Even terrorists are nuts about Nutella

21 August 2014 - 02:01 By Peter Delmar
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So there I was at Zurich International Airport two or three years ago.

I was trying to leave the country lawfully after spending a week on holiday in Heidiland.

In the week I was in Switzerland my family and I had bought the usual stuff: knives, cheese and chocolates. And T-shirts with pictures of cows on them (the Swiss like to pretend that they invented cows but nobody, other than the Swiss, believes them).

Nevertheless the Swiss almost certainly did invent cuckoo clocks, watches and chocolate. As far as I am aware, it was also the Swiss who came up with Albert Einstein, the cheese fondue and the Red Cross, all of which have immeasurably improved the human condition.

From Zurich International I was travelling back to Joburg on my own while my family went swanning off for another week around various cantons and a place called France. But I was the pack horse bringing home the spoils of a lovely holiday in Helvetia.

In my checked-in luggage, I had a small arsenal of kitchen knives but no cheese or chocolates (because I had eaten the latter before departure). But, in my hand luggage, I had a bottle of something called Nutella.

Nutella is a concoction consisting of cocoa, hazelnuts and a great deal of sugar.

My daughter believes that Nutella goes with everything - even scrambled eggs. It was the Nutella's fault that I happened to be stopped as I put my bag through the airport X-ray machine.

The gruff mustachioed official in charge of the X-ray machine promptly picked up my bag and put it behind his desk without explanation. And then he wandered off to do something official somewhere else.

I waited for him to do whatever official thing it was he was doing and, after a few minutes, thought "the hell with this", reached over and took my bag back and set off.

At which point a very indignant official with a very official moustache caught up with me and shouted, very loudly, about me not knowing my place (in Switzerland, we ill-disciplined Africans are never quite sure where our place is). And then he promptly confiscated my Nutella.

Now even I know that these days you cannot take liquids that have not been bought at duty free into an aeroplane's cabin. But Nutella, I figured, was a solid. The official begged to differ. In his view it was a liquid. It was only thanks, I suppose, to the fact that the Hairy Guy in the Uniform also could not figure out how to blow up a wide-bodied intercontinental aircraft with a jar of nutty chocolate spread that I was spared incarceration.

Ever since my one and only run-in with Swiss officialdom I have harboured something of a grudge against Nutella (the bottle cost a small fortune) and have actively tried to dissuade my children from eating this very expensive brown gloop. Then, last week, my Nutella prejudices were reinforced when it was revealed that, bizarrely, the IS thugs fighting the Iraqi regime, Christians, Shiites, Americans, and anyone who does not resemble their cousins, like nothing more than to ransack newly captured supermarkets for their stocks of Nutella.

Reporting the new-found IS sweet tooth, the UK's Daily Mail added to my misgivings about this product by revealing that bad weather has ruined the Turkish crops of the hazelnuts that go into Nutella, an agricultural commodity whose price had recently risen by 60%.

This was all the ammunition I needed to declare my own little fatwa against a sandwich spread which is really good for neither man nor beast. But then this column's research department brought some interesting facts to my attention: Nutella is not Swiss at all, it is Italian. And, thanks to the Farmer's Weekly, I discovered the fact that Ferrero, the people who make Nutella, are bending over backwards to get SA farmers in certain areas to plant hazelnut trees, hundreds and hundreds of them. Near Franklin, in Eastern Cape, several hundred hectares are being planted to hazelnut trees, which the nice people at Ferrero are selling to farmers at R15 a tree, less than their cost price.

Farmers are the most unsung entrepreneurial heroes in this country; if they discover a market for something, they will grow it.

I now feel much better about Nutella and Ferrero Rocher chocolates. Eat lots of them - it is the patriotic thing to do.

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