Susan Morrison: Fake news? We’ve been there before – remember Angel Delight
There is much worry these days about ‘artificial intelligence’. I can see the anxiety, but be reassured. We have been here before and survived, even though the fake was on our very plates.
As a child raised in an era when we embraced artificial foodstuffs with gay abandon, fear not, I say. The seventies were a positive smorgasbord of fake food.
Few can forget saccharine, no matter how hard you try. Sweetex came in tablets. It came in funky little red and blue tubes that you could click over your tea. Michael Aspel advertised it. With that star power, masculine colour combo on the packets and the clicky action for product release, it was clearly safe for men to use in public.
For the figure-conscious gal about town, on the other hand, there were handy handbag sized pink packets of ‘Sweet and Low’. Ladies at lunch would peel and pour white powder into frothy coffees, looking like Lucretia Borgia poisoning another inconvenient ex-lover.
Actually, poor little Lucretia gets a bad rep. She probably didn’t poison anyone. Mind you, even if she did, being Italian, I’m willing to bet her organic potions would have tasted better than saccharine. You could taste it even above the vile coffee of the time, and that is saying something.
Artificial food was everywhere. The back of a packet of Angel Delight listed Sucralose, Diphosphates, Sodium Phosphates, Maltodextrin, Propylene Glycol Esters of Fatty Acids and Silicon Dioxide. But blimey, it tasted good. Butterscotch flavour was just the best. Oh, I know, some say Strawberry rules, but they are wrong.
At some point people began to think that food with things in them that you couldn’t pronounce was generally a bad thing. They might have had a point.
There was a diluted drink back then called ‘Kia Ora’. They claimed it was ‘orange flavoured’. You’ll note, just flavoured. That bottle had been no closer to a real orange than I have been to George Clooney (note to editor: George is coming to Edinburgh next year if you’re looking for a cool, dispassionate observer at the event) (Ok, maybe not the ‘cool, dispassionate’ bit).
My mum discovered that I was allergic to something in its impressive list of E- numbers, including, among others, E466, E445, E202, E223. The culprit made me hyperactive, and since I was already something of a whirling Tasmanian Devil, it took her a while to spot the problem. Kia Ora was banned in our house.
It was so virulently coloured it practically glowed in the dark. Very handy for a tipsy student who needed to find a suitably hydrating fluid/ fast acting pick-me-up without switching on the lights in a shared flat. Kia Ora was back on my shelf.
Never did find out which E Number was to blame. They changed the recipe in the 80s, I think. Just wasn’t the same. And then we all found out that the name was stonkingly embarrassing.
We’d been offending the lovely Maori people all this time. Kia Ora quietly vanished.
We embraced the artificial. Never did us any harm. Apart from the hyperactivity. So, if someone out there is trying to get our intelligence faked up, bring it, I say.
It's not like the organic version is doing us much good. Look at Elon Musk. That lad could do with an Angel Delight.