02 May 2008

Faster Food

We have ways of letting you have it your way.

The trouble with hiking, or indeed any outdoor activity, is, as everyone knows, that there are so few McDonald’s in the wild. For who among us does not yearn to sit down with a tasty cheeseburger after tramping about the hills, skipping over streams, and wandering in the woods?

At last, a German company, Trekking Mahlzeiten, has come up with a solution. The cheeseburger in a can.

Clearly, this is an idea whose time has come. So much of modern cooking is simply not convenient enough — but happily, we live in an age of miracles, and innovations never cease. Witness the Campbell’s Soup company’s recent development, soups that come in plastic jugs. Because obviously, it was just too much trouble to add water, now we can squirt, heat, and serve. The excuse behind the Trekking Mahlzeiten Burger in a Can is indeed that hikers might like a burger, but I’m confident that folks at home will be serving them soon.

Apparently one does have to go to the trouble of boiling a pot of water, and throwing the can into the pot — and if one is hiking, one therefore has to start a campfire. But it’s hard to see how the hamburger could be made more accessible. And I can easily imagine hung-over college students eating them cold.

I haven’t sampled the burger in question, although I’m told the bun is pretty scary. (It looks good in the picture — but what doesn’t?)

As a sometime student of German culture, I’m delighted to see that the home of the hamburger — named after one of Germany’s most important cities, lest we forget — is reclaiming its prize and wresting the crown of dominance away from the Americans.

And above all, remember this: if Lost in Space taught us anything, it is that we are what we eat.