ICM - Leeds Design Agency

Friday, April 25th 2008

A state of national crisis...

So you’re thinking this is going to be a rant about the price of petrol and diesel, the cost of your favorite tipple, immigrants, the government and so on.

But you’d be wrong.

There’s far more serious and pressing matters afoot. It’s affecting the last bastion of this United Kingdom…

Tea breaks.

Have you not noticed the national fig-roll shortage? Last summer whilst we wallowed around in the rain and gloom, Turkey and other Mediterranean countries had a scorching hot drought. This badly affected the fig harvest. In fact the Guardian recently reported that a species of pollenating wasp which attends to the fig flowers was laid low by the hot conditions hence the poor yield. The situation has been compounded even further by the a FSA finding that some batches of the heat stressed figs are showing above permitted levels of a naturally occurring fungal toxin. Fig roll manufacturers such as Jacobs are looking to America to source their figs to fill the immediate stop-gap.

The situation is said to get worse as stocks run low.

Now if it were just fig rolls I could just about cope but it gets worse…

Our good friends at the FSA would like to see the complete removal of the six additives, E102 Tartrazine, E104 Quinoline yellow, E110 Sunset yellow, E122 Carmoisine, E124 Ponceau 4R and E129 Allura red AC from foods.

This may sound like science to you but it means the end of the Battenburg cake as we know it to me.

To aid the situation, feel free to send any unwanted biscuits and cakes straight to the ICM studios. Dark chocolate Hobnobs are going down particularly well during this difficult time.