Notes from a small island

Notes from a small island
A weblog by Jonathan Ali

Monday, December 30, 2002

Last week I took him to task over the Roy Dubay case; today I fully endorse Kim Johnson's opposition to the ubiquitous presence of ketchup in local cuisine:

'Not that I have anything against ketchup. A hamburger isn’t a hamburger unless it has a dollop. Without it fries soon become too boring to be worth the effort.

'Too besides, it’s supposed to prevent prostate cancer.

'Nor have I any objection to culinary innovativeness. Some of our most wonderful haute cuisine was created by that restless Trini urge to try a thing. Or maybe that Trini ignorance as to how it should properly be done.

'I love it, even if I don’t use much. A touch of this, a dash of that, and I good to go.

'So I have no problem with either ketchup or novelty, but the two combined — no thanks. Why would an adult want to put ketchup on pizza?

'Children I understand. “Polymorphous perversity,” is how Freud put it. They can eat things forbidden to adult palates.

'Yet it is much worse to see someone buy a box of Chinese take away, say, char siu kai fan, and submerge it under ketchup, so that the bits of pork gristle become mere islands in a sea of red.

'What next, roti? Boil corn? How about ice cream?

'Officer, I’m willing to be a witness. This thing must be stamped out.'

Call me up, too. I can think of no greater culinary crime than the one with ketchup perpetrated daily in homes and eating establishments across this nation, the red plastic squirt bottle the usual weapon of choice, the person wielding it with such impudent abandon himself the victim. As I wrote in the Roy Dubay post, the law exists to protect people from themselves - perhaps there should condiment abuse legislation to save us from drowning in that awful sea of red.

'Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are,' the saying goes. I truly shudder to think what our ketchup fetish says about us.

posted by Jonathan | 8:47 AM 0 comments

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