"Scarbrand Pie Filling" Food Scare (1975)

At harvest time in Scarfolk, families donated food, household items and other objects they were going to dispose of anyway, to people who were too lazy to go shopping themselves. Canned products were most often donated (because they are easier to throw), but that ceased in the mid-70s following a food scare.

Tests on Scarbrand's meat-flavoured pie fillings had shown that each can might contain up to 7% ergot-impregnated stoat faeces, which had most likely leaked from a farm that specially bred animals and children for pagan rituals.

Scarbrand admitted culpability but did not recall their products. They maintained that most customers weren't qualified or even clever enough to notice the contamination because the genuine, non-faecal ingredients were so similar in colour, texture and odour to the faeces that they were virtually indistinguishable.
Secondly, the hallucinogenic ergot content was so high that the vast majority of affected customers would not be able to remember their name, or even that they were human, much less complain about the pie filling.

Scarbrand's public relations director publicly ate stoat faeces to demonstrate that it would not have any adverse effects. However, when he and several consumers fell ill and hijacked a garden centre which they tried to drive to the Lake District, Scarbrand relented and advised consumers to discard the questionable 7% of their pie fillings. They even incorporated the message into their TV ad campaigns.
"Only greedy people eat ALL their food. Scientists have proven that eating more than 93% of your food could affect your health".

By the end of the 1970s, with no improvement in consumer health, Scarbrand was forced to provide the ergot-laced stoat faeces in a separate sachet.

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'Totalitarian Salads', Scarfolk Books, 1976

'Totalitarian Salads,' published in 1976, sold more copies than any other book that year and was voted Scarfolk's best book by no less than 100% of the public in a mandatory survey.

The success of this publication may be partly due to the fact that all bar one of Scarfolk's bookshops and publishing companies were razed to the ground in semi-mysterious circumstances. In short,'Totalitarian Salads' was the only book commercially available that year.

Additionally, the authors and editors of competing cookery books were found sauteed in a mass shallow grave just outside Scarfolk.
Police food forensics experts put the recovered bodies in a refrigerator overnight before transferring them to an oven for 20-25 minutes and then pouring into individual pots to be garnished with wreathes of flowers.

Despite attempts to monopolise the cookery book market, illegal food pamphlets were distributed by an underground recipe resistance movement. This is the origin of recipes such as
'soufflé uprising,' 'coup soup,'  'putsch punch,' and 'insurgence sausages.'