Don’t open that tin…

Ever wondered about the significance of those obscure digits, dots and dashes printed on the bottom (sometimes on the top) of tins, jars and bottles in any supermarket or grocery store?

If not, it probably means you live in the real world, and therefore already know all about the existence of such concepts as ‘expiry dates’. There are, however, some of us out here for whom ‘shopping’ is a more or less annual appointment; and even then, an appointment we keep somewhat reluctantly, when the pangs of starvation become too urgent to ignore. 

I fall into the latter category, so my direct experience of picking and choosing items from a supermarket shelf has always been rather limited. When I first noticed the regular presence of those mysterious symbols, stamped in smudgy ink on each and every product, I found them as intriguing as an archaeologist might find an undiscovered set of ancient hieroglyphics. 

What could it possibly mean? A sign of things to come, no doubt. Like the mandatory micro-chips we now insert into dogs, and will soon start inserting into new-born babies. A stamped mark of identity, like the branding on a herd of cows… to remind us that we are all, in our own way, just a bunch of mass-produced items on a supermarket shelf.

About the last thing I imagined was that they contained vital information that could very well save your life. And this might explain a near-death experience I recently went through involving eggs, bacon and a tin of baked beans.

Oddly enough, I had been ‘shopping’ that day, and consequently felt like a 19th century explorer who had just discovered the source of the Nile. I had wheeled my trolley through endless aisles of supermarket shelves… slashed my way with a machete past small mountains of discounted special offers and cut-price bargains… through dense jungles of cabbages and kale I discerned distant, pyramid-like structures composed of laboriously stacked fruit-juice cartons…

And I saw peas. Lots and lots of shiny green peas, winking back at me through the misty glass panes of a freezer encased in thick-ribbed ice. 

Ah, the thrill of discovery! Like ‘stout Cortez with eagle eyes’, and all that. Anyway, by the end of the expedition I was reasonably certain I had secured everything necessary for English breakfast that morning… which also means I had enough to keep myself alive for at least another week. But the bacon was already sizzling merrily in the pan when I realised I’d forgotten a vital ingredient.

Baked beans. I had bought a packet of frozen peas… not, mind you, out of any intention to ever actually consume them: it was more because I was moved by compassion to free them from imprisonment, like a latter-day Oscar Schindler… but I had forgotten baked beans. 

Now, I ask you: what would an English breakfast be without baked beans? ‘Breakfast’ it may remain, certainly. Starvation it may even stave off, for a while. But ‘English’? Not a chance. An ‘English breakfast’ without baked beans becomes an ‘irregular immigrant breakfast’: the sort of breakfast that UKIP would probably try to ban (and probably succeed). It is like ‘hobz biz-zejt’ without either ‘hobz’ or ‘zejt’. Or like Maltese politics without a healthy dose of childish immaturity (more of which in a sec… this is going somewhere, I promise). 

Fortunately – or so it seemed at the time – it struck me that I might have once acquired a tin of baked beans on another expedition to the supermarket in the distant past. But verifying this detail would involve opening the kitchen cupboard… and in the case of my own kitchen, that’s a little like ‘opening that door’ in all those classic horror B-movies from the 1950s. You can even hear the creepy soundtrack as you reach out for the door-handle. You know (or should know) that you are about to invoke the forgotten curse of the Mummy, and unleash a long-dormant terror onto the unsuspecting world… 

And because – let’s face it – we all live in our own private horror B-movie from the 1950s, I went ahead and did precisely what any Pantomime audience would have screamed warnings about from the safety of their theatre seats. I ‘opened that door’. 

Whoosh! A brief draught of musty air escaped, and a torch was needed to penetrate the grim darkness within. Let’s see now… hmm… coffee, tea, cup-soup, sugar… various sedimentary strata of unopened packets of pasta, which could probably tell you the precise age of the known Universe.… an ancient jar of honey in which a primordial insect-like life-form had once been trapped, amber-like, and might now provide the DNA necessary to clone extinct dinosaurs… And then, that ineffable moment of discovery-age excitement. 

Naturally I had to blow off the fine layer of dust that had accumulated over the decades; and the colour of the beans on the tin had long faded into ferruginous rust… but there was no mistaking the label. And again, that curious code stamped on the top of the tin. This time, it ended in the digits ‘98’. Hmm. What could it be trying to tell me? ‘Don’t open that tin’, perhaps? But hey, it’s just a tin of beans. What could possible go wrong…?

Ugh. Ooh. Ick. AAAAARGH! 

