Wednesday 8 June 2011

Los Pepinos Inocentes

Cucumbers. They're everywhere. Every time I make the mistake of turning on the television news, there's ever more extravagant footage of alleged Spanish farmers dumping ever more prodigious quantities of cucumbers. This is by way of illustrating the story of how the Germans spectacularly fouled up over their e-Coli outbreak, unfairly pointing the finger - or the cucumber - at the Spanish. At first the news showed us what looked suspiciously like stock footage of a single peasant chucking misshapen cucumbers into a large skip - these cucumbers were probably already doomed under those laudable EU guidelines that protect a grateful citizenry from misshapen vegetables (which are actually better for you and tend to taste nicer too). Now, though, the cucumber disposal is on a truly heroic scale, with small armies of sturdy peasants pitching in, hurling tonnes (as they say in the EU) of blameless cucumbers into ever more gigantic receptacles. What fate awaits these hapless vegetables? I hope they will be put to good use. Perhaps they could be sent to Laputa, where the Projectors could extract sunbeams from them - a project which, according to this fascinating analysis, might actually have some slight basis in science...

5 comments:

  1. Suberb post, Nige. Love the brilliantly obscure link and fascinatingly curious analysis. Spain has a lot to answer for - especially the glut of baby cucumbers. I spend ages deciding which ones to put into my supermarket trolley - you have no idea of the embarrassment they cause...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Are you sure that's the supermarket Susan?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Susan, we avoid such embarrassment by having our cucumbers home-delivered in plain, opaque packaging.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Watching the news from Canada, those thrown out, so-called Spanish cucumbers, are EXACTLY like the ones I buy every week, but here they are called English cucumbers. Long and thin.

    If that is any help to anyone.

    For much longer than I care to admit, I thought they came all the way from England, but no they are grown locally. Still, they are more expensive (and do taste better) than the short, thick ones which can be a tad watery.

    ReplyDelete
  5. When it comes to cucumbers (and in the end it always does, doesn't it), I recommend Organic - firmer texture, more flavour.

    ReplyDelete