Friday, July 21, 2006

Grating my nerves...

I'm regularly amazed at the variety of packaging concepts you find in American grocery stores...not that I have a ton of experience browsing the aisles of grocery stores not on this continent, but I know of the struggles just to fulfill basic needs in other parts of the world, and we have an entire aisle dedicated to bathroom tissue. Makes you wonder.

As did this discovery from last night...grate your own parmesan cheese, right in the package. Yeah, as anybody with an interest in food knows, freshly grated parmesan is far superior to the dried-out stuff you get in the can...however, would it kill you to get your own perfectly good microplane and use it, rather than have Kraft provide you with another piece of plastic you'll eventually throw away? (Last month's Wired magazine has a great article on how researchers are trying to crack the code on cream chese production that Kraft clearly perfected years ago...they are the gold standard and prime mover innovator of processed cheese food product, clearly.)

It's odd and wrong and lazy and wasteful (and probably a bunch other adjectives I could come up with) all at the same time. And so relentlessly "American."

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