Oh, well. I suppose you can work the rest out for yourselves. Not only did I fail to imbue my breakfast with the ingredient necessary to make it ‘English’… but I had to throw the entire breakfast away, sizzling bacon and all, and get the Department of Sanitation to evacuate the entire neighbourhood.

The good news (for me, at any rate) is that I survived the ordeal… and in the process I finally worked out the significance of all those dots, digits and dashes on all those products, too. I now know that some things in life have an expiry date. They will serve their purpose for a time… and serve that purpose admirably, too… but once their time is up, the only place for them is the garbage bin.

And because the warning is so potentially life-saving, I am increasingly coming round to the opinion that everything in life should likewise come complete with an ‘expiry date’ to help avoid catastrophe. Election campaign strategies, for instance (see? Told you I was going somewhere…). Or the way that the supermarket choice of products we call ‘politics’ actually functions in this country. 

Political parties, too. They more than anything should have an ‘expiry date’ stamped in smudgy ink somewhere on the package. ‘Best before 1976’. Yes, that would certainly help avoid a few catastrophes here and there. Might even save a few lives: the national percentage of ‘death by boredom’ statistics might conceivably decline.

OK, by now you will have worked out that I have not been particularly enthused by the local council election campaign that just went by. If that is what it actually was: I for one didn’t hear very much about local councils… indeed I don’t think the term was even alluded to once… but I did hear an awful lot of things that slipped past their sell-by date at roughly the time when the Woolly Mammoth went extinct around 40,000 years ago. 

In fact, the entire vocabulary coming out of political parties these days sounds like the verbal equivalent of the Lascaux or Alta Mira cave-paintings. It is primeval. Guttural. Unchanged over the millennia. ‘My tribe is better than your tribe’. ‘Me good, you bad’. Ugga, ugga. Thud!

That last syllable was the echo of a distant club-blow, from the days before ‘debate’ and ‘argument’ were even invented (i.e., the days in which so many of us still seem to live today). We hear echoes of it in every statement ever made by both party leaders, regardless of the subject-matter. Indeed, the ‘subject’ no longer ‘matters’ at all. They could be talking interconnectors or gender identity bills. They could be talking about Swiss bank accounts or Switzerlands in the Mediterranean. They could be talking about CHOGM or contracts for private construction jobs in Gozo. They could even be talking about peas. Lots and lots of shiny peas... 

It doesn’t matter. The sound is always the same. Who takes the credit, who gets the blame? Whose right is it to bask in the glory of a random infrastructural development that wouldn’t even be noticed in most 21st century countries? Whose energy plan is bigger and more pulsating than whose? Who can call the other the dirtiest name? 

It is the same old primordial soup in the same old rusty tin, forgotten at the bottom of a kitchen cupboard that hasn’t been opened since the reign of Ramses III. It is…

EXPIRED.

And just to hammer this unlikely analogy to its laboriously foreshadowed conclusion: ‘opening that tin’ and serving out the contents today is every bit as nauseating an experience as opening a can of baked beans that had expired in 1998. The ensuing aura of decay pervades the entire atmosphere, making it difficult for living, growing things to breathe. Much worse beside, it ruins the rest of the breakfast, too. 

The other ingredients may be well within their ‘best before’ date range… they may even be fresh and delicious, if unadulterated with the smelly stuff… but add a dose of the insufferable political childishness we have all had to endure in recent weeks, and you’ll have to throw the whole dish away, and disinfect the entire kitchen. It just poisons everything.

And there is evidence that the number of people who are repulsed by this schoolyard politics is forever on the increase. Polls, surveys and trust-rating barometers all consistently point in the same direction. Both Joseph Muscat and Simon Busuttil are losing popularity by the minute. And incredibly, even this statistic is now the subject of the usual tit-for-tat exchange of barbs and taunts. ‘MY trust rating is decreasing at a slower rate than YOUR trust rating. Ugga ugga, THUD!’ 

Neither seems to have noticed that it matters little how fast the decline in popularity actually is in the end: you’re still going down. And neither seems to even be aware that the choice of whether to ‘open that tin’ or not – whether to buy into this national culture of primeval club-bashing – is not theirs at all, but ours. 

Perhaps the parties themselves believe the message on their products’ external packaging; perhaps they genuinely do regard their own product as intrinsically better than the other…. for no other reason than because it is, in fact, ‘the other’. But whether we, as consumers, single out their particular product from the selection on the supermarket shelf … that is a decision that falls to the electorate. 

In a fast-changing Malta, something tells me that the electorate is becoming ever more conscious of the need to read the expiry label before purchasing. And already it has its eye on the garbage bin.