, just why has it made a return now? If you live outside the UK then you might not be aware that there is something of a war going on between the supermarkets there. As the economy has stubbornly resisted efforts to recover (in my opinion a country spends itself out of a recession, making cuts doesn’t work and only drives people in to poverty) the top four supermarkets have discovered that their once loyal customers are going to cheaper supermarkets who have rather cleverly rebranded themselves through an appeal to the innate inverse snobbery of British shoppers.
Soylent Green fell out of favour as British tastes developed in the seventies and eighties (coinciding with the massive reduction in the number of mine workers in the UK and the return to a booming economy). It simply disappeared off the shelves. However, it’s marvelous to see the choice made available again, even if it was a recession that caused it. A household staple returns! Already a number of economists have pointed out a possible correlation between the return of Soylent Green and the recent drop in unemployment figures. Whether this trend continues is yet to be seen of course, but any positive news about the economy should be welcomed.
It’s great to see, too, that the makers haven’t tried to update the image of this once cherished product.
Retro is very fashionable these days and this will no doubt appeal to the baby boomers out there. After all, who of a certain age, can fail to be nostalgic about all those happy memories of settling down in front of the TV on a Saturday evening to watch
Doctor Who with Soylent Green on toast, hoping the lights were not going to go off because of the miner's strike? It seems almost like a kind of
wonder comfort-food for these recessionary times.
For more information about Soylent Green, you can visit
the homepage of Id-Iom, currently the only supplier in the UK.
