Spectator competition winners: why baked beans should be banned

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.