Letting the genie -- or the ketchup, at least -- out of the bottle

The New York Times reports on the ground-breaking story that the Heinz Ketchup bottle is good design.  And I can certainly imagine the scene in the Style editor's office when the ace design reporter burst in the door and said "Stop the presses, chief, I got a story's gonna set this town on its ear!"  The searing nature of this revelation was probably pushed off the front page so as to not rattle cages too large for the Times to deal with.

(/snark)

But in a real sense, my concern is: The Heinz Ketchup bottle is good design -- for the Heinz corporation.  For the rest of us, for the people, not so much.  How many man-hours of our GNP have been lost to our collective attempts to dislodge ketchup from a Heinz bottle?  If I eat a hamburger a week (or, in my case, a soyburger), and I spend an average of 90 seconds trying to get the ketchup out of the Heinz bottle, and you multiply that by the number of Americans who eat hamburgers every day (due to the beef lobby's abilities to control America's eating habits) the time squandered in this pursuit is incalculable.  Why must the American working-class (and, let's face it, it is the workers who consume the fast majority of hamburgers, I'm not telling tales out of school here) be forced to labor harder to garnish their meals simply so that the Heinz corporation can continue to reap obscene profits? Isn't this what government oversight is all about?

And I say this with full awareness of John Kerry's role in all this.

What is the point of the FDA, if not to protect American workers from the predations of the food lobbyists?  Food manufacturers will do anything they feel they must in order to maintain high profit margins, whether it's putting ground glass into our food or putting ketchup into an inefficient bottle because it's "popular."  Who cares if it's "popular," the worker needs to be protected or else what is the point of a federal government at all?