The Swiss are superior. Just ask any Swiss person.
Growing up, everything Swiss was revered. I was raised with reverence for all things Swiss. It is in part because of what my grandparents left behind. A factor of remorse and longing is aggrandizement: the husband whose death made him perfect; the old girlfriend who would have made the perfect spouse.
But it's not just me and the way I was raised nor my grandparents loss of country. The label Swiss-made has heft.
Swiss chocolate. Swiss watches. Swiss skis. Even Swiss woodpiles are superior. Just look up a photo.
My father used to order a wheel of Swiss cheese through a New York cheese broker. He couldn't eat a whole wheel of Swiss cheese. A classic wheel of Emmantaler can weigh 200 pounds. The cost can be between $15 and $30 per pound. He did this because even Swiss cheese made in Switzerland is superior. I loved seeing my chunk of gifted cheese in the fridge.
In the grocery Coop, I look at the honey. Having harvested my own honey, I always look at the honey for sale in foreign countries. They sometimes label the honey as to what flowers it comes from. We discovered while in France, that honey from Acacia trees was superior.
I find that most of the honey costs around four Swiss francs. I initially suspect that all honey is Swiss honey because we're in Switzerland. But I notice that some of the honey is sixteen francs per jar--four times the price of other jars of honey.
The less expensive honey is imported from South America. Even France. Even Germany. The prices climb a little bit higher but are still much less than Swiss product honey.
Because of my conditioning, I know I will buy the Swiss honey. But it takes me a week to actually shell out four times the money for the same amount of the same bee-made product.
When I finally do, I bring it to the chalet-apartment, and wait for the right moment. The right moment was this morning when my dry, authentic Swiss muesli, needed a little bit of sweetening.
When I tell Tony, he asks, "Well how was it?"
"It was fresh. It was just like I'd harvested it from my own hives."
It is thicker, sweeter than other honey. But there is one product I will take home to a friend: nutella. I will be present when we do a taste test together.
Under the assumption that European chocolate and Nutella are superior to American chocolate and Nutella--even though they are made from the same ingredients--I insist along with friends-- that the European versions are superior. One in-the-know friend claimed that the same brand of chocolate in America had added wax for better melt resistance.
I take a photo of the Nutella label. I send it to Kristi asking her to take a photo of the Nutella in her cupboard because I know she has Nutella.
The labels are the same, but the percentage of hazelnuts in the American Nutella isn't listed. The European Nutella lists the hazelnuts as 17% of the product. The absence seems to be an important clue in solving the superiority mystery.
We are on a very important mission.
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