Cognitive Conga: a blog

I’m in the late stages of a prolonged and extensive spring clean. One of the things I’ll be getting rid