Between heaven and Hellmann’s

F Scott Fitzgerald apparently used to end letters to some of his correspondents with “Yours till hell freezes over.”

Would the same were true of Hellmann’s mayonnaise which, thanks to consumer goods giant Unilever pulling the plug on importing it, is not going to be ours until hell freezes over.

There are a few competing versions of the story.

The first, according to a Bizcommunity report, is that Unilever had stopped importing Hellmann’s to SA due to low consumer demand and that the big retailers delisted it. Another is that Unilever simply delisted it itself, leaving the supermarkets to deal with anxious customers.

Unilever later cleared up the muddle, saying the “regretful” decision was due to “high inflationary importing costs”.

Hellmann’s now joins a pantheon of lost comfort food gods that include Tempos, Caravans, Inside Stories and Chocolate Logs, Peck’s Anchovette and Redro fish paste, Kellogg’s Honey Smacks and Simba’s All Gold Tomato-flavoured chips.

Predictably, comments on Hellmann’s Facebook page have reached into the thousands, helped along, it must be said, by panicked Americans thinking that they, too, were staring down the barrel of a Hellmann’s-free future.

“I was about to get ip [sic] out of bed and make an EMERGENCY run to Walmart and Publix to do a little mayo hoarding,” wrote one.

South Africans may have bigger things to worry about than the disappearance of a jar of mayo, but for some people it undoubtedly feels a bit like having a steerage berth on the Titanic.

As one Facebook poster noted: “... it feels as if we are in a sinking ship and the world is paddling away.”

And so back to Fitzgerald, who perhaps would have grasped this dark moment in South Africa’s comfort-food history: “Can’t repeat the past?” he wrote. “Why of course you can!”