Supermarket packaging misery: the struggle is real
Adeline loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out. Things usually go well, but sometimes they don’t. In the Sunday Roast series, she shares her observations. This week: picking at Parma ham is like the curse of vacuum packaging.
I already understood little of the faff involved with cheeses. An overzealous cheese-counter employee wraps one of those vacuum-sealed plastics around it, which you can only open at the risk of your own life and the loss of three fingers. But I may understand even less about the packaging material used for Parma ham.
Picking and fiddling
The fact that drinks and nibbles are the highlight of my week, even though I’ve instituted a dry January, illustrates lockdown pretty accurately. It also has to be somewhat lean, otherwise I won’t fit through the door when I’m allowed outside again, and then you quickly end up at the charcuterie counter anyway. A selection of little hams, some tasty olives, perhaps a piece of vacuum-packed cheese as an indulgence. Well, let me tell you, it’s rightly called char-cut-terie, because picking, fiddling and messing around with Parma ham gives you a serious case of charcutteritis.
Who comes up with this stuff? First, you have to get down on your bare knees and pray that the corner of the packaging cooperates, so you can remove the plastic in one movement. But if you manage that, the real hassle is only just beginning.
Mild murderous intent
As a child, I was such a lazy little monster that I didn’t throw away the plastic sheets from cold cuts. I would simply stack them all on top of the remaining slices. Very annoying, I realise now. I completely understand that my mother developed murderous tendencies because of this behaviour, because I know she, too, occasionally served a little ham with drinks and nibbles. And when you do that, you can no longer deal with those little sheets like a normal person, making mild murderous intent entirely understandable.
Slice and sheet
So you’ve opened the packaging without either you or the wrapping being torn to shreds, for which: chapeau. But then the fight begins. It’s as if the butcher and packaging manufacturer thought: let’s make sure everything sticks together as much as possible, that’ll be hilarious. I have genuinely tried everything. Carefully positioning a flat knife between the cold cut and the plastic. Quickly pulling slice and sheet apart. Simply using whatever comes loose first and dealing with everything left behind later. Nothing works satisfactorily. Either you spend minutes scraping off shreds of plastic, or in the end you’re left eating only hard little pieces.
Now I hear you thinking: then buy it in one piece and slice it yourself, woman. But those slices are just a little too thick for my taste, which I don’t enjoy with my char-cut-terie. Yes, the Parma problems are real. I’m telling you, Parma ham with plastic is like a pair of scissors pulled into a vacuum. And everyone knows how cut that is.
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