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Not the call of the Yellowhammer
(A little bit of bread and no cheese)
[6 minute read ]
Bread and Cheese
Sometimes, the world is just going along, without us noticing. I am always relieved (for me that is not thinking 'I could design this better') that the cheese I buy, when I cut slices from it, fits half a slice of bread (well almost). I have to be honest, I really don't want to notice the errors in the world, which are, inevitably, from human intervention.
I am definitely not one of those types that bang on about climate change or rain forests. I am vegetarian simply because I feel healthier; ruthlessly, the heath of animals, when it comes to my diet, really doesn't come into my eating decisions. I don't eat bear bile, for example. Mind you, I wouldn't eat a sandwich in front of a chimpanzee when I am numbly staring at it in a zoo. Here's a tip for eye-hunters: If you get approached by a person whom you might be tempted to get a room with, when you are in a zoo, never say, 'Why are these animals in prison? What did they all do?' I said this at London Zoo, and she went straight back to her boyfriend, whom she had escaped from for a few moments.
I buy my cheese from ALDI. That shop has changed a lot! It used to be that shoppers would walk along aisles of pallets of goods. Now, it is not much different to Tesco or Sainsbury's. I asked an employee why, and the reply was that shoppers had requested a better shopping experience. It pays to listen because ALDI replaced Morisson's as the fourth place in 'The Big Four' a couple of years ago, but you have to wonder why the shoppers were in the shop in the first place. The answer is, of course, because they want low prices; prices that are low because it takes less time to switch an empty pallet with a full one, than it does to put individual products on tidy shelves, which is why bags of sugar in ALDI is on a pallet (Clearly, we buy a lot of sugar in ALDI).
Putting products where customers could reach them used to be done by warehouse people; with the shop floor merely representing a 'Goods Out' portion of their warehouse. So, a portion of the supply chain; inventory (storage) has shifted to 'product placement': which term is actually used in the media to refer to people in films and on TV using a particular brand. By product placement I mean, placing a good on a supermarket shelf; so, the product in an ALDI store moved from 'Logistics and the Supply Chain' as a good to simply a 'product', from the average customers' point of view. The display and actual selling of a product is still part of the supply chain and logistics, however.
Supermarket products are often in rectangular shaped packaging, because they can be shipped in smaller boxes than the same amount of things like wine, beer, and spirits which individually are in round bottles. Cheese is no different for supermarkets. Even the tiny Boursin, which I used to buy as a short and fat cylinder, can be bought in a rectangular box; but this is because they stack better in the supermarket, and damage during shipping is vastly reduced;
'Hurry up! Chuck the box!'.
A dropped box of Boursin without protective individual packaging would make all the little wheels move to one end of the shipping box, ruining almost every one of them because they are squashed. The same applies to dropping a box of spirits, except for 'Jim Beam', and 'Jack Daniels', and some others, which are, individually, in rectangular bottles. Yeah, I know! Physics told us that the circle or arc is the strongest design; or in Architecture, an arch is the best way to span an open distance, between two piers or pillars. Lintels just don't cut the mustard.
Why is it then, that cheap cheese in discount supermarkets is offered to a customer, that when it is cut, fits half a slice of bread. I had to think for a moment. Who is that cheese aimed at? That cheese gets no media advertising. It fits the size of sliced bread. It is cheap. Hmmm.
I used to eat packed lunches at school. My parents were not poor and I am tall.
'Tall? What do you mean?'
My doctor, a few years ago, suddenly said to me, quite out of the blue, 'You're taller than your father, aren't you?' I replied that I am. The doctor qualified his blurted sentence with, 'That is because you ate better than him when you were children'.
Right. Think of a family with low income; two adults and three kids. Who, in that family, wouldn't be grateful for cheese that almost perfectly fits half a slice of bread, when they are making packed lunches for lunch in the morning? And, just think, what would you do with all the little trimming falling to the floor when you eat those sandwiches in public? Ignore them? In front of the monkeys?
Cheese that fits sliced bread is aimed at 'low food-budget' families and individuals, which is why it gets no advertising. Advertising a product affects that product's profitability, and the customer pays more for that product, not more for the other products in the store, which keeps that unadvertised product's price low. Consider 'Cathedral City' cheese, for example. It is advertised sometimes. It also doesn't fit sliced bread well. I suggest that people who buy 'Cathedral City' might also buy artisan bread, or non-sliced bread that isn't rectangular. You know, a Cob or something, or at least a round loaf.
Rectangular shapes sometimes trick us a bit in a weird way. I watched my young nephew try to cut a slice from an rectangular unsliced loaf of bread. The result was much as we might expect; thicker at the top or bottom than the other end, or the end closest or furthest to him. Most of us cut bread from top (the crusty side) to bottom, when we should really cut it from one side to the other (with the crusty side being a side not the top. If you cut it from the top, crusty bit, to the bottom, we should, occasionally lean over the bread to see the other side as well as the nearest side of the bread to us, because otherwise the moment of cutting is longer and there is more opportunity for error. Sliced bread in factories is done by machines, so it doesn't matter if time is not an issue; but the process is almost instantaneous in factories and only the length of the movement of the slicing might be a consideration because there is more wear that way.
I cut blocks of cheese that fit my bread by lying it flat with one of the widest sides facing up. It means that I need a linger knife. I do this, because, it is important to me to make sure the slices are even, because, I eat more cheese on toast than cheese sandwiches; Too thin or uneven slices means that either the toast burns in places under the grill or the cheese burns at one end and is unmelted at the other. However, I get a little cross at the greater effort I need to use to cut cheese this way.
It is a question of pressure; pounds per square inch, or maybe kilos per square metre. But my irritation is because my knives are just not very sharp. So, we may indeed understand why factories might slice bread from top to bottom, wear of machinery be damned. As the blades become blunt, a greater incidence of crushing the bread, while it is being cut, will occur. Yup, the blades wear, or get blunt, faster this way, but it is both cheaper and quicker to replace a short blade than a long one, and maintenance time is reduced, which means that the machine can make more cuts per minute. (When considered, there is the same amount of wear on lots of short blades to the equivalent length long blade). In real life, factories use a series of spinning blades to cut bread so it is moot anyway.
The world goes goes on doing things without us noticing, until it doesn't segue with our individual lifestyle.
By the way: Grated cheese tastes better than sliced blocks of cheese because more air gets to it. Don't bother putting it on toast; it will not be grated when it melts.