Killer Fact!

Top five per capita baked bean consumption by country.

1. Ireland 5.6 kg
2. Britain 4.3 kg
3. New Zealand 2.3 kg
4. USA 2.0 kg
5. Australia 1.3 kg

What’s Ireland thinking about? I’ve been to Ireland once or twice and I can’t remember baked beans on the menu. In fact I can’t remember seeing an Irishman eating beans. It doesn’t ring true. Irish cuisine is that strange modern European mixture of the welcoming native traditional and the mean stateless nouvelle. It’s as if they leap frogged from the optimistic sixties to the cool dude nineties missing out the fish fingered seventies altogether. So I can’t believe they eat all these beans. There’s been a mistake. No pun. Maybe they feed them to the horses.

Then there’s us. 4.3 kg is about 10 tins. Now I like beans, always have. I’m common, I can’t help it, I do like a baked bean, but I don’t eat 10 tins a year. Maybe I do. It’s certainly worth thinking about.

New Zealand. Doesn’t surprise me. What else they got? Nothing to look forward to, poor little kiwis. Beans on toast is still a treat to them.

USA, well we all know their diet is the pits so I suppose the baked bean is the only proper nourishment they get, big fat lumps that they are. They think they invented them as well but we know better don’t we?

Australia, that’s a surprise, don’t know why, but you’d think they would avoid beans just on a matter of principle. They’ve got a terrible cussed nature when they’re given time to think about anything, your average Australian, but the weather’s good or so I’m told. Round the coasts. Not inland; inland it’s all flies and sand and those big long road trains driving across the desert looking for backpackers to murder. Or so I’m told.