Horror in a jar: The Catelli story.

A year ago I foolishly bought a can of Catelli meat sauce, thinking, Well, how difficult could it be to make a decent sauce for noodles? Apparently for a big company like Catelli it's one of the things you might do in an ideal world, but this is reality, man. It was pretty bad. Then the other day I was once again in a hurry and I noticed there's a new line of Catelli noodle sauce in a jar. That had to be an improvement. There's a whole list of produce that goes into it, and it is in a jar rather than a can. How hard could it be to make a decent noodle sauce if you have all those ingredients at hand and you're packing it in a nice glass jar?

I guess if you start off with the worst tomatoes you can find and then add stuff to disguise the flavour you might have some problems. Here is their story:

CATELLI first started making macaroni and vermicelli by hand in 1867 when an immigrant from Vedano, Italy -- Carlo Onorato Catelli, established Canada's first pasta plant on Saint-Paul Street in Old Montreal.

And it has been steadily downhill since then. Almost every food and beverage company likes to go on about how long they've been in business. Many of them have ads showing some moustachio'd guys in sepia ginding meat or brewing beer or whatever. But those guys got the boot a long time ago, bought out by some businessmen who probably hate anything that doesn't have mayonnaise or BBQ sauce on it.