Anti-Tomato Ketchup

Dis­claimer: The fol­low­ing is 100% fab­ri­cated and was writ­ten by me purely for the amuse­ment of a few friends, fam­ily and co-workers. Up until now, it has been hid­den in the vin­tage kartooner.com (circa 2000) archives so I fig­ured I’d unearth it and share it with whomever was interested.

For the past twelve years, a research team located in Pills­bury, Min­nesota has been search­ing for the answer to ketchup with­out tomato-based ingre­di­ents. Dr. David Motaja men­tioned the idea orig­i­nally while vis­it­ing a local restau­rant after real­iz­ing his dis­like for toma­toes and crav­ing for ketchup.

“It essen­tially started as an idea of pos­si­bly cre­at­ing ketchup with­out the need for toma­toes. Ever since I was a child my dis­like for the red veg­etable fruit has increased excep­tion­ally. Peo­ple who love ketchup but are dis­gusted by toma­toes have no choice. I felt it was a task to be com­pleted by the year 2000″.

Dr. Motaja con­tacted his col­league Dr. Charles Groper and the two dis­cussed a few pos­si­bil­i­ties. As Groper explains, “David came to me with a bril­liant idea. Usu­ally the case being that we research some­one elses failed hypoth­e­sis. Here we were able to test some­thing new, need­less to say I was ecsta­tic. Give or take a few weeks, the project even­tu­ally started in Decem­ber 1988. Our ini­tial task was to recruit a team of sci­en­tists from dif­fer­ent back­grounds. Usu­ally a process like this can take months so we decided to just pick peo­ple off the streets and toss them in a lab.“

The pre­ced­ing months, Dr. Motaja and Groper went on a scav­enger hunt. Dr. Motaja recalls, “We could have eas­ily picked from the cream of the crop, but our intent was to work with the com­mon man. Charles [Groper] took one side of Pills­bury and I had the other. The process, which by all means was even­tu­ally suc­cess­ful, was need­less to say a dis­as­ter at first. We installed a card­board sign out in front of local super­mar­kets with “Sci­en­tists Wanted” writ­ten boldly on the front. Cus­tomers started toss­ing change left and right. There was even one per­son who gave me a can of tomato soup, which, if you think about it was very tongue in cheek to the project.”

Dr. Groper recalls his early expe­ri­ence, “While David received a warm response, I had a lot of peo­ple kick­ing down my sign. Enough to the point where I replaced the sign three or four times, so I sup­pose I drew the short straw. Even­tu­ally, we both received sev­eral inter­ested appli­cants.” After the course of recruit­ment, the sci­en­tists decided to choose the most qual­i­fied indi­vid­u­als through a process of elimination.

“We took all of the sticky notes and lit­er­ally tossed them into my son’s base­ball cap. Give or take 20 or so min­utes we hired our team, which we called the The SciGuys. They are in no par­tic­u­lar order;

• Christo­pher Jenkins
• Tobias Mitchell
• Cyn­thia Lemur
• Jos
  hua Smith (not related to any other Smith, he’s his own Smith)
• Jim Carey (no, not really. Just wanted to see if you were pay­ing attention)
• Ray­mond Adrika
• Nathan Poljockey

The team lead by Motaja and Groper were to spend the next 12 years research­ing the link to the Anti-Tomato ketchup. Tobias Mitchell reflects, “It was and still is no easy task. At the time we all thought we could sim­ply sub­sti­tute tomato paste with soy, con­sid­er­ing there is a great demand for the prod­uct amongst veg­e­tar­i­ans and dieti­cians. That attempt failed the first hour because the test sub­stance just didn’t taste like ketchup, but more like radioac­tive chicken.” Tobias remem­bers the brain­storm­ing ses­sions for the facil­ity by which this research project would take place. “Frankly, David [Motaja] and Charles [Groper] thought the best place would be the least obvi­ous. Push come to shove, unan­i­mously we decided the vacant water treat­ment plant would work best.”

“The plant was located 10 miles from Pills­bury in the town of Crock­erVille, just past the vacant dairy and the aban­doned min­ing town. Crock­erVille was the per­fect place con­sid­er­ing it’s loca­tion and the fact our project would be secret. Not that we had any­thing to hide but frankly this is an idea that could spawn crit­i­cism and controversy.”

Groper explains, “The project needed a code­name. Many secret projects in the past have used numer­i­cal codes such as Area 51 or Plan 9 from Outer Space. The Anti-Tomato ketchup project needed some­thing dis­tinc­tive yet oddly cre­ative. That’s when Ray­mond Adrika asked why and thus our project was born; Project Y.”