Sara, his oldest daughter, never had anything to do with the cake business.The sweet-faced man whose mug has adorned Uncle Ben's rice and sauce packets since 1943 may well have been somebody's uncle, but his name certainly wasn't Ben. He had invented the process for making frozen food after noticing that fish and vegetables stayed fresh when in ice while on a hunting trip in Labrador at the end of the First World War.Sara Lee - she of frozen cheesecake fame - never actually went near either a cake tin or a freezer. Instead it was Sara's adoring daddy, a master baker called Charlie Lubin who, in the 1940s, came up with the idea to freeze his popular cheesecakes as a way of transporting them to customers living far away from his bakery. Neither has Uncle Ben, Betty Crocker, or most of the familiar faces found lurking on tins and packets in supermarkets. The news that a whole larder-full of personalities are no more than figments of advertisers' imaginations was revealed in this month's BBC Good Food magazine.Cap'n Birdseye, with his trademark white beard and twinkly eyes, was dreamed up by an advertising company in 1967.

The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths said the research was "interesting" but was carried out between 1987 and 1990, before the dramatic decline which followed official advice to put babies to sleep on their backs, and it was unclear whether the same association would be found now.Mary Daly, of the Health Visitors Association, said the findings, published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, had not been presented in the context of other known risk factors such as sleeping position, smoking and temperature. The Cap'n was revived in 1974 with the announcement that reports of his demise were grossly exaggerated.A Clarence Birdseye, born in New York in 1886, did help found the Birds Eye company in 1930. When he was briefly killed off he even warranted an obituary in the Times. There was nothing in them to justify changing advice already given to pregnant women to drink beverages in moderation, she said..

Mr Kipling does not make exceedingly good cakes In fact he doesn't make cakes at all. And while Cap'n Birdseye may claim to be captain of the fish finger, in reality he has never sailed the ocean blue. Health: Coffee could cause cot deaths Women who drink four or more cups of coffee a day while pregnant increase the risk of their baby suffering a cot death, according to a study. The findings from the New Zealand study of the parents of almost 400 babies who died and 1,600 parents of normal babies suggests that heavy consumption of caffeine drinks, including tea and cola, during pregnancy could be risky.However, experts challenged the findings. The truth is that far from lolling around in quintessentially English gardens dreaming up new recipes for small packaged fruit pies, Mr Kipling has never actually existed. It has slipped from the top of the rankings as joint worst swear word to third, according to audience research for the Broadcasting Standards Commission. Although viewers were becoming more used to swearing, nine out of 10 adults are still concerned about bad language on television when there are children around.There had been little change since 1994 in the ranking of words as commented on by 753 adults interviewed last year, the report said."The exception (and the change is slight) is the word `f***' which was considered less severe than the other two words ranking higher In the pre. I've been upset about the whole thing and now I just want everyone to leave me alone."The former Young Chef of the Year said he had been devastated by the allegations..