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I like yoghurt. Particularly Tesco's seventy-calorie-a-pot
healthy-eating yoghurts, which are almost entirely fat, sugar and guilt free.
And Tesco likes to sell 'em - So much so that the intrepid yoghurt-eater cannot
purchase a singular yog, but is required to adopt into his or her fridge and
entire family-of-four yogi (or whatever the plural of yoghurt is).
Still, no problem with that, because, as I said, I like yoghurt, and I like it
well enough to eat four (or more) pots a week. Here's where things start to get
a little complicated. You see, wretched, degenerate specimen of a human being
that I am, I have a full quota of irrational prejudices when it comes to my
food. Here are some of the things I like:
Curry, chocolate, scallops
in a white wine and cream sauce with prawns and bacon strips, garnished with
chopped parsley and served with fresh crusty bread, chocolate and black cherry
yoghurt
Here are the two things I don't like. Salt and vinegar flavour
crisps and pineapple yoghurt.
So - don't buy the pineapple
yoghurt! That would, indeed, seem to be the overwhelmingly sensible
solution to the problem, along with nukeing the salt 'n' vinegar crisp
factories, but Mr Tesco has other ideas.
"If you want a black
cherry yohgurt, Flo," he says "you've gotta buy a pineapple one
too!"
That's right - the fourpack deal - Black cherry, peach,
raspberry and..... Pinapple! This is the horns of a particularly unsavoury
dilemma - either forego the pleasures of the black cherry yoghurt, or watch as
my fridge fills up with ageing and unwanted pineapple yoghurts.
And thus it was, writ in tablets of stone from time immemorial. At
least, until Mr Tesco got round to rebooting and updating his yohgurts the other
week, and great was my joy to perceive that the pineapple yoghurt was no more -
Gone, vanished to whatever hell unpalatable milk products go to when they are
discontinued. Gleefully, I purchased my fourpack and chomped my black cherry,
secure in the knowledge that the dark recesses of my fridge would no longer be
an elephant's graveyard of pineapple yohgurt, and that I would have three more
yohgurt-eating days that week instead of the usual two.
All was going well until I got to the Tropical Fruit. As I munched,
it occurred to me that there was something a little familiar about the taste. It
was....well..... pineappley. I looked at the picture on the lid, and sure
enough, amidst the plethora of colourful fruits depicted there, one bore more
than a passing resemblance to the dreaded p-thing. But worse was to come -
checking the ingredients, I discovered that the second item listed was "Pineapple"
As we all know, ingredients are listed in order of how-muchness, and
this prominent positioning of the pineapple confirmed my worst fears. No
fiddling, small amounts of passion fruit, coconut and mandarin in
twenty-somethingth position could disguise the fact that this was a Pineapple
Yoghurt. In disguise.
I suppose, at my age, I should be used to this sort of thing. Life
rarely hands one a black cherry yoghurt on a plate without requiring the
pineapple penance in return, but I feel justifiably disillusioned with the
universe when such a blatant attempt at deception is perpetrated. It's a crime
on a par with putting salt 'n' vinegar crisps into green bags in order to try
and fool people into thinking they are cheese 'n' onion!
Call me a romantic fool, but I still believe in a world where tropical
fruit means mangos and lychees and cambazolas (even though I don't know what
cambazolas are). The Marquis de Sade insisted that pleasure and pain were
one, and that they could only enhance each other's effects. It's a fair bet he
never tasted a pineapple yoghurt. I feel that we are mature enough now, as a
society, to dispense with this "retribution marketing" and demand
fourpacks of black cherry yoghurt for all!!
But, on the bright side,
it may be that this hard lesson in life has been a blessing in disguise, and has
been responsible for honing my personality and making me the woman I am today -
Bad-tempered, cynical and hungry!
Flo Mudshark
24th February 1998
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