Superb article by Malcolm Gladwell (originally published in The New Yorker) ostensibly about ketchup, but digging deep into what makes food products work. The Ketchup Conundrum is a really good read, especially if you have any interest in how companies manipulate the food we eat. But this isn’t a scare story about Heinz using rotten tomatoes: it’s about one guy trying to create the world’s best ketchup.
“If you were in Zabar’s on Manhattan’s Upper West Side a few months ago, you would have seen him at the front of the store, in a spot between the sushi and the gefilte fish. He was wearing a World’s Best baseball cap, a white shirt, and a red-stained apron. In front of him, on a small table, was a silver tureen filled with miniature chicken and beef meatballs, a box of toothpicks, and a dozen or so open jars of his ketchup. “Try my ketchup!” Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. “If you don’t try it, you’re doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life.”
Been there, done that…