A global warm or cold war has revealed that in a divided world, some things are not negotiable.
There are some hectic things going on, online and in real life, and most people feel overwhelmed, helpless and hopeless. There’s real rage in society over life-altering challenges. Wars, famine, crime, economic divides, corruption, climate change and injustice. Most of us feel no one is listening, no one can change things and no one gives a damn anyway.
In the face of all that, there’s nothing like a global debate that is inconsequential and meaningless to relieve the blood pressure.
It has not been short-lived, either. On June 27, Heinz UK posted on Twitter, apropos nothing, it seems, that “FYI: Ketchup. goes. in. the. Fridge!!!”
For a cold condiment, it attracted some heat.
By this week, the furore had caught the attention of news outlets like The Washington Post, CNN, The Guardian and other international publications, a quick Google check revealed. It trended on YouTube and social media.
First, ketchup or tomato sauce? Americans don’t use English. They have auto trunks (car boots), sidewalks (pavements), apartments (flats), condos (err, flats again – no wonder they confuse condiments); wrecks (car crashes as in “we’re going to wreck!”); theater, center, we could do a long list. Instead of tomato sauce, they say ketchup which, according to National Geographic, isn’t even an American word, although the Heinz parent company is. It comes from the Hokkien Chinese word, kê-tsiap, the name of a sauce derived from fermented fish.
Anyway, the couch was gloriously unaware of the red ruckus, being way too busy eating hot dogs (with mustard and tomato sauce, natch) and catching up on all the TV shows and movies we missed before “discovering” streaming.
We remained unchallenged even when word of it finally filtered through. The tomato sauce we use says clearly: refrigerate after opening. That’s where ours lives and has done ever since mom and dad had a GE in the olden days.
But cold or warm, ours has that one thing common to every tomato sauce container in the world. It either doesn’t come out or with just the slightest tap on its bottom splurts out in huge dollops. Once, our kitchen wall looked like a scene from the Texas Chain Massacre because I thought I had a solution. While the lid was on the bottle, I gave it a good shake to “loosen it up”. But then I did it again when the food was ready to be condimented up and the lid had also come loose. The walls were red, but the air was blue.
Restaurants, more Googling explained, keep theirs on tables or condiment servers because ketchup/tomato sauce has a stable shelf life. And if they’re any good, it doesn’t last long because they have lots of customers and even catering-size condiment bottles run dry fast.
If it’s a dingy diner, no one cares where the ketchup has been and fancy restaurants would rather die than dish it up. It would be freshly kitchen-made, if it was served at all.
The original tweeter generated a global publicity blitz last seen when the first Tesla caught fire. But it also shows that even on trivial topics, some things still divide.
- Lindsay Slogrove is the news editor
The Independent on Saturday