Cheesy wotsits
Tuesday, November 8th, 2005Does anyone remember the whole Parmalat fraud scandal a couple of years ago? I was quite confused when the big news hit the papers. I’d never heard of Parmalat, but by all accounts they were close to ruling the world from behind the façade of their dairy product business, until the management in Italy let slip that they’d ‘lost’ 3.5 billion euros.
Anyway, I forgot about it pretty quickly, because frankly, Parmalat didn’t feature large in my life. Until I got here.
I love cheese. I’ll eat any kind of cheese, at any time of day, preferably until it’s all run out, and I’m supine on the sofa, cracker crumbs resting in drifts on my swollen belly. A nice melty brie – yes please. Crumbly, creamy wensleydale – bring it on. Give me a good chunk of Cornish Yarg and I’ll give you anything you want.
Namibia doesn’t get cheese, and for a nation so rich in goats, this is a travesty. All you can buy in the supermarket are blocks of pale, flaccid battery-cheese. Those cheeses are miserable, I tell you. They look like they’re raised in perpetual darkness. I’m sure they torture them before they’re taken off to the cling-film machine for wrapping. They arrive at the supermarket in foot long bricks that could give you a nasty injury if one fell on you while you were innocently buying milk. They all taste like shit, and they are all made by Parmalat.
The global giants have won. Obviously their billion euro fuck up didn’t stop them from trying to foist inferior products on an unsuspecting nation.
I could cry.
