Freedom is Slavery

[enitharmon]

I wanted a tin of tuna for a pasta dish. Preferably yellowfin in olive oil. Could I get it?

The best I could manage was the inferior skipjack in sunflower oil. It was hard enough to find that. What I could find was a hundred and one varieties of tinned tuna: tuna in mustard sauce; tuna in tomato sauce; tuna in lime mayonnaise; tuna in chilli sauce; tuna in mermaid's blood. All right, I made the last one up. But what the hell?

I strongly suspect that this is a ploy by the food industry to fob off inferior ingredients. But what I can't understand is why anybody falls for it? The best way to start a tuna dish is with plain tuna. Tinned tuna is fine for convenience. The only limit to what you do with it is your imagination. I make my own spicy tomato sauce by the bucketful; it uses nothing but cheap ingredients and only requires a saucepan and a blender (if you don't mind a courser sauce you can do without the blender). Onions, dried chillis, garlic, tinned tomatoes, tomato puree, parsley, salt, sugar, herbs as available, water. It's good, too, better than any tomato sauce you can buy. Lime mayonnaise? Provided you don't make your own mayonnaise it's a piece of piss. Same for any other mayonnaise with something flavourful and piquant stirred into it.

Don't people realise that all those 'value-added' (one of the most insidious of marketariat weasel words) are actually limiting, not liberating?

It's not just food. See it happen with children's toys, all ready to suppress your child's imagination ready to take her place in the market society as a good, compliant consumer. When I was little, I had Lego as today's children do, but my lego was very general, and you built whatever your imagination led you to build. Now, it's all pre-prepared projects, with very specific units that can only be used for one purpose. Something happened to Plasticene too - once you bought the basic material and you fashioned according to your imagination. Now it's all on rails - make your own Gromit, but for mammon's sake don't think originally!

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Lego do both general and kit-making stuff - all that's happened is they've moved into the Airfix-style model-building market (and done very well out of it - their stuff is a lot easier to make than airfix was!) - but that's certainly not replaced the general bricks.

In fact, what they do now in larger toyshops which is AWESOME and I wish they'd done when I was a kid is sell the general bricks pic'n'mix style which lets kids pick colours, accessories etc for themselves (and it looks gorgeous too - big dispensers full of bricks).

As someone who enjoys cooking, I agree that my heart sinks when I see a lot of the pre-made or pre-flavoured variants. But I'm sure there are people who roll their eyes at the fact I paid someone to wash the car the other week, or got an electrician in, and then those same people would probably tell me that they rang pest control when they had mice in rather than try and find the mouseholes themselves, like I did, and so on. Most people have some things they don't get any great satisfaction out of doing, even though it might be cheaper to do it themselves. Assuming they still want it done, where's the harm in them spending money on it? As a marketer myself the kind of thing that I hate is the attempt to persuade people that optional stuff is non-optional.

[trixiedelarue.livejournal.com]

Sainsbury's usually have it and I think some of the larger Tescos too

Tuna that is