No quibble over kibble?
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By Ritva Liisa Snellman
Monday evening TV viewers have been following a Finnish drama series examining the travails of people living in a small residential estate in the suburbs.
Harvoin tarjolla (probably best translated loosely as "Desirable Residence" or "Des. Res.") contains a rich palette of characters, including a modern middle-class alcoholic mum, who has sent shivers down many spines.
She tipples Chardonnay like there is no tomorrow, neglects the kids, and keeps a secret stash of bottles to which she escapes at every opportunity.
In the episode a week ago, there was another very effective scene. The mum sits at the kitchen table, with her eyelids drooping and the mother-of-all-hangovers, and orders her child to eat up a bowl of breakfast cereal.
The child does his best to resist, as he is aware that his mother has inadvertently poured dry catfood into the bowl rather than Cheerios or Rice Krispies.
Get on with it and eat it up, urges the mum, and pours some more milk on for good measure, as the armchair audience puts hands over mouths and feels sympathetic nausea for all the children of tippling mothers.
Then again, perhaps the nausea wasn't so necessary after all.
Last Wednesday's Aftonbladet in Sweden carried a piece by the paper's food columnist Karin Ahlborg, in which Ahlborg writes that she would choose catfood kibble any day, rather than vacuum-packed slices of sandwich ham.
Her reasoning is simple enough: the ham includes no fewer than eight chemical additives, while it is perfectly easy to buy from the local supermarket a carton of dry catfood that contains only meat, grain, vegetables, oils and fats, vegetable protein extracts, and minerals, and no additives whatsoever.
RITVA LIISA SNELLMAN / Helsingin Sanomat
ritva.liisa.snellman@hs.fi
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| 4.3.2008 - THIS WEEK |
 No quibble over kibble? |
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