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CMU Beef Of The Week #324: The Smiths v Percy Pig

By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 23 September 2016

The members of The Smiths are famously vegetarian. Militantly so (perhaps slightly less so in the case of Andy Rourke), going so far as to call an album ‘Meat Is Murder’. This is not news. That album came out in 1985. You’ve had plenty of time to notice. No, the news is that their hatred of meat now extends to eating cartoon animals too.

Right, OK, maybe I’ve misrepresented this story slightly already. No you’re only writing this because the headline made you laugh. But ex-Smiths drummer Mike Joyce has been laying into poor old Percy Pig this week, or more specifically his maker Marks & Spencer. The problem, you see, is that Percy Pig sweets are made, in part, with actual pig.

“It came to my attention a few weeks ago while I was out shopping in Marks & Spencer that the sweet ‘Percy Pig’ they sell contains ‘pork gelatine'”, Joyce write on Facebook. “I was told a short while after that M&S sell a veggie option without the pork gelatine. I know that a lot of sweet products and deserts contain some form of animal derivative but how many children know, or are made aware of the fact, that the Percy Pig sweet they are eating does in fact contain bits of Percy’s skin, bone, ligaments etc”.

I would go so far as to say that very few children are made aware of this fact. That said, I learned what gelatine was when I was aged eleven or twelve and it didn’t put me off. Nor did finding out that jelly sweets generally get their shine from a quick polish with beeswax. It’s amazing how far you need to go to stop children eating sweets. I think I’d probably have still eaten a few even if you had told me a fox had sneezed in every packet.

Still, children’s tolerance for the disgusting aside, it’s a funny old thing, isn’t it? As Joyce says, there is a vegetarian Percy Pig option, so why not just make every bag of the sweets pig-free and be done with it? Is it a texture thing? Or a cost issue? Will we ever have an answer? Yes, we will. Of sorts. Because Joyce tweeted the company to ask exactly that question.

“We’re really proud to have a personal choice of Percy Pigs for different dietary options”, came the response from M&S.

Can a packet of sweets ever really be described as a ‘dietary option’? Let alone one you could be proud of. And while someone might choose to eat vegetarian sweets, because they want their conscience to be clear when they have their heart attack, has anyone ever put down a pack of veggie sweets and said, “No, I really need my confectionary to contain bits of mashed up animal”?

“I’m sure 100% of children wouldn’t eat a sweet that contains pork gelatine if they knew it was in the product”, replied Joyce, a point I think we have already resoundingly proven to be false, but whatever.

“I know it states clearly on the label that it does contain pork gelatine”, he went on. “But we both know that young children (never mind adults!) rarely consider the contents of a sweet. Phase out the Percy Pig product that contains pork gelatine whilst continuing to sell the veggie option. Listen to what the consumer wants. Now wouldn’t that make M&S ‘really proud’?”

We’ll see if that happens, but for now the M&S social media bods have just told Joyce that they will “pass on your feedback to our food team”. So that’s nice.

But hey, is there another solution? In recent years various companies have tried to get gelatine derived from humans off the ground. There are health benefits to this, it is claimed. And there has been some debate about whether or not this would be acceptable for vegetarians and vegans. It’s not actually made by boiling down old bits of people – the magic ingredient is human DNA used to modify yeast – but could telling kids that their sweets are made of a mashed up grandma be the elusive way to get them to eat an apple instead?

Speaking of pig/human hybrids, as we certainly were not, a pig-shaped statue of Ed Sheeran – hilariously named Ed Sheer-Ham – has been sold at auction for £6200. The statue was one of 39 created for an art trail in Ipswich, and raised almost three times the prices achieved by David Bowie and Elvis-themed pigs.

And that concludes this week’s pig news. Next week, back to beef.