Gratitude #69: sugar dispensers
The sugar game is a cutthroat subculture within the greater cafe industry. The most popular sugar dispensers are so impractical we shouldn’t even be having this conversation. Well, it’s not really a conversation, more a one-way rant with you shaking your head thinking “Get a load of this guy!”. Listing all the negative aspects of popular sugar delivery devices would take all day and so in order to fill my word quota and thus avoid being bullied by real authors, that’s exactly what I’ve decided to do.
The clear one with the tube in the middle
Let me begin with the most popular dispenser on the market: that clear one with the steel tube in the middle. We can all surely agree that these tubular monstrosities are not the way forward in the sugar game. My gripes are as follows:
Gripe 1: There has never once been a steady, predictable flow of sugar from these things. You turn it upside down and nothing comes out. Or you turn it upside down and nothing comes out for 5 seconds, until it does, and then you’ve got yourself a coffee-flavoured cup of sugar.
Gripe 2: They’re a nightmare to clean. Back when I was a kitchenhand there was nothing I couldn’t clean. Soufflé dishes, baking trays, pans, it didn’t matter. Chefs used to have competitions to see who could take me down, they’d be grilling extra cheese on this, not putting oil on that, but in the end all it took was a sugar-crusted tube to see me off. I resigned later that day. The prestige was gone. The prestige of being a kitchenhand.
Gripe 3: Once you get towards the bottom of the container you’re invariably faced with an immovable, crystallised shelf of sugar, possibly banding together in defiance, or possibly because it hasn’t been cleaned before. Whatever the reason, if you want some of that white gold you’re going to have dislodge it like snow from the bottom of your ski boots. Once loosened this calcification will rattle down the tube like a kidney stone through the urethra until it reaches your spoon, at which point you’re going to have to figure out whether this block of sugar represents anything close to a teaspoon.
Gripe 4: In order to access this subterranean crustiness you first need to be able to unscrew the lid. What’s the problem, you might be thinking. Surely even Larry the No-Arm Cowboy could open that. Once again you’ve underestimated the ability of sugar to find a nook and/or cranny, and overestimated Larry the No-Arm Cowboy. If you do manage to pull a King Arthur on the lid you’ll be rewarded with a snow cone of ancient sugar shavings all over your table.
The tubular dispenser does have two redeeming features, though:
- It manages to adequately perform the role of a jar insomuch as it stops the sugar from falling directly onto the floor, and
- Of all the options it really seems like the most fun for the sugar.
Sugar Packets
I’m not actually that against sugar packets but I find them completely unnecessary when you can just use the same sugar the kitchen uses. Sugar packets feel cheap and nasty and manufactured, like we’re rationing in the midst of the Great Depression. The packet takes away the feeling of it being real food and it’s pretty annoying to open and you know, it’s shit for the environment. I guess it turns out I am a bit against them.
I do like flicking the packet to get the sugar down one end though, it’s a very George Clooney at the airport cafe kind of move.
Flappy Trapdoor
We’ve all seen those jars with the inconceivably small opening in the lid through which the sugar can flee to its milky grave. The Flappy Trapdoors are prime candidates for the old sugar-me-do, i.e. as you’re leaving you loosen the lid so the next sucker gets a cupful of sugar. It’s Comedy 101 and never not funny. And truly selfless comedy too, you’re never around to see the results but you just know that sometime in the next 24 hours someone’s day is going to be ruined.
I guess my main gripe with the Flappy Trapdoor is that it takes too long for the sugar to come out of that tiny hole, you have to hold it there for 10 seconds just to get a result. I know throughout the book I’ve been espousing the calming virtues of the cafe but I’ve become accustomed to getting my sugar promptly and will not tolerate anything less. I mean, the lid itself is so big, why did they have to make the flap so small? Corporate greed, probably. Less flap = more profits for Big Sugar.
The flap itself is problematic, too. A lot of the time you have to hold the flap open with your finger when you turn it upside down to pour. I mean, that’s not living. A lot of the time people will just cut out the middleman altogether by unscrewing the lid and heading for the mother lode directly, which reduces the flap to an ornament and the whole Flappy Trapdoor to nothing more than a glorified jar of sugar. Going for the mother lode is fine in theory, but if you happen to dip a wet spoon in that beast you’re going to have some serious problems down the line — namely a trapdoor bottleneck. Next time someone uses the dispenser your wet sugar clump won’t fit through the tiny trap door and it’ll be rendered useless — more so.
Equal/Sweet’n’Lo/Splenda/Panela/RawSugar/Stevia
Once again it comes down to sticking up for what you believe in. It’s entirely up to you how many, if any, of these alternatives you choose to put on the table, but let me just say this: most of the people who order these are crazy people. And it takes up too much valuable table real estate. It’s not worth serving any of these — unless you live in the city in which Equal was invented and it’s treated as something of a God — because it just makes things too complicated. It reminds me of a website with too many “Share” buttons at the bottom of the page — Google+, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Digg, Myspace, ICQ, Encarta 95, it’s too much. It says you just want to be everyone’s friend.
Just leave a jar of sugar on the table, yeah? *pinches your cheeks menacingly*
