Where to you fall on the Great Ketchup Debate? Fridge or cupboard?

Heinz, the venerable condiment maker, sent out an innocent seeming tweet in November 2022, when it asked: "If tomatoes are fruits, is ketchup a smoothie? Discuss."

Ehh, we'd rather not.

Most of the 59 replies castigated Heinz for the sugar and sodium content in its products, because random anonymous people yelling at companies always gets results.

I felt bad for the person at Heinz who launched this tweet, because they probably lost their job as social media engagement specialist. "What was I thinking? No one wants to think about a ketchup smoothie. It sounds like breakfast in hell."

But I am pleased to report that the company is having much better success in getting retweets and likes and other meaningless metrics, because it caused a stir by making a rather definitive statement just last month: "FYI, Ketchup. Goes. In. The. Fridge!!!"

This is, of course, wrong.

They followed up with a survey, and 62% of British votes agreed. Not the cupboard. The fridge.

Well, Britons also leave the eggs out on the shelf in grocery stores. This means you could sneak into their kitchen, swap out the ketchup and hen fruit, and in the morning they'd be seized by the terrible certainty that a Yank had gotten into the house overnight.

Conversely, if you went to a friend's house, put the ketchup in the fridge and the eggs on the counter, they might think the entire American Revolution was a dream, and check Wikipedia to see if we were a sovereign nation.

Why put it in the fridge? No one wants cold coagulated ketchup on fries. It is, by Heinz's own damning admission, shelf-stable. I don't know anyone who spent a night in the emergency room because they got hold of some bad ketchup.

If you're on the fridge side of the argument, do you chill your hot sauces, as well? The very idea of "cold hot sauce" is one of those oxymorons that ought to make the bottle evaporate into another dimension. I have a bottle of sriracha that started out a merry lurid red, and now it's a rich, deep ochre. It's not only still good, it's got enough chili and vinegar in it that you could use it as a disinfectant.

The English tabloid the Sun declared in 2017 that the science was clear: Not only should ketchup be refrigerated, mustard should go into cool storage, as well. I guess when the English have a hamburger, or "Do up a Wimpy," as they say, they take out the cold sauces, spread them on plates, put them in the sun to warm up, then eat them cold anyway because the sun hasn't come out in two weeks.

Some will note that restaurants leave the ketchup out. That's different. They go through a lot of it, so it doesn't make sense to put it all in the cooler. When I was a waiter, the end of the shift always included combining the plastic bottles so they were all full for the next day, a procedure known as "marrying the ketchups."

The Great Ketchup Debate gives us something fresh to argue about at home. I have the sense that ketchup-in-the-fridge people invariably marry ketchup-in-the-cupboard people, and then spend decades in silent irritation moving it from one place to the other. Or perhaps one party just gives up and lives with cold condiments, figuring it's not worth it.

I know I'm lucky enough to be married to a cupboard-ketchup woman, so we don't have to Jack-Sprat that particular issue.

Now, catsup in the fridge, that's a different matter entirely.