Here’s a beef about some bottles: Wyn Drabble

We should teach container designers a lesson, to fix a broken world, writes Wyn Drabble. Photo / NZME

THREE KEY FACTS

• The designers of containers and bottles seem not to be aware of their function
• What use is a sauce container that won’t dispense the sauce?
• And much more from the marvellous mind of...

Wyn Drabble, a teacher of English, writer, public speaker and musician. He is based in Hawke’s Bay.

OPINION

I’m not generally one to grumble but I do have a gripe to share. It’s about the container/dispenser of a commercial food product, one that we like to use reasonably often.

We enjoy the product, a very reputable satay sauce, so we have no beef with the contents. But it comes in a bottle with a narrow neck. If it were lemonade, to choose but one example, it would dispense its citrus delights with fluid ease through that opening. Mineral water would positively cascade from the aperture.

Unfortunately, the satay sauce is thick and blobby and gloopy so that, when you upturn the bottle over a target – quite possibly beef – it doesn’t come out. You might coax a little sauce to emerge but not enough to satisfy your needs.

You can bash the base of the bottle all you like but the probable result will be a sore, possibly injured, hand.

You can hold the bottle under hot running water for a minute or two and that might loosen the gloopiness a little but you still won’t get enough sauce for your beef. So my beef is, why isn’t the product in a user-friendly dispenser?

The last quarter or so of the contents is the most irritating because you can see it through the glass but it is trapped and will taunt you. It looks like enough for your beef but it is stuck. Firmly. Gloopily.

One possible explanation for such packaging – and it is one for which we can only commend the manufacturer – is that they want to use recyclable glass rather than the much-abused option, squeezable plastic.

Surely then, a wider neck would work. Or even a flattish glass jar; open the lid and spoon the contents out over your beef.

As a packaging issue, I believe this is right up there with anything ring-pull or the distinctive sardine can. Ring-pull cans are certainly not made with the arthritic in mind.

And, with sardines, I accept that there must be difficulties. I certainly wouldn’t want to be tasked with the problem of trying to keep the little blighters still while the can is closed up around them.

Then there are capers, those little pickled buds from the prickly caper bush which come in a jar so narrow you can’t fit a spoon in to retrieve them. Only in a doll’s house world could the packaging work.

Why do the producers do this? Is it just to irritate us?

One plausible theory is that the narrow jar keeps them fresher because the capers remain submerged in the pickling liquid. Another is that the product looks more elegant on the supermarket shelf. Mmmmm!

So, what’s the answer? Tweezers might work for caper extraction but you’d look pretty silly! And you’d need to make sure the tweezers meet. What is the point of tweezers that don’t meet? Don’t laugh. They are out there.

There are also scissors you can buy which come trapped inside a contoured hard plastic shell. Can you guess what you need to breach the protective packaging and gain access to your new purchase? That’s right! You need scissors.

I’ve come up with the following solution. I suggest gathering all the container designers together to experience a meal of sardines with capers and satay sauce. I accept that’s not a felicitous culinary combination but let’s overlook that; we’re here to teach them a lesson, to fix a broken world.

At the appointed meal time, just put the items on the table in their packaging and speak to the designers:

“Welcome along. Please, help yourselves.”

I feel confident they will get the message.

PS: As back-up, I’d also send out for pizza.