Tunnock’s is a company that sells sticky, sweet biscuits. The not-so-secret essential ingredient is sugar.

It’s a fair bet that many of the teeth pulled from gingivitis-ridden gums of the Scottish population came in contact with a Tunnock’s product, and a good percentage of Type-2 diabetics quietly shooting up at the dinner…may well have consumed a Tunnock’s product, or two.

But the main issue for some people is the wee lion on the side of the wrapper?

This will send a clear warning around the world that we Scots will turn a blind eye to many things but don’t fuck with our cakes or there will be hell to pay.

It’s a shame.  This could have been a good chance to talk about the merits of a company like Tunnack’s and its business model.  A business model that is based on filling its products with the world’s most pervasive legally addictive stimulant: sugar.  A substance almost all of us are struggling to avoid and would probably cease imbibing altogether if we could.

Strange that in Scotland we worship such commodities.  Commodities that make us feel warm and fuzzy inside for a few fleeting moments before the creeping ailments begin to stack up.  How coincidental that those substances that made Scottish slave owners so rich are now symbols of national pride and cultural heritage as well as hallmarks of our infamously self-defeating lifestyles.  Tobacco, sugar, alcohol.  We can’t go anywhere or do anything without at least one of these pumping through our hardened arteries.

In this we get a snap shot of how some aspects of culture permeate our identities over time.  Not days into mourning the loss of the glass bottle of Irn Bru have we launched ourselves into a grief-stricken boycott of a company that makes cakes?  We are so emotionally attached to things that make us fat and stupid it’s frightening.

Then there’s the issue of what sugar is doing to us as a species.

Physiologically our bodies and minds have not evolved to cope with a daily supply of added sugar.  Every time we get a hit it sets up a demand for more.  Retailers know we find it hard to resist and have set up our shopping facilities like rat mazes as a result; running the sugar gauntlet right up until you physically leave the building.

And if it’s not the junk food that floats your boat that’s likely because you’re an alcoholic that can’t digest solid food or a chain-smoking vegan arsehole.  You have to be pretty enlightened to be able to avoid all of these vices and unfortunately real fulfilment is the only thing capitalism doesn’t produce.

Our hospitals are full of children, adults and elderly people with chronic health conditions as a direct result of developing dependencies on one or more of these addictive substances we have come to worship as part of our Scottish cultural identity.

What kind of culture is this?  A culture of self-harm?

We are so permanently stunned by the headlights of identity politics that we rarely take a moment to examine what that identity even is.

I don’t care if Tunnock’s is Scottish or British as I’m too busy becoming a fat diabetic. I mean, Boyd Tunnock, its managing director, is 82. He was born on Robert Burns’s birthday in 1933.  He looks a lively character (not overweight) with a zest for marketing which he seems to have inherited from his great grandfather, a coffin maker, who advertised his wares thus: “why live a miserable life when for 30 bob you can be buried comfortably”.

I don’t have the stomach to talk about anything else.

Image of knitted teacake reproduced under Creative Commons