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Abstract

Peas. Of ‘garden’, The Dictionary of Diseased English said, ‘a meaningless word, beloved of the restaurant industry’, and in six years that situation has changed not a scrap. Everywhere in the UK, on the middle level of eating places, this, that or the other dish will be ‘served with chipped potatoes and baked beans or garden peas’ (menu, Myllet Arms, Perivale, Middlesex, England, July 1982). It is worth considering if places which advertise ‘garden peas’ are not rendering themselves liable to prosecution under the Trade Descriptions Act, since the description is simply not true. The peas in question are certainly frozen and, equally certainly, they have been grown in a field, not a garden. A garden, as any competent lawyer would be able to demonstrate, is not a field, in the sense in which both words are commonly understood, and consequently an offence has been committed. The eating public is being misled tens of thousands of times every day and the motive for such deception is perfectly clear. ‘Garden peas’ suggests that the peas in question have been picked in a nearby garden, taken straight to the kitchen in a basket and shelled while the bloom is still on the pods. It is, alas, not so.