Last week I dined on porcine plasma. Not wittingly, mind. I wasn’t stunt dining for some terrible television show (although I’m sure I would if they asked), nor was I the intrepid guest of some lost Amazonian tribe, taking part in a holy pig-blood gargling ritual which to refuse would have grievously offended my hosts (would that my life had gone that way).

No, my ingestion of porcine plasma was unwitting until after the event and came in the form of a… wait, hang on, here’s fun: I won’t tell you what I was eating. I will merely transcribe the list of ingredients that I subsequently read on the side of the container in which it had been served, and I’ll see if you can guess what it was that I ate.

Those ingredients were as follows: wheatflour, water, malted wheat flakes, muscovado sugar, wheat gluten, barley malt flour, wheat bran, yeast, salt, spirit vinegar, emulsifiers: E472(e), E481, E471, vegetable oil, flour treatment agent: E300, chicken breast, water, glucose syrup, thickener: E1422 (from maize), free range pasteurised egg yolk, maltodextrin, acidity regulator: E260, stabiliser: E415, preservative: E202, black pepper, pork belly, porcine plasma, sugar, thickener: potato starch, natural smoke flavour, stabilisers: E451, E450, antioxidant: E316, preservative: E250, lettuce, inulin, whey powder (from milk), milk protein, stabilisers: E415, E407, flavouring, colour: E160(e).

Have you guessed what it is yet? Come on. It’s easy. Glucose syrup, bran, porcine plasma and inulin? It can only be a chicken and bacon sandwich, can’t it? More specifically, a “Café Culture” chicken and bacon sandwich served on an easyJet flight from Gibraltar to London Gatwick. It came in one of those triangular boxes with a tab on it that read: “Pull here and enjoy!” An injunction more suited, frankly, to being written above the bar on a Club 18-30 holiday. I should have known better, really.

If I was going to be pulling any tabs, they should have been attached to the ripcord of the parachute I was wearing when I jumped at 35,000ft and left the sandwiches to my fellow passengers.

How can you need 15 different E numbers in a sandwich? How the hell long does it have to keep? Was this food created with a crash in mind which would leave the surviving passengers having to live on the plane’s store of chicken and bacon sandwiches for 30 YEARS?

And don’t you love “Café Culture”? It is a name no doubt intended to conjure up images of Ernest Hemingway, Proust and Gertrude Stein at a pavement table outside Les Deux Magots, languorously puffing at cigarette holders between mouthfuls of maltodextrin and flour treatment agent: E300.

And what about “natural smoke flavour”? Is that the craziest, wrongest, dunderheadedest misappropriation of the word “natural” you ever heard, or what?

And why “free range egg yolk” in the crappy mayonnaise but not free-range chicken or pork? Is this because they care a little bit about chickens and want some birds to have an okay time but aren’t such crazy animal lovers that they want to extend this munificence to the entire animal kingdom? Or is it that “free range egg yolk” mayonnaise was the only kind they could find, and they’re sort of apologising for it?

Which brings us to the porcine plasma, which features in the ingredients list as one of the constituents of their “smoke flavour sweet cure bacon”. Just what in the world is it for? Porcine plasma? I mean, let’s leave aside the current world squeamishness about pigs in the wake of a feared swine flu epidemic and ask simply: what is it about the yellow liquid component of blood in which the blood cells are suspended that makes it so much more excellent for the creation of bacon than the blood itself?

You know how you make plasma? Course you do. You remember school biology lessons. You simply place a test tube of pig’s blood in a centrifuge and spin it until the dark cells separate and collect at the bottom, then you pour off the translucent yellow liquid and MAKE IT INTO BACON!!!! And then MAKE SANDWICHES OUT OF IT!!!

It’s the most bastard awful thing I ever heard. I looked up porcine plasma on the internet to see if its use in food for humans is normal, and could find nothing.

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