I realised that the vanilla seeds in Lidl’s ice-cream adverts are fake! I know this because they are of an equal size and colour and are roughly equidistant throughout. This is not what vanilla seeds in ice-cream usually look like.
This means that Lidl are selling at least in part to a middle class audience.
Vanilla seeds in ice-cream is a classed and classing thing within food. The idea that good food is expensive because it has lots of “natural” flavours in it is a middle-classed thing – the poor get vanilla essence and annato seeds, the wealthy get genuine vanilla seeds.
The interesting thing in this, is that they are still both seeds. But seeing as the wealthy dictate what is expensive – because they dictate what is desirable in a demand-supply economy – they create the conditions of expensive existence for their own food. Their attitudes have put prices on their own dinners.
I wonder if Lidl’s actual ice-cream has vanilla seeds in?
Beth's Food and Sociology Blog 