Joanna Blythman: Britain has gone daft for national ‘food days’

What’s the point of these food days, weeks and months? Most are driven by companies or trade bodies to promote awareness, and therefore sales, of their products; they are attempts to imbue products with the status of an iconic national institution in the consumer's mind. I’m tempted to inaugurate my own ‘Nothing To Do With Food Today Day’ to mark the rapidly diminishing days left in the year not yet claimed by some company trying to sell us something.

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Now you can take the view that such hackneyed marketing efforts are pretty lame. Consumers aren’t as passive as Pavlov’s dogs; we do have the capacity for independent thought. In the unlikely event that I became the PR supremo for some dynamic food company, I’d not be impressed by ad agency ‘creatives’ who could come up with nothing more original than this ubiquitous marketing strategy. But perhaps I’m being naive. However naff these food days might be on paper, they could be more effective in shaping our shopping and eating behaviour than they might initially seem.

Editors face the daunting task of coming up with a constant stream of good ideas that appear to have some current relevance. And there’s nothing more comforting for them than to see the news diary filling up with potential food stories throughout the year, so annual events with catchy names tick that box.

Covering such a story is also easy and cheap because the companies and organisations pushing the concept can be relied on to put up free ‘experts’ who will fill up airtime and column inches.

So clock the ‘revelatory’ headlines prompted by these annual days by all means, but don’t feel they deserve a diary entry. Just see them for what they are: disguised advertising.