...to compare pâté with cat food-- I'm right there with you.
Pâté is a common snack food in Serbia, and something that the country (reportedly) 'does well.' Having heard this, Paula wanted to try out the local offering to see if it lived up to the hype whilst in Belgrade.
Seemingly the most popular brand at Belgrade's Maxi grocery store.
From the English version of the Carnex website: "Pâté made from carefully selected chicken meat enriched with spices to fully enjoy and tastefully rounded experience" [sic].
"Carefully selected?" It's approximately USD $0.39 for the entire tin, let's not get carried away.
So with pâté having successfully infiltrated the shopping basket, I felt compelled to swing through the cat food section for a quick comparison.
The closest match (from both a flavor and 3-year shelf-stability standpoint) is Purina's Gourmet Gold Pate with Chicken also available at Maxi. There's a lot of marketing copy to sift through, but the main point is "Our tender pâté recipe includes the delicious taste of chicken, cooked to our demandingly high standards to ensure a taste and texture your cat will love."
In the 'composition' section: "Meat and animal derivatives (of which chicken 4%)..." I wonder how much of the 'delicious taste of chicken' your cat will savor when it's only 4% of the product. Honestly guys..
In some circles, turning down (or scoffing at) pâté seems to land you firmly on the less-sophisticated end of whatever social spectrum the group currently ascribes to. It's an end that bears my assprint time and time again, however, here's where things get empirical.
The most punctilious of readers will have noticed an unnerving detail in the pictures above. Maxi asks but a modest 42.99 Serbian Dinar (RSD) in exchange for a 50g tin of Carnex pâté-- this is neither a clearance nor sale price. Purina's Gourmet Gold retails at 75.99 RSD for an 85g portion of tender*, meaty* kitty vittles.
You've done the math already; [drumroll] on a per-gram basis, the cat food is more costly than its pâté counterpart.
Go ahead and feign surprise, I'll wait. Exactly-- you're not surprised. It's one of those things that deep down, you know the truth, inconvenient as it may be to admit.
Believe me, I'm well aware of the petty and grossly anecdotal nature of this 'finding' if you want to call it that. I don't mean to treat it like it's some sort of groundbreaking exposé-- but I'd be lying if I didn't think it ever so slightly nudges humanity's planchette toward greater edification. A pleasant aside at least, a small win for the good guys at most.
Cat food companies are further blurring the lines by marketing their own 'pâté'-- think they bothered to change what's actually inside the tin? Me neither.
For me, pâté continues to serve as a paradigm of things that people think it's cool to like, but don't actually enjoy as much as purported, joining the likes of olympic swimming, the Ramones, wet-faced yippy dogs, Two-Buck Chuck, flip phones, movie car chases**, etc.
In the interest of balance, it's only fair to mention a few things that people actually like, but that are not necessarily cool to admit, such as: letting the bottom of your shoe catch at the end of the escalator-- essentially 'scraping off' your foot onto the landing instead of merely stepping off, Old Spice 'original' scented items, looking at a naked person (no matter how unflattering), bacne that is surprisingly within reach, shampoo (the word, not the product), blowing air into a juice box straw and having it force juice back up through the straw and into your mouth, etc.
* each of these terms give me a small yet noticeable amount of anxiety-- including them here as a reminder to expand on this topic at a later time
** particularly when there are about 5 downshifts for every upshift. I was determined to find a decent example to link here, but couldn't stomach the tedium of actively watching one from start to finish