In Competition No. 3340 you were asked to submit a poem calling for a particular food to be banned.

It was Julie Bindel’s impassioned anti-balsamic vinegar piece that prompted me to invite you to share your culinary bêtes-noires (three of mine – Battenberg, tripe and Liquorice Allsorts – cropped up in the entry). Adrian Fry and Colin Brewer were thinking along the same lines with twists on Betjeman’s ‘Slough’; both earn commendations, as does Frank McDonald’s villanelle in dispraise of the lamb chop and Brian Murdoch’s anti-cucumber rap. The winners, led by Bill Greenwell (with echoes of Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry), earn £25.

For I would outlaw the potato crisp.
For there are only 22 crisps in a standard bag.
For that is only about 10% of the space available.
For that is only about one of God’s potatoes.
For that is about 35p a potato, even on a Multi-Buy.
For having eaten one packet, you need to eat another one smartly.
For firstly the crisp is addictive, especially cheese and-onion ones.
For secondly, a bag has 130 calories, and that’s just the first one.
For thirdly, each packet has 11% fat.
For the British eat six billion packets a year and are fatties.
For when I have a packet of crisps, I need a beer to wash it down.
For when I have a beer… you get the picture.
For the packets take three decades to decompose.
For I suffer from hypertension.
For I am a diabetic now, and have no teeth left.
For I have not long to live.

Bill Greenwell

It is baked beans that should be banned.
In nauseating sauce encanned,
All sickly-sweet and liquidous
The bastards are ubiquitous.

An English Breakfast should eschew
This transatlantic parvenu –
No beans! No beans! I cry. Too late.
Plop goes the dollop on my plate.

Not even a mixed grill avoids
The devil’s horrid haemorrhoids.
I scrape them to the side, but still
They manage to pollute my meal.

They sidle up and touch my chips,
Contriving thus to reach my lips
So I again am forced to taste
Their overtones of toxic waste.

Ann Drysdale

It’s nineteen forty-nine, approaching noon,
We sit in class and know we’ll hear it soon –
The clattering in the hall as they erect
The benches and the trestle tables decked
With knives and forks set ready for the fray
As class by class we make our sombre way
Each to his place where I shall sit and wait
In dread of what is dolloped on my plate.

Each day it comes, the food we all begrudge –
A yellowy-orange, vomit-coloured sludge
Dispatched, lukewarm, in central kitchen tins,
Fare fit for cattle feed or pig swill bins,
Then ladled out into a mountainous pile
Of mashed-up stodge, voluminous and vile;
Let swede be banned as bland, insipid grot,
Interred in sodden soil and left to rot!

Alan Millard

Odious, hideous Capsicum annuum
Ought to be banned, and should certainly not
Ever be carelessly, unconscientiously
Added to food in a skillet or pot.

Even the tiniest, infinitesimal
Barely discernible minuscule dot
Causes the bile in your gastrointestinal
Plumbing to sizzle and curdle and rot.

Terrible, horrible Capsicum annuum,
When it is loaded in weapons and shot,
Drives away dangerous, hyper-aggressively
Threatening predators, right on the spot.

Searing the lungs and the nasopharyngeal
Passages, sparing not even the snot,
Capsicum annuum unsympathetically
Scorches, but otherwise isn’t so hot.

Alex Steelsmith

Earnest talk of live bacteria,
Good, gut-friendly streptococcus
Frankly smacks of woke hysteria,
Nanny-stately hocus-pocus.
Mesophilic? Probiotic?
What a lot of Waitrosese!
Yoghurt’s just an idiotic
Way of selling sour cheese.
Fat-free? It’s a sugar rush;
Sugar-free? It’s full of fat.
Kefir? Doogh? It’s foreign mush;
Icelandic? Greek? Not eating that.
Bifid lactobacillus?
It’s germs! – and they’ve the nerve to flog it!
Health freaks, pray don’t hassle us:
Cancel culture? Cancel yoghurt!

David Silverman

Oh, devil-angel, Sugar! Your time’s done!
You rot my teeth, yet melt upon my tongue.
I’m forced to hide my black smile from the sun;
meantime, my exhalations smell like dung.
You cause us cardiovascular disease
and diabetes I and II, as well;
you pile the flesh upon our bones with ease
and pulverise our livers till they swell.
You’re bitter cocoa’s sweetheart, you’re adored
in fizzy drinks and soda pop which stokes
our bodies, building up a lethal hoard
of fat that causes heart attacks and strokes.
Let’s ban this snow-white crystalline of death,
before it puffs you up and stays your breath.

Paul A. Freeman

No. 3343: preachy

You are invited to submit a sermon on a subject of contemporary relevance in the style of a well-known writer (please specify). Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 27 March./>