Experience in New Zealand, that is, let alone Australia. And least of all in a supermarket.
The scene was the service deli counter at Woolworths Balmain. With my chicken and bacon weighed and wrapped, the young man behind the counter asked if I’d like anything else.
Yes, I said, one cocktail sausage please. Like jandal, cheerio would have gone way over his Australian head.Realising it was for Austin, he handed it to me (gripping it with a plastic bag) and told me it was on the house.
Bugger me if I didn’t find this uplifting and heart-warming. To be honest, it made my day. And not because we’d saved 34 cents. This was totally unexpected. The tradition was still alive.
Alive for my boy. And very much against the odds.
Four major forces have brought about the demise of butchers giving free cheerios to kids. The first is that there are more supermarket service deli staff than butchers. Second, as a result, the common day cheerio is generally rubbish. The taste and texture aren’t what they used to be and they tend to split even when you bring them to the boil slowly and simmer them very gently.
Then there was the media frenzy whipped up in the late 1990s about the health risks of uncooked cheerios. Media frenzies being what they are, my lasting memory was that the tradition had been banned altogether.
It might as well have been, but the truth is that it had just been a warning from a single area health board.
And a certain Dr Pink.
Canterbury’s Officer of Medical Health, he had issued a statement saying that cheerios had to be heated prior to consumption to wipe out any residual bacteria and that handing them out to kids in butchers’ shops was therefore a no-no.
Residual bacteria? Isn’t that what the acidity of the tomato sauce is for?
Perhaps, but an investigation by the Canterbury District Health Board had found that six children suffering from yersiniosis had eaten cheerios. Six out of how many is unclear but, according to the statement, attempts by butchers to maintain their charitable tradition had been associated with previous local outbreaks of salmonella and campylobacter.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it took just one medical officer to bring down the walls. What’s more, he issued his statement less than a month before Christmas.
As if thousands of kids wouldn’t suffer enough.
That said, Dr Pink is not our Grinch. That honour goes to Mainland Products.
Just when you thought poor tradesmanship and bureaucratic nonsense had done enough damage for one processed meat product, they come along and trademarked what most would consider a great kiwi colloquialism and therefore off-limits to branding and legal types.
An example of the impact of this is outlined in a 2008 story from the Christchurch Press, written by one Elizabeth Osmers Gordon.
Three years prior she has given a public lecture in which she expressed regret that the cheerio was being “chased out by the interloping cocktail sausage”.
Weeks later she received a four-page lawyer’s letter telling her that ‘cheerio’ was trademarked by Mainland. If talking about these pink party favorites, it instructed, she must instead use the term ‘CHEERIOS - cocktail sausages’.
Talk about the end of the golden weather.
And yet there may be hope. At least in Balmain. Austin is too young to tell me how it tasted, and the name on the sign was certainly Mainland Products wrong, but this was one afternoon on which a beautiful tradition was handed down from proud father to smiling son.
And I’d like to think it won’t be the last.
No comments:
Post a Comment