4 rants about certain products who cornered their markets

1 - Why have blueberries cornered the fruit-in-muffins market?  Who does their PR?

No one likes blueberries.  You don't ever think "I know!  I'll get the kids a treat, they can have some lovely blueberries".

No.  It doesn't happen.  You buy strawberries BECAUSE THEY TASTE NICE.

And yet, in muffins, it's chocolate, it's lemon and poppy seed (poppy seed?!? Again - what's going on there), or it's blueberry.  Try and get a strawberry muffin, I challenge you.


2 - If water is so good for you, why doesn't it taste of anything?

There is a reason that bacon, sausages, pork scratchings, cheese etc taste nice - it's because they have fat in them.  Fat, for the majority of the human population, is in short supply and we are genetically designed to like the taste of it, because we need the energy supply of fat to survive.  It's better than stuff like carbohydrates because it's easy for the body to store until needed.

It's just that in the current "modern" western civilisations, we have an excess of it, so we pretend to like salad.

But taking this reasoning, why don't we love the taste of water?  Apparently we need it to survive, and yet the taste of it is nowhere near as good as lemonade, or beer, or coffee or any number of other drinks.

There's only one explanation for it - it's actually bad for us.


3 - Cranberry sauce with Christmas dinner?

Why is it acceptable to have weird jam with a Sunday dinner, if you happen to have it on December 25th.  I'm not saying that I don't like Cranberry sauce, I do, but if we're allowing jam to be spread all over our turkey then what about when we have pheasant?  Can we have some blackcurrant jelly on that?  What about some lemon curd on a ribeye steak?  Perhaps marmalade is the Colonels secret ingredient in his Kentucky Fried Chicken?

(If this post vanishes abruptly, you know that the last suggestion was right)


4 - WHY DO WE HANG A PINE SMELLING CARDBOARD TREE IN OUR CARS TO MAKE THEM SMELL NICE?

No one likes the smell of pine, at least not the smell of pine cleaner.  Pine cleaner is inevitably the "bargain" or "value" brand of linoleum cleanser you've bought because it's only twenty pence for five litres, and the trade off for buying such an inexperience cleaning solution is that it stinks of nasty pine, probably it's the smell that you'd get if an elk urinated on a rotting pine branch, it was left to soak in for a few days, and then you brought the branch in to lighten the atmosphere of your kitchen.

And yet we choose - voluntarily - this smell to go in our cars.

Mad!