Paper Monitor
10:59 UK time, Monday, 26 November 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
All credit to the Daily Mail for standing up what Paper Monitor rather suspected was a scare story from two weeks ago – the £100 turkey.
When bird flu was traced to a turkey farm in Suffolk earlier this month it didn't take long for the papers to put a Christmas twist on events. "Bird flu could lead to £100 Christmas turkeys as culls take place on four farms" was the alarming headline on the front of the Evening Standard, a local London paper.
Paper Monitor was sceptical, but the Mail serves up the goods today with the "first" £100 family-sized turkey – courtesy of farmer Tom Copas.
Yet all of a sudden bird flu is off the agenda. There's no mention of it whatsoever in the story, just rising grain prices and the extravagant steps that the farmer involved goes to to justify the price tag: said birds live in cherry orchards, are hand-plucked, fed on organic additive-free cereals etc.
So it would be fair to surmise that bird flu or no bird flu, the £100 turkey was going to happen.
It's not the price of turkeys that's bothering the Guardian – but the new-found taste for carp as a Christmas treat. Apparently, it's the traditional fare for Polish Christmas meals and the rise in Polish immigrants has pushed up sales at Waitrose (although the upmarket store is hardly likely to be the first port of call for all those low-paid Polish labourers we keep hearing about).
And look, there's a subtle plug for Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall resident gourmet of the Guardian's Weekend magazine. According to today's news story, Mr F-S is "encouraging people to eat more of the fish" which is not surprising since he's just released a cookbook called... Fish.
The 
