Today's Sermon--Ketchup

"Sermon Sunday" once again comes late this week--blame the holiday. Today, I shall sound off against one of the great ills of our society: ketchup (or catsup, I don't care.) The title of today's sermon: "On How I Learned to Stop Kowtowing to Society and Hate Ketchup."


Ketchup, my friends, is evil. There, I said it. Money has been said to be the root of all evil--it is as nothing compared to the festering sinkhole of corruption and calumny which is catsup.

Now some among you may think that I am expressing a hate of tomatoes, or of vinegar, two hapless, helpless participants in the perfidy which is ketchup. Nothing could be further from the truth. I love tomatoes: red, green, heirloom, I don't care. (And I love tomato juice, which has the same relationship to ketchup that a pure, sweet drink of spring water has to a swig of carbolic acid.) I have a cooler relationship with vinegar--we have a nodding aquaintance, mostly confined to salad dressings and the occasional shake of the malt variety over fried fish and chips. Vinegar is always welcome at my table...as long as it behaves itself.

Ketchup, however, embodies everything I dislike about our culture. It is applied, without wit or consideration, to foodstuffs that can survive perfectly well, nay, thrive, without it--often in heaping amounts. Its cloying, sickly sweet taste overwhelms and eradicates the savour of anything it is applied to. It stands as the fervent symbol of the "ugly American," who hastens to cover the slightest soupçon of unfamilar flavor with a red viscous shroud of pat routine. In short, if any condiment is emblematic of the soft bigotry of lowered culinary expectations which pervades this country, it is ketchup.

Therefore, I implore you, dear readers--set your french fries free! Cover your burgers no longer with a layer of the red devil! Apply it not to your fried fish, to your onion rings, to--sin of all sins, calumny of calumnies--your hot dogs! Banish ketchup (and catsup) to the nether reaches of the furthest, darkest, hottest circle of Hell!

Further, deponent sayeth not--go forth and sin no more.