Is the fancy bottle ever worth the squeeze?

Rebecca Flint Marx is the editor of Eater at Home. She likes an olive oil bottle with quiet dignity.

In late April, Taste published a fascinating and well-researched story on the rapid ascendance of squeeze-bottle olive oil (you should read it!), the kind first popularized by the brand Graza. I was thinking about this story, which was written by Cathy Erway, a couple of days ago while shopping for olive oil. I have been more or less immune to Graza's lure, since I'm trying to eradicate as much plastic as possible from my kitchen. But I needed only a smallish bottle of oil, and an aluminum refill can of Graza's Sizzle, its cooking oil, fit the bill.

I am an easy mark for good design — one of the most direct paths to my heart is through a well-chosen font, particularly when it's paired with a winsome graphic. So I was primed to love Graza, plastic aside, since it makes some very pretty bottles of oil. But that love, embryonic as it was, disintegrated upon contact with the oil itself. I know there are a lot of people out there who love Graza's oil, but I can now attest that I am not one of them. For me, the flavor just wasn't there, and I found myself confronted with the dissonance between the expectations created by a product's packaging and the reality of what lurks inside it.

Lille Allen/Eater

This has been happening to me a lot lately. In a recent installment of her Snaxshot newsletter, Andrea Hernández wrote about the "Grazification of condiments" — the proliferation of squeeze bottles, and the concomitant "yassification of everything mundane, from chile paste to mayonnaise." You know it when you see it: Ayoh!, Molly Baz's squeeze bottle mayo; Joolies packaged medjool dates (rebranded as "California Superfruit"); Fishwife, the tinned seafood brand that has now expanded its aesthetic ambitions to sandals (because nothing goes together like fish and feet?). It's food as a shiny happy people millennial status symbol, and while I, again, am a sucker for this kind of thing, it makes me miss the earlier generations of condiments that didn't try too hard.

I'll take your Graza and raise you a bottle of Colavita, an olive oil whose packaging encourages exactly zero delusions of grandeur regarding the product it contains. (See, too, Pompeian olive oil, which recently inspired my colleague Francky Knapp to write a love letter to its simplicity.) Pineapple Collaborative's bottle of apple cider vinegar (dubbed the ACV) looks like something you'd find at the MoMa Design Store, but to me it will never surpass the strange beauty of a bottle of Bragg's, with its homey, food-co-op-conspiracy-theorist vibe.

I don't wish to sound like Andy Rooney here. There's a (big) part of me that loves the aesthetic leaps these brands are taking — why shouldn't a bottle of stir-fry sauce provoke visual delight? The issue, for me, is when style overtakes substance, and the way social media and cultural homogenization increasingly dictate what a product (to say nothing of a person) should look like in order to be considered appealing. Just as you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, we'd all do well not to judge a bottle of olive oil by the anthropomorphized, probe-dial thermometer on its label.

Canteen Creemee Co.

What I'm enjoying on the site:

Our Summer Where to Eat guide is out, and with it, a whole story on Vermont creemees!
The second installment of this year's Dinner Party series, our Big Birthday Blowout, is gorgeous and makes me want to eat cake.
The great Dutch oven throwdown!

What else I'm consuming:

Reading: Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino's entrancing novel about an alien growing up as an Earth girl.
Watching: I'm not a horror person, but Companion is nasty fun (and a perfect plane movie).
Listening: As a big admirer of Bridget Everett and her HBO show Somebody Somewhere, I loved this interview she did with Marc Maron.