Their ice-cream may not be tasteless. But the latest marketing wheeze of Mackie's of Scotland certainly is.
The diary giant has a new product to market this summer: Sicilian lemon. They are, their PR department announced, "making treat lovers an offer they can't refuse".
Yes, the lemons are Sicilian so Mackie's went for a Mafia gag. They decided the best line for a product from Sicily was a joke about the people who torment Sicilians.
"As well as being famous as the birthplace of the Mafia," explained the firm's Kirstin Mackie, "Sicily also produces some of the finest lemons available".
Now I think this is pretty crass. I gather, perhaps unsurprisingly, that most Sicilians fail to see the funny side of Mafia humour. "We are not the Mafia," goes the often repeated Sicilian phrase. "We are the victims of the Mafia."
I would like to think decent folk know this and would turn their noses up at any company that was quite so insensitive.
Murderered: Sicilian anti-mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone
That is, I would like to think that. Alas, I suspect that gangsterism as entertainment is now so deeply embedded in our popular culture that Mackie's naff gag will go unpunished.
But what is going on here? Why on Earth would somebody think a bunch of violent parasites like Sicily's Mafia is a suitable subject for light-hearted marketing banter for some artery-clogging cold fat and sugar?
Are we all really that inured to violent criminals - provided they are far enough away? Well, probably.
Blood, gore and horror does seem to get sanitised the farther away it is from us in time and space. So the Burke and Hare killings, for example, are fun entertainment on Edinburgh ghost walks because the victims are long dead. We wouldn't do tours of recent crime scenes.
And, I guess, Mafia victims, the businesses paying their extra "tax" or "pizzo" and the grieving widows of slaughtered judges or journalists are too far away for us in Sicily for us to worry about their feelings. Shame on us.
If Mackie's ever branches out in to fizzy pop I doubt they would market, say, Ulster's refreshing Club Orange as having an explosive taste or being good fuel for marching. Northern Ireland, I suppose, is too close for threats of violence to be funny.
Mafia as entertainment? A scene from The Godfather
But I think there is a bigger issue here: We like gangsters; we still think they are glamorous. Weaned on TV, movies and throwaway paperbacks, we read newspaper stories about our own Scottish organised thugs, with their naff nicknames in brackets, as if they were part of some diddy branch of Hollywood. Sorry, but they're just crooks. And usually their lives are as dull and unexciting as they are potentially dangerous.
There is an old story - I have no idea if it is true - that the most stolen books from Glasgow libraries were "true crime". But such books conceal the dull, unrelenting, unimaginative sameyness of your everyday loser Scottish thug. Too much popular culture still makes organised crime glamorous. And too much popular culture makes it sound normal.
Mackie's, I am guessing, think they are just having a laugh. Maybe. But their joke, in its small way, is stigmatising Sicily and normalising that island's torture.
What news about the Mafia really looks like: the 1992 headlines after anti-mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino and five police officers were murdered by the Cosa Nostra in Palermo.
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