The Greggs delusion

Everything about Greggs is fake. You can smell it as you walk down any British high street. There’s an astringency, a hint that what lingers in those ovens is more than butter, flour, eggs and salt – that their food has been adulterated with something unnatural. What you’re smelling is an approximation of pastry, an attempt by the Greggs customer development unit to ‘curate an authentic baked goods experience’.

Of course, we all secretly know the food is fake. The texture of the baguettes suggest that they’ve been salvaged from a 1970s deep freezer found buried beneath a Midlands business park. And the fillings. All that slimy pink ham. The medical cross-sections of boiled egg. The industrially-developed salad, precision engineered to survive for weeks and taste of nothing. The thick, engorged slabs of white flesh, smeared with a compound of mayonnaise and the dregs of a packet of Bombay mix that is, somehow, labelled ‘tandoori chicken’.