Tomatoes and the laws of Thermodynamics

When we spent a while in the US in the eighties I was amazed and amused by the silly warning “serving suggestion” found on food packaging. I mean, what were they afraid of… a flood of lawsuits by people that opened the soup powder sachet and failed to extract a steaming soup tureen?…

Like many a silly idea this practice hit Israel a few years later, and I stopped noticing it – until this caught my eye:

Yakhin crushed tomatoes

This has the ubiquitous “Serving Suggestion” in fine print; what makes it unusual is two incongruities:

  1. Slicing one tomato in half hardly counts as a serious serving suggestion.
  2. These tomatoes would require a Magician to be served in this way. You see, the caption on the green stripe says “Crushed Tomatoes”!

I don’t expect the marketroids at Yakhin food products to be fluent in the laws of thermodynamics and entropy, but even they must know that you can serve a whole tomato by crushing it, but you can’t make a crushed tomato whole again.

Bon Appetit!

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1 Response to “Tomatoes and the laws of Thermodynamics”


  1. 1 Phil Tierney

    irony is so wasted on the observant…

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