The other day I was watching one of those documentaries corporations sponsor to try to convince us there are humans behind the corporate mask. In it a famous British supermarket chain was airing its elaborate Christmas plans. It had never occurred to me to take any interest in the work and planning that go into making sure consumers are enticed and captivated by exciting new variations on the things they eat.
Yes, as your waistline is no doubt telling you, the festive season goes hand in jar with eating. The bacchanalian cascade of pigs in beech-smoked blankets, cacio e pepe-flavoured crisps and yuletide puddings made with burnt Sicilian-orange zest is a necessary prelude to the virtue-boosting fasting and sweat-letting rituals that dominate January. As such, there’s a great deal of industry in producing those tasty one-bite whotsits your friends served at that Christmas party.
You would not believe, for instance, the number and variety of food aesthetes who spend a distressing amount of time workshopping the new variation on the house panettone. In case you’re interested, things took a sycophantic turn when the chief bakery wallah, in an act of uncritical obeisance to the looming orange threat, suggested an American-themed panettone would be just the thing to end off the new year (cherry and chocolate, for what it’s worth). Panettone is a cultural insignificance in the US: that country accommodates little in the way of cultural complexity when it comes to its immigrants.
We learn, fascinatingly, that panettones are hung upside-down, like baked Mussolinis, when they emerge from the oven. The artifice lies in convincing the consumer some flour-aproned nonna is behind the whole operation, when in fact it is a massive industrial operation. Never mind. Elsewhere we learn about Colin, a chocolate-sponge cake baked and iced into the shape of a caterpillar. Colin is something of a modern national treasure, a roll cake whose ritual dismemberment is meant to inspire post-prandial bonhomie. Like most cute ideas, Colin crumbles under close scrutiny. Nevertheless, the dedicated caterpillar conceptualisers agonise over how best to redesign Colin to ensure he remains ahead of the legion of Cuthberts, Clives, Cecils, Calebs, and Caiphuses being churned out by the other worm wholesalers.
It’s all about novelty, and the generation of newness is a serious business, really. I couldn’t help but wonder what it says about the average British middle-class consumer envisioned by the commodifiers as an untrusting middlewit whose palate must be constantly surprised, but also nurtured and shepherded through the stormy seas of the unfamiliar. Witness paralysis as the exotic cheese buyer contemplates whether someone in Blackpool might be persuaded to buy the black garlic-infused Manchego. I guarantee there’ll be people ramming pensioners out of the way to get to it when Woolies poaches the concept in about six months’ time.
A mere 40 minutes into watching gleeful Englanders discuss the mechanics of a diabetes-inducing caterpillar, I was clutching myself like Edvard Munch’s screamer. It all seemed terribly desperate and cloying, so insistent on a vision of the holidays that seemed out of step with our modern world. Perhaps if I wasn’t viewing it from the bleak slopes of January, with the cheer of last year’s Christmas already burnt away by wildfires and wild Greenland annexers, I’d feel more charitable.
I came away from it wondering what such a documentary would look like from over here. On the face of it, the average local buyer has no greater inclination to try new things, and all the evidence suggests our grocery overlords believe us to be cognitively inflexible in our buying patterns. Still, versed as we are in grinning and bearing an endless deluge of “new normals” (Zadie Smith once called that “the most melancholy of all euphemisms”), perhaps it is surprising, after all, that we’ve not really generated our own standby industry of biltong infusers and cheese choosers. How have we endured life without them?
From the February issue of Wanted, 2026
