I awake to BREAKING NEWS. The TV news anchor announces
that “…they’re changing the recipe for ketchup.
It’s set to happen gradually over the summer. ”
“Wha….! Nah…no way,” I say in disbelief. But
before I allow fear and panic to take over, I dismiss
the whole thing to the fact that I just woke up. I was
still in that semi – conscious, altered state that
lies between REM sleep and my full acquisition of
“walking around sense”. It’s a brief but
‘crazy’ time each morning just after I awake when
my brain tends to have a mind of its own. Anything can
happen. Apparitions of long dead relatives, monsters,
ghosts and goats are not uncommon. A couple of months
ago, I was abducted, albeit briefly, by aliens. On
another occasion, I was visited by Elvis.
A full half an hour after I’d heard the announcement
about ketchup out of the corner of my ear, I am
showered, shaved and fully awake. I see the story
again. “…the ketchup company with a seventy
percent market share is about to change its recipe,
reducing the condiment’s salt content by fifteen
percent. The company is doing it for health
reasons”, the report says. The company is also
changing the proportions of the spices which make up
the recipe’s secret ingredients,” says the morning
anchor. She’s reporting from on one of those new
High Definition TV studio sets and even though the
camera shows her nice looking legs in full view, it
doesn’t do anything to cushion the blow. My latent
sleepiness had not been a factor, after all. I’d
heard the report correctly. Drat!
Now desperate, I think about the Ronald Reagan adage:
“Trust but verify” and I surf over to another
channel. Sadly, I hear the same story, same facts.
“Can they do this”, I ask to no one in particular.
“I mean …can they really change the recipe for
ketchup? Can they legally do this? I start to
look around for my copy of the U.S. Constitution. The
founders surely must have anticipated something like
this. Thomas Jefferson---or one of ‘em--- would have
been ‘on the ball’ and placed some kind of
prohibition against changing stuff that didn’t
need to be changed in the Constitution. And heck,
even if the founding fathers, themselves hadn’t
thought of it, then most assuredly their wives, the
founding mothers, had done so. Maybe Dolly Madison had
whispered the idea into James Madison’s ear ….
Then, I recall that sorry business with New Coke a few
years back and figure that the prohibition of changing
time honored stuff was probably not in the
Constitution after all. Jeez. Nice going, Thomas
Jefferson.”
I remember that this whole annoying business of
unwanted and unneeded change started in 1960. This was
the year that they took the big tail fins off new cars
that made cars look like rocket ships, at least in the
eyes of seven year old boys. It was also the same year
that the Corvair came out. (If you’ve been lucky
enough never to have seen a Chevy Corvair, think
“sardine can.”) Suddenly, instead of riding to the
second grade over at St. Kennedy’s Catholic School
and pretending to be Buck Rogers in a rocket ship, I
was now riding around in a tin can and pretending not
to be‘Mister Rogers’. (At the time, I wrote
a letter of protest to the car companies about the
removal of the tail fins. In the first of a long line
of life disappointments, I got no answer, leaving me
to conclude that nobody much cares what a seven year
old thinks about anything except for possibly a six
year old.)
In 1973, Major League Baseball decided to add the
designated hitter to the game. “For what”, I asked
at the time? But alas, my protestations fell on deaf
ears. I am sure that Abner Doubleday is still
turning over in his grave.
In 1985, the people that make Coca-Cola took it upon
themselves to change the wildly successful formula
that had been handed down by God and Asa Candler.
You’d have thought though that maybe the people
smart enough to invent Coke in the first place would
have enough sense not to monkey around with success.
(If they’d really wanted to do something
imaginative, they’d have added Jamaican rum to the
formula and really increased gotten people’s
interest!)
I don’t know what gets into people that they just
won’t leave well enough alone.
No doubt I have consumed a remarkable amount of
ketchup over the years. I was introduced to the
condiment when I was about five years of age. It was
not an acquired taste, but rather instant and long
lasting love. I’ve put it on burgers, hot dogs,
brats, steaks, and even scrambled eggs. I‘ve often
used it as a masking agent to disguise the fact that
tofu has no flavor or to disguise what chitlin’s
really are. Mostly though, I’ve used ketchup to
drown French Fries and to disguise that
they’re…well, “French”. (We’ve even had a
non-food relationship that includes the time, as a
nine year old prankster, I scared the” bejesus”
out of my mother by faking a head wound complete
replete with fake blood. It was a master-stroke worthy
of a 1950’s B-movie.)
The idea of changing the ketchup formula lacks
imagination if you ask me. It is a diabolical and
tricky business with an uncertain outcome. If they---i.e.
the Ketchup Company, as I have always called them----
were just hell bent on monkey-ing around with
something, there are a bunch of other things that they
could have done. Say maybe put the ketchup inside the
French fries. Maybe re-package and put ketchup inside
a tube like toothpaste. Maybe they could’ve put the
French Fries inside the ketchup bottle. Or maybe mix
the mustard and the ketchup together.
Sadly, as a consumer with a sophisticated and nuanced
palate when it comes to ketchup, the only thing that I
know to do is to go out and buy a case of the old
stuff before they stock the shelves with the so called
new and improved version. Maybe I’ll get a couple of
cases, maybe even three and stockpile it. I’ll give
a few bottles of vintage ketchup to my closest
friends for Christmas.
While I’m at it maybe I’ll buy a whole crate of
potatoes before somebody decides to change them too.
Make a bunch of French Fries and drown them in the
‘vintage ketchup blend’. Wash it all down with
some of the old or, er….or rather ‘Classic’
Coke. Gonna make the potato fries in the shape of the
big tail fins… just like they had on the 1959
Cadillac.
© Copyright Will Cantrell
* * * * *
 For
the record, Will Cantrell is a freelance writer and
humorist. He writes, he says, “...not about life as
we know it, but rather about life as how we suspect
that it really is”. Legend has it that at an early
age he wandered South, got lost and like most males
was loathe to ask for directions. A last sighting, he
was still wandering around Atlanta, Georgia, lost and
saying that he was trying to “...write his way
home.” Of course, there are a lot of eyewitnesses
who suspect that “...Cantrell ain't wrapped too
tight” but hope that he keeps writing about his
experiences as he finds his way back to the main
highway.
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