Let me begin this article with something of an illustrative tableau concerning Marks & Spencers decision to make all Percy Pig sweets they sell vegetarian by removing gelatin from the ingredients.
Sane Person #1: Hey, have you heard Marks & Spencers are making all Percy Pig sweets vegetarian by removing gelatin from their ingredients?
Sane Person #2: Oh. Will this result in any substantive change to the sweets themselves?
Sane Person #1: No, not at all. They will still taste the same and there will be essentially no difference in their texture.
Sane Person #2: Great.
Such is what we can imagine would be a reasonable reaction to this news. Lovely stuff.
However, anyone who has been at least semi-conscious through portions of the 21st century cannot help but have noticed the fact that Piers Morgan, the televised bile sluice, is not renowned for either sane or reasonable reactions to even the most perfunctory news of social or ethical progress. Behold his reaction to this news. He is incredulous. He is simply unable to comprehend this new world which he is forced to confront.
'Vegans and vegetarians - go and get your own sweets!'@piersmorgan isn't happy with the new veggie Percy Pigs... Have you tried them? pic.twitter.com/zbgCHacfff
— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) May 1, 2019
He gladly admits that, despite having never consumed Percy Pigs himself, he had taken their gelatin content as a given. He assumed they would always contain gelatin, thus his outrage at their change. The gelatin content of Percy Pigs had, to Piers Morgan, been a point of fixity; a surety in this world of flux. We can imagine him at home, confused and reeling from minor new societal change that he is fundamentally unable to come to terms with, clutching to a bag of Percy Pigs for reassurance, like a man adrift in the sea clinging to a life-raft. He would glide his hands over the bag's ingredients, consoling himself that - despite the fact that his own views mark him as an ever more incongruous and anachronistic figure in the face of social progress - Percy Pigs still contain gelatin. "Some things will never change," he would coo, before placing the bag of Percy Pigs back in his drawer with absolutely no intention, or even vague temptation, to actually taste or eat one.
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This is what Marks & Spencers are taking from Piers Morgan by changing the ingredients of their signature pig-themed sweet. From whence will he derive such comfort, such solace, now?
So incensed is he by this news that - while he rambles about the injustice of it all, becoming ever-more irate - he, Piers Morgan appears to take on a porcine complexion. His face grows ever more puce with rage. A pinkness seeps into his jowls, a gelatinous wobble is evident as his whole face trembles with righteous indignation. Piers Morgan is becoming ham. He is transforming into ham before our very eyes. It is as if on some deep cellular level Piers Morgan's body recognises the absence of pig product where once there had been pig product in these Percy Pigs and so, in an effort to try redress this perceived imbalance before him, his body starts - on a biological level - to transform Piers Morgan himself into ham.
This is all that can be concluded from this video, of a man becoming bizarrely furious at a simple change in the ingredients of a sweet that he himself has never eaten.
While Marks & Spencers have sold vegetarian Percy Pigs - free from gelatin - since 2011, these will now become the standard version. Indeed, the very fact that Marks & Spencers had for so long been using gelatin - derived from the boiled bones of animals, often pigs - to make a fake, pig-themed sweets had always seemed somewhat weird. By harvesting materials from the carcasses of actual pigs to create fake pig sweets, Percy has long been complicit in this grand betrayal of his own people. It is only fair that he should, at some point, be held accountable for these crimes. However, this article is neither the time, nor the place, and as such, it is a matter that I will leave to Percy and the courts of The Hague to sort out between themselves.
