Consider “ketchup” as an object of study, a foundational and intellectual object, an exercise upon which one might choose to build a career. Turn then to the “experts in the field” of ketchup studies, and see what they have to say; see then if anything remains to be said.

That which remains to be written might best unwrite the manner in which tomatoes become topical institutions, and ketchup is not necessarily peculiar in this regard. It is hard to imagine that tomatoes might have hoped to become institutionalized, but such speculation remains nonetheless scant.

This paper shall thus seek to legitimize the agency of ketchup as socially irruptive and, for all practical purposes, subversive to the usual and unquestioned gaggle of celebrity adulantricities. Hence the radical democratizing thrust of ketchup as affirmative of divers variety and heirloom schematic pace ultimately undermines genetic consistency, and the idiocy of those who claim to be in charge shall likewise be exposed as merely another in a series of fraudulent props.