22 November 2008
The deadly responsibilities of a pesto demonstrating girl
18 August 2006
Comment: Te Waha Nui Online
Lauren Bartlett describes the unexpected dangers associated with being a pesto demonstrator.
Plopping chunks of pesto onto stale crackers at a food expo is a position of deadly peril.
As a Pesto Demonstrator, you become the object of hatred. You are the one who must placate grubby-fingered children grabbing for more, and worse still grubby-fingered grown men eager to fill their overhung tummies with minute samples of green basil goo.
It begins in the early morning when the nasal-voiced woman with a loudspeaker informs the retailers the gate has been breached.
The crowd charges down the narrow cardboard cut-out street, intent on filling their provided plastic bags with mini-variants of cleverly marketed cuisine.
The Remuera not-so-young mums lead the charge, double-pushchairs their weapons of choice.
“What’s this?” they demand, poking pieces of Italian-herb smeared biscuits into their mouths, reaching for more before you even have time to say “one per customer”.
Your objective is to convince customers that their lives aren’t worth living without an $8.95 pottle of pesto in their fridge.
This of course clashes with the customer’s objective to get something for nothing. You have a split-second to explain the handpicked-basil-and-parmesan-pesto-made-with-roasted-pinenuts-in-a-handy-resealable-jar.
Often too late, they have already gobbled down the treat and snap their beady eyes in the direction of their next victim.
Then the next customer is upon you immediately, repeating the demands.
At first you try to do your job and explain that everyone is buying pesto these days, it is such a versatile food, “you could put it on crackers as I’ve done here, or stir it through pasta, or even on a lamb chop for a culinary flavour explosion”.
But they don’t care that mass-produced pesto is lovingly made by the moustached Italian godfather cartooned on the label.
It becomes a conveyor belt. Scoop pesto onto cracker.
Repeat spiel. Scoop, repeat, scoop, repeat.
As the day wears on, the crowd turns on themselves.
A hard-faced lady with too much make-up grabs the last jar of the sun-dried tomato pesto, which the effeminate blond man had wanted specifically for his dinner party that evening.
He did say he wanted it first, but the woman was clutching the pottle defiantly and had thrust her cash onto the counter.
“I’m sorry sir, but we still have plenty of the original handpicked-basil-and-parmesan-pesto-made-with-roasted-pinenuts-in-a-handy-resealable-jar left.”
The day wears on, and what began as an unbeatable battle starts to swing in favour of the retailers.
The bloated civilians are slower now, weary from pillaging the other end of the pavilion. They are convinced, beaten into buying.
The pottles flew across the countertop and embedded themselves into the bulging bags. A ceasefire was declared.
I had not come through unscathed, wrists wretched from the twisting motion of the pate knife; RSI would hit me later.
But approximately 394 refrigerators in the greater Auckland region now contain basil-and-parmesan-pesto-made-with-roasted-pinenuts-in-a-handy-resealable-jar.
