The best and worst foodie fibs

Team lovefood loves a good prank. To celebrate April Fools’ Day, we look at the best foodie fibs, the most dishonest ones, and ask whether you’ve ever cheated with food…

The spaghetti tree

Perhaps the best ever April Fools’ Day joke was Panorama’s April 1 1957 broadcast on ‘spaghetti trees’. The clip is three minutes long and celebrates the spring-time harvest in Switzerland, which is enjoying an ‘exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop’ in the first two weeks of March – ‘an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer’.

Viewers watched as Swiss workers picked long strings of spaghetti from trees (oh how the BBC runners who planted them there must have laughed), and the narrator dares to push the boundaries of the joke by lamenting that a late frost ‘generally impairs the flavour’ of the spaghetti, and that the ‘uniform length’ of the pasta is the result of ‘many years of patient endeavour by plant breeders’. Apparently the whole nation fell for it hook, line and sinker.

There’s also been the ‘Left-Handed Whopper’ from Burger King (1998), who took out a full-page ad in USA Today revealing a burger specifically designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans (‘all condiments rotated 180 degrees’); Tesco claimed they had successfully developed the genetically modified ‘whistling carrot’ in 2002 (the carrots had tapered airholes in their sides, causing them to whistle when cooked); last year Ocado introduced their new ‘Livestock-Shop’ delivery service, which would provide customers with live farm animals to produce their own milk and eggs; and of course we tricked readers into thinking that a new 'not cross bun' [pictured top] was on sale, designed with non-believers in mind.

Umm… that’s not funny

But what about those fibs within the food industry that sound like April Fools’ jokes, but are in fact deadly serious?  The horsemeat scandal could have been a brilliant April 1 joke (just look at all the ‘My Lidl pony’-esque jokes that have followed it), and last year health inspectors in Falkirk, Scotland, found beef being sold as lamb by 14 local businesses.

Even the big wigs do it. In 2009 it was revealed that customers at four of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants were likely to be served ‘pre-prepared meals’ produced by a central supplier – apparently the food arrived in transit vans, was reheated, and sold for up to six times the cost price. There was no real apology given, and Gordon Ramsay’s people still insist that the food at his outlets was always ‘freshly prepared’.  

How about you?

We’ve all muttered a quiet ‘yes’ when asked if the Jus-Rol pastry on our homemade quiche is made by hand… but have you ever told a massive food fib?

There’s a great scene in Calendar Girls when Helen Mirren’s character wins a W.I cake contest with a Marks & Spencer’s Victoria Sponge, and I too must confess to something similar. The cake I ‘made’ a friend for her 24th birthday was fresh off Waitrose’s shelf, and I still feel bad about my little white lie. But to be fair, I had lovingly baked a three-tier chocolate cake for her earlier that day, but it ended up on the floor with just minutes to go until the party. Given my reputation as an eager baker who always snubs supermarket cakes, I would never have lived it down, had I confessed to my crime.  

What’s the worst food fib you’ve ever told? Ever passed a M&S terrine off as one of your own? Don’t be shy, share you stories with us in the comments box below… promise we won’t tell!

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