Licence to Thrill

They say the world is a small place. I don’t think that is strictly true – it’s the biggest place I know of – but there is an element of veracity in the fact that modern transportation means we can bump into our next door neighbour on the other side of the world. Since my next-door neighbours are Swiss, this happens more often than you might believe.

The Swiss are travellers: they have the disposable income and the time as well as that curiosity about the world that drives to the most out of the way places. Wherever you go, if there is one other foreigner in that remote mountain village the chances are they will be Swiss. And they will either be your next-door neighbour or have served in the military service with him.

The Swiss can be identified by their Mammut rain jackets or their Schoeffel hiking shirts, by their Swiss flag SIGG water bottles or their deft use of an army knife to create a small picnic in the middle of the jungle. Closer to home, there are other signs that set the Swiss apart – their Car licence plates for one.

Travel to northern Italy or the South of France in the spring time, pick the most attractive village you can find and then start counting the number of Swiss-plated cars you see there. There will be many. The Swiss have an ability to locate the prettiest places to spend their weekends, particularly when the weather on the southside of the alps is better than on the north. The Swiss licence plate quotient is usually a good indication of the quality of the place: if there are lots of cars with licence plates beginning with ZH and GE there, then you are in luck.

This week, Switzerland was shaken by the news that the growing number of cars registered on Swiss roads means that authorities are running out of numbers to assign to new cars. Inside of the two letter cantonal code plus up to six numbers currently employed, there may be a need to introduce 7 digit numbers. This would then potentially threaten the inclusion of the cantonal emblem on the licence plate – challenging the very core of Swiss identity and sparking an outcry the likes of which has not been seen since the redesign of the Swiss passport.

The Swiss licence plate is already something of an exception. Much like Switzerland itself in the world of homogenised European nations, the Swiss licence plate is willfully different from those of its neighbours: at the front the little thin tag requires carmakers to change the size of the mounting plates from the traditional Wide and long European size to the thin and skinny Swiss style and at the back the U.S. style square plate causes problems for those with cars designed to take the more conventional oblong form. Its no big deal but it is a nice reminder of the ways in which Switzerland differs from the countries around it.

Switzerland isn’t the only country with plates that tell of where the car is registered: france’s departments are clearly numbered on that country’s tags while Germany has a long list of the one two and three letter codes for each of its towns and cities. B, D, HH, M, MTK the list goes on.

But in terms of localness, quaintess and – dare I say it? – parochialness – the Swiss system with its Wappen really takes the biscuit.

A Swiss licence plate without a picture of a Bernese Bear, the white and blue Zurich crest or the Geneva crow and key combo appears to be more than the Swiss can contemplate. It would be another piece of their heritage eroded away and would mark the loss of an important pastime in Swiss society: namely honking ones horn at out of towners who dawdle along the streets of Zurich in their clearly labelled Aargau-plated cars.

Mother's Milk

Arriving back in Switzerland from a sunny holiday abroad I was surprised by several things: the fact that autumn had rapidly advanced across the Zurich region; the fact that financial markets appeared to be in meltdown and the fact that there was just one headline dominating the Swiss newspapers.

It has been a tumultuous week in the banking sector, something that should be a cause for alarm in Switzerland, home to two of the world’s biggest banks. Stock markets have plunged, credit markets are frozen and American banks are folding like a house of cards – literally and figuratively.

On top of all this financial shenanigans, there is the tragic case of contaminated baby milk in China, an escalating scandal in which four children have died and hundreds have become ill through ingestion of baby milk formula allegedly contaminated by unscrupulous farmers and negligent food companies with melamine.

Amid this turmoil, the Swiss German newspapers have doggedly pursued the news, refusing to be sidetracked by such global issues as financial crisis and food scares, sticking instead to the more homely subject of a local restaurateur who has a novel idea for drumming up interest in his cuisine.

A chef in Winterthur announced this week that he wanted to experiment with a new ingredient in the production of his Zurich Geschnetzletes and Soups: namely breast milk. Not merely breaking a taboo but positively crushing it underfoot, the chef told local newspapers that it would be completely natural: “We were all brought up on it,” he said. “Why shouldn’t it still be part of our diets?”

Well – I might suggest one reason here: I was brought up on, among other things, Ribena and weetabix but that alone is not reason enough for me to expect a chef to use them in the preparation of my Wild Ragout.

Of course, he wasn’t expecting the milk to produced by one woman alone: in fact he distributed fliers to women who might be willing to donate. And at the princely sum of 6.50 francs for a four decilitre up of mother nature’s finest, he was certainly willing to fork out more than for standard dairy fare.

Naturally this caused an outcry: of all places, the country in the world with the highest number of cattle per head of population (expect perhaps Argentina), producing gallons and gallons of milk each year, this chef decides that human milk would be a better alternative.

The local health authorities, with typically Byzantine justification, said that while it was not permitted to process milk extracted from a human into food stuffs, it was not forbidden either. Later they decided that the fact that human milk was not listed as a safe food stuff, then the chef would in effect be acting illegally by serving it to customers.

The project was dropped but not before the man’s restaurant, the aptly named Stork in Iberg, was given the best publicity any restaurant has ever received in Switzerland. Food for thought.