This is a right hum-mess
LAST WEEK, this country faced a crisis. No, not the prospect of a terrorist plot nor the threat of global thermonuclear war triggered by a tweet (God bless America). Neither of these events shook this nation to the core quite like the trauma I speak of… the hummus shortage. For those of you that missed this earth-shattering event, when a dip, or lack thereof, nearly brought this great nation to its knees, this was the news that pots of hummus at major supermarkets had to be recalled due to a metallic taste being detected. It transpires, in this day and age of mass food production, that one factory, just off the A40, supplies multiple supermarkets with their own brand hummus and apparently they had fallen foul of a bad batch of Canadian chickpeas affecting production. It wasn’t dangerous to eat. Just horrid.
So the pots were withdrawn for approximately three days and the country reacted with a typical British resolve… by getting melodramatic on social media. Photographs of empty shelves were posted on Twitter with captions (with varied spellings) along the lines of, “this signals the end of the world! Two days no houmous #struggling” and “What’s a gal gotta do to get some houmous?” with broken heart emojis.
The media reacted to, arguably, the most first world problem to have ever been encountered, by rushing out make-your-own hummus recipes and reflecting on how it had become so crucial to our existence. I am sure we can all take great pride in knowing that Britain was crowned “hummus capital of the year” in 2013 with over 40 per cent of Britons having pots in the fridge (that Yotam Ottolenghi has a lot to answer for).
To me, this was like the horse meat scandal all over again — Jews, and their funny dietary ways, had dodged a bullet. Because, in and among the madness and despair, I couldn’t help but feel, well, smug. I felt especially pleased with myself when our online supermarket delivery arrived on Thursday night, smack bang in the middle of the so-called “hummus crisis”, complete with the Yarden hummus I had ordered a few days earlier. For any Jew worth their kosher salt knows that supermarket own brand hummus isn’t real hummus anyway. It is a decent enough imitation that we will eat if there is no alternative, but we all know its granular, gloopiness is not a patch on the good stuff.
Just like we know that you don’t buy supermarket own brand bagels, pickled cucumbers and falafel, all of which should be purchased from either a Jewish deli or at least somewhere Middle Eastern. (Didn’t get that memo? It’s all there in your copy of The Protocols of Zion. Towards the back, after the global domination bit.)
As I was entertaining a group of university friends over the weekend, I obviously splashed out on the posh one, Yarden’s “hummus extra”, with the olive oil and pine nuts on the top. Nothing screams “look at how sophisticated I’ve become in the decade since we’ve graduated” quite like a sprinkling of pine nuts.
Except that, due to unforeseen circumstances (namely hunger), by the time my guests were due to arrive, there was hardly any of the precious chickpea nectar left. As a result, I had to run to the corner shop to buy another pot and while this wasn’t supermarket own brand, it wasn’t much better. As my friends dipped their crisps and crudites into it, I found myself apologising to them for not providing the good stuff. None of them is Jewish and all looked at me like I had lost the plot. Which of course, I had. No one should be that exercised by dip. It seemed I wasn’t immune to the hummus crisis after all.
This was like the horse meat scandal all over again
Abigail Radnor is features editor of Guardian Weekend