All Lost in the Supermarket

Do you like baked beans? I mean, do you really like baked beans? Do you love baked beans, adore them in all their leguminous glory, revel in the luscious mouthfeel as your teeth meet each pliant kidney-shaped carapace? Then have I got the place for you. It's a little country I like to call "England."

Here is the baked bean section of an Asda Superstore I shopped at the other day:


A quick can-count suggests more than two dozen different varieties of baked beans. Of course, much of this is the same basic product offered by different companies. But there is a noticeable diversity in the product line. For example, there is the mildly fortified, as in the contents of this can:

Baked beans (or "beanz" in the jokey parlance of bean-king Heinz) with pork sausages. That's surely in keeping with the traditionally porcine nature of the product. (Other Heinz offerings include baked beans with vegetable sausages, Cumberland sausages or chicken nuggets. I didn't know what a Cumberland sausage was. It's made of pork but must differ in some critical way to a plain pork sausage.)

Then there's this:




Heinz Italian beans, or what the label describes as "baked beans with herbs." The serving suggestion shows a slice of Italian bread smothered in beans and what appears to be mozzarella cheese. A single uncooked bean, its head adorned with the laurel wreath of the Caesars, surveys his boiled, sauce-slathered legions. Beani, Beadi, Beaci.

This surely must be the zenith of the bean-maker's art:



"The Full Monty" is an entire English breakfast--bacon, sausage link, button mushroom, beans--in a single can.

You'll note that this is not a Heinz product. I'm sure that deep in the bowels of Heinz House, lab-coated scientists are even now concocting a response to this latest salvo in the bean arms race. Their mantra: If you can put an entire bean-centric breakfast in a can, why not, say, a complete dinner: shrimp cocktail, rocket salad, poached Chilean sea bass, tiramisu, beans.... Or, better yet, a cream tea: scone, strawberry jam, Devonshire clotted cream, beans....

I can see the slogan: "Heinz Mean Cream Teaz."

A Consumer Reports
I'm not going to be one of those Americans who kvetches about the lack of selection in British grocery stores. I'm in a different country. I should expect that I won't be able to find my particular U.S. brand of low-fat, salt-free, baked, sour cream-and-onion potato chips. The trade-off is that I will be able to find roast lamb-flavored potato crisps, something I've never seen in the States.

I am annoyed by one thing, though, and that's how hard British supermarkets make it for consumers to compare prices. Many shops have a little shelf label indicating the unit pricing, a staple at the Giants and Safeways of my homeland. But how how helpful are they? Here's one for a box of dishwasher soap tablets:



The box costs 6.78 pounds, or 22.6 pence per tablet. I wonder how that compares with another brand:


It's 9.72 pounds for a box. How much is it per tablet? Well, it's 10 pence per 100 grams. I'd have to take out my triple-beam balance and determine how much a single tablet weighs, then do a quick calculation. And even then I'd get it wrong, since I was an English major.

This was at Asda (owned by Wal-Mart, by the way) but I've seen the same obfuscating hijinks at other British supermarkets. Though Asda employees have the coolest uniforms (black and electric-green outfits that make them look like minions from a Bond film) my English friends tell me the chain is at the bottom of the barrel. I think the order, from top to bottom, goes something like this:
Marks & Spencer's Simply Food
Sainsbury's
Tesco's
Asda
Feel free to make your own suggestions. Where, for example, does Waitrose belong?

What a Treat
And how was Halloween? Great, actually. More trick-or-treaters came to our Oxford door this year--41--than came to our Silver Spring door last year. They were mostly dressed in homemade costumes. They were polite, fawning over our decorations (three flickering jack o'lanterns and a crepe-paper spider; modest by American standards), petting our dog and saying "thank you." A few of them didn't quite get it: They said "Happy Halloween!" after we opened the door rather than "Trick or treat!" But My Lovely Wife set them straight.

And I didn't see any overturned cars, burned-out rubbish bins or crucified Old Age Pensioners when I walked the dog this morning. Could the media have over-reacted?

One last thing: Check out this story from The Washington Post on how dentists dread the day after Halloween. This year they've dubbed it "Black Thursday" for all the damage it inflicts on braces.

Halloween U.K.

It's the day before Halloween and we're wondering what will happen tomorrow, exactly. You see, October 31st in the U.K seems to be a totally different beast from October 31st in the U.S. And why shouldn't it be? They're different countries, after all. But the lead-up to Halloween in England has a menacing undertone: It's expected that the hooliganism that percolates just below the surface here will boil over.

Take the front page of today's Oxford Mail:


There's nothing sadder than an old lady cowering behind her door. The story says that police are gearing up for vandalism and are especially concerned about the elderly. The police have a "No Halloween Here" poster they make available for citizens who don't want their houses approached. Stores are urged not to sell eggs and flour to anyone under 18, lest they be employed in nasty hijinks.

All of this can be bewildering for Americans such as myself and Sarah Churchwell. She's a senior lecturer in American culture and literature at the University of East Anglia and author of an essay in yesterday's Guardian about Britain's bastardized Halloween. I'll forgive her gratuitous slap at my hometown ("Halloween is not scary, unless they reside in the inner city of Washington, in which case every night is scary") for I think she's on to something:

"There is a great deal of resentment toward 'American cultural imports', the myriad ways in which we are contaminating your demi-paradise with our corrupt practices. I hate to break it to you, but in the case of Halloween, you are the ones bastardising our culture. If your version is a violent, threatening and ugly spree across the month of October, don't blame America, blame yourselves."

As always, the comments after her essay online are the most entertaining. There's the America-bashing that is to be expected at the Guardian's Comment Is Free section, but the comments also provide a cultural/anthropological recap of various All Hallow's Eve practices across the British isles, from carving lanterns out of root vegetables to reciting poetry.

There's another article in the Guardian, by Sue Blackmore, extolling Halloween's virtues:

"Halloween is a time to get scared; to conjure up the most frightening ideas you can, of ghosties and ghoulies, and things that jump out in the dark; of spiders and skeletons and creatures that lurk under the bed. Or you can go out on a dark October night and dare to go up to some stranger's front door, looking more cool than your friends, and being the first to ring the door bell - or whatever level of scariness suits your age."

It's not only the English who are struggling to figure out what Halloween should be. In the States it's no longer a holiday just for children. Adults horn in on the action and their horny mindset (throw away your inhibitions on Oct. 31) have crept into the kids' holiday. There's a story on the front page of The Washington Post today about the pornified costumes that are being pitched to children this year, outfits such as micro mini skirts, belly-exposing shirts and fishnet tights.

I agree that Halloween has probably gotten too commercialized (last time I checked, everything had gotten too commercialized), but I think it might be particularly ill-suited to the thug culture that enthralls many (not all, not most) young Britons.

So, what will happen tomorrow? I don't know, but we won't be putting up a "No trick or treat sign" and our jack o'lanterns will be out and lit. I'll let you know if they survive the night.