Plochman's mustard

Let us say, for example, that you are small and barrel-shaped. Your head is narrow, pointy, and bright red. When you turn your head and squeeze your stomach, yellow liquid shoots out of your face. Surprisingly, your friends admire you for it and ask you to do it again.

Now let us say you are back to normal. In your bedroom, you talk to an object which you hold like a Fabergé egg in both of your outstretched hands. In the midst of your contemplative reverie, you kneel and find yourself saying: Is this a mustard bottle I see before me?

Yes, it is a mustard bottle, a one-pound hand-grenade of jaundiced condiment. And you gaze at it, looping lassos of comprehension about its yellow pot-belly, attempting to grasp its significance as if you were Roy Rogers hog-tying a surly calf. You eventually realize that by imagining yourself to be small and barrel-shaped — attempting to become one with the plastic mustard bottle in order to understand its particular attitude toward life — you have failed miserably. Mustard bottles don't have attitudes.

And that is why you don't hear people criticizing others for assuming mustard-bottle attitudes.

This bottle of Plochman's mustard resembles a tiny saffron zeppelin with a red Plochman's placard on its underbelly. I believe the placard is red so that the user is reminded that the reason one uses mustard is to suppress the desire for ketchup. Thus the red label stimulates one's ketchup-buds yet denies satisfaction of that debilitating craving. Mustard is the way out of the ketchup rut. In conjunction with cuisinary psychiatrists around the nation, Plochman's mustard helps you on your way to dietary rehabilitation.

In certain positions, the bottle also resembles Flash Gordon's rocketship, that cheesy tin-can manipulated by thick strings in the old black-and-white television serial. Cultural mythologist Roland Barthes might suggest that the industrial manifestation of mustard bottles as caricatures of spaceships symbolizes a collective desire to journey through cultural space and time in order to be squirted, in homogeneous color and texture, into a service-oriented future. I believe, however, that upon further morphometric investigation, plastic mustard bottles more closely resemble small footballs and should be recycled as such (without the nozzles, of course, which may put one's eye out).

The hull of the bottle is shaped curiously like a barrel. Is this design a symbol of nostalgia for the way mustard used to be distributed? Is mustard made like wine, cured and aged in huge barrels in warehouses? Plochman's is located in Chicago which is perfectly apt because I imagine Carl Sandburg dedicating a poem to the Chicago-based Plochman's. "Meat-packer, ship-builder, O mustard-barreler of the Midwest." Something like that.

"In the 1800's, M.C. Plochman signed a pledge to make premium quality mustard at affordable prices," says President Carl M. Plochman III.

Well, I'd just like to say that my commitment to enjoying this one bottle of Plochman's has been as serious as if I'd signed a mustard pledge myself. I can't emphasize enough how much these ribbony miles of mustard tracking experimentally across my carpet have meant to me and my roommates. I try to envision M.C. Plochman and then to construct him as a personal memory, as much enshrouded in nostalgia as in contrived sympathy. O, the picnics, the wieners, the stained clothes. O, Plochman, mustard-barreler to the world!

As I esteem in my cupped hands this plastic gourd of plenty, I must lament: "Alas, poor Plochman! I knew him well."

— David Barringer (curious@davidbarringer.com )