Deep-Fried Mars Bar Is a Brilliant Idea – But: Almost Banned
A chip shop in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, invented it: the legendary deep-fried Mars bar. But now the government threatens to throw a spanner in the works. A banner on the front of the chip shop has to be removed to encourage Scots to eat more healthily. Mars headquarters wasn’t happy either. Is the deep-fried Mars bar illegal?
It was the clever people at Carron Fish Bar in Aberdeenshire who were the first to put the deep-fried Mars bar on the menu. An ordinary Mars bar from the vending machine, dipped in a thin layer of batter and then—whoosh—into the bubbling fat. The result: melted chocolate and caramel in a crispy jacket. Brilliant, right?
Unique snack
People come from all over the world to Linda Watson’s fish & chips shop to try that unique snack for just £1.50. And then they also love having their picture taken with the banner Linda hung on her shop, proudly bearing the words ‘Birthplace of the World Famous Deep Fried Mars Bar’. Until Linda received a letter from the council: that banner had to go.
Get rid of that banner
The council wants the centre of Aberdeenshire to look more pleasant, and a large banner doesn’t fit that vision. Linda is stunned: her shop, with its unique deep-fried Mars bar, is an enormous tourist attraction, and surely that’s good for the local economy, isn’t it?
Too many snacks, too little exercise
Linda had already faced lawyers over the famous snack before—namely, Mars headquarters itself. They wanted her to stop deep-frying their bars because it didn’t fit with the message of a healthy lifestyle that the company wants to promote. The fact that Mars’s legal department managed to put that in writing with a straight face is an achievement in itself. The deep-fried Mars bar, now available throughout Scotland, is seen as a symbol of everything that went wrong with Scots’ health: they fry too much and exercise too little.
Warning: not healthy
Fortunately, after some legal wrangling, Linda managed to get permission to keep frying the bar, as long as she put up a warning in her chip shop: deep-fried Mars bars are not healthy for you. Is a Mars bar in a crispy jacket really that unhealthy? Yes, with 600 calories to its name, it’s no joke. For a while, social media warned that the snack could cause a stroke within a minute. It is indeed a bomb of sugar and fat that you consume in a few bites, but extensive medical research shows that a bowl of porridge is just as good—or bad—for you as that deep-fried Mars bar.
