The Brexiteers all in a pickle over Monster Munch

Yes, if nothing else, it is a sign that Keir Starmer’s EU reset, trifling as it might be, has rattled the Europhobic press that one of the key Brussels tropes of the past three decades has reared its head: that of meddling bureaucrats interfering with apparently beloved digestible icons. And this time it’s meat-based snacks largely associated with the playgrounds of the 1980s.

“Bacon Fries face being RENAMED under ludicrous Brexit rules that could also hit Monster Munch and Pot Noodle,” roared The Sun this week. “Pot Noodle and Monster Munch risk being renamed under Keir Starmer’s EU reset deal banning meat names,” GB News fumed. “Iconic British snacks face being renamed under new Brexit rules,” LBC told the nation’s cabbies.

There is a kernel of truth here. It is correct that Starmer’s government is seeking to negotiate a new Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement with Brussels which would align the UK with EU rules on things like food and feed safety, supplements, labelling and regulation of pesticides and biocides. The current situation leads to red tape and perishing goods on both sides of the border, and a deal will be welcome for importers and exporters, and ultimately for shoppers.

And it coincides with a move by EU lawmakers, under pressure from livestock farmers, to ban meaty names such as steak and bacon for vegetarian and vegan foods, outlawing the use of words such as bacon, beef, chicken, drumstick, loin, ribs, steak, T-bone and wing. 

The move was seen as a compromise after Céline Imart, a French centre-right MEP, unsuccessfully sought to ban non-meat goods from being called sausages or burgers (your correspondent, a vegetarian, was against the move, but not enough to march on the Berlaymont building).

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So add two and two together and you get a ban on beef Monster Munch, Smith’s Bacon Fries and chicken Pot Noodle and other things which, to a Brexiteer of a certain age, are apparently Very Important Indeed.

“If we can’t even hold the line over a packet of Monster Munch or some Bacon Fries, what hope do we have over rejoining the Customs Union?” bleated Mark François, chair of the European Research Group (yes, it does still exist!) to GB News. “If people want to be able to say something has a meaty taste, what’s it got to do with these know-nothing bureaucrats? It’s absurd,” complained Iain Duncan Smith, who once had a vague fancy of being prime minister.

We’ve been here before. For many years these stories were a mainstay of Britain’s EU-hating Brussels correspondents, one of whom unfortunately became prime minister. Banning bendy bananas (in truth: classifying their pricing according to shape), fry-ups (sparked by some very general 2001 guidelines on the need to improve the health and safety of truckers), Sunday roasts (a law on energy-efficiency requirements for new ovens and cookers) and Stilton (rules relating to listeria in cheese made from unpasteurised milk) have all provided good fodder for the right wing press.

And it’s tangential, but in 2005 the Sun was even forced to launch a Save Our Jugs campaign after the EU “declared a crackpot war on busty barmaids – by trying to ban them from wearing low-cut tops”. It was, even by the Sun’s standards, a pretty audacious take on an EU proposal requiring employers to assess the risk of skin damage to employees who worked in the sun all day, a proposal which would have applied to approximately 0% of UK hospitality staff.

But even were the latest story to stack up, does it really mean the end of our apparently beloved Monster Munch or Pot Noodle? None of the words monster, munch, pot or indeed noodle have “meaty” connotations. And if they can’t be called beef or chicken flavoured, so what? Surely it isn’t beyond the wit of Britain’s marketers to come up with some clever way of getting around it. Maybe even some smart Sun sub-editors could have a crack.

And even if they weren’t allowed to use their “iconic” names anymore – and if you knew that Smith’s Bacon Fries were even still a thing you have a keener eye on the snack aisles than most – is this really such a blow to the national psyche? I only found out recently that Sugar Puffs haven’t been called Sugar Puffs since 2014. They’re Honey Monster Puffs now. The world appears to have remained on its axis. Do the Brexiteers want the Farm to return to Emmerdale?

No, the whole thing feels like the final roar of the dinosaurs, or perhaps a naff version of the original Brexit war as reenacted by a particularly mischievous branch of the Sealed Knot Society. Unless the likes of Mark François and Iain Duncan Smith really are concerned about the nomenclature of snacks best left in the 1980s – in which case they should grow the Munch up.