{"id":34492,"date":"2016-04-02T02:00:53","date_gmt":"2016-04-02T06:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34492"},"modified":"2016-03-31T21:17:17","modified_gmt":"2016-04-01T01:17:17","slug":"canadas-new-frontier-in-patriotism-ketchup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/04\/02\/canadas-new-frontier-in-patriotism-ketchup\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada’s new frontier in patriotism: ketchup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh<\/a> gently pokes fun at the latest outbreak of manufactured patriotic fervor:<\/p>\n

An enterprising Toronto man wants to sell us all \u201cKetchup Patriot\u201d T-shirts, so that the virtuous among us might assert the correct position on the hot issue of whether it is right to eat products made with dubious foreign tomatoes.<\/p>\n

This presents me with a dilemma: I agree with the many words already written in this space, and in the Financial Post<\/em>, about the preposterousness of tomato isolationism; on the other hand, I am pretty sure our future as a country has less to do with mid-grade agricultural products destined for pureeing than it does to do with insta-auto-robo-printing of faddish social-signalling paraphernalia. You have to admire the spirit of enterprise wherever it emerges. The best answer ever given to Che Guevara\u2019s philosophy was the Che Guevara T-shirt.<\/p>\n

The \u201cKetchup Patriot\u201d view favours French\u2019s brand ketchup, which is now made from tomatoes grown in the area around Leamington, Ont. Leamington is practically a creation of the H.J. Heinz Co., which was a major employer there for decades, but fled to the United States in 2014. Few Canadians are employed in the growing of tomatoes, mind you: migrant workers flown into local dormitories and paid around $10 an hour seem to do most of the hard work on Leamington-area farms and in greenhouses.<\/p>\n

French\u2019s, best known for selling mustard, is owned by the Reckitt Benckiser Group PLC of Slough, Berkshire. This \u201cKetchup Patriotism,\u201d the closer you look at it, becomes more and more a matter solely of dream terroir. Canadians don\u2019t get the profits, don\u2019t pick the tomatoes and don\u2019t even can the ketchup \u2014 that happens in Ohio, although French\u2019s, obviously aware that it has a whole country by the tail, has hinted at plans to open a new cannery somewhere in Ontario. All we do, for the moment, is own the land. This ketchup has a mystical Canadian essence, one I defy anyone to detect in a blind taste test.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One may not detect the “distinctive Canadian ‘terroir'”, but having actually tasted Heinz and French’s products, there’s a reason that Heinz is the default ketchup for most people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh gently pokes fun at the latest outbreak of manufactured patriotic fervor: An enterprising Toronto man wants to sell us all \u201cKetchup Patriot\u201d T-shirts, so that the virtuous among us might assert the correct position on the hot issue of whether it is right to eat products made with dubious foreign tomatoes. This presents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,6,25,74,53],"tags":[52,859,266],"class_list":["post-34492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-cancon","category-economics","category-food","category-politics","tag-absurd","tag-manufacturing","tag-protectionism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Yk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34492"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34493,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34492\/revisions\/34493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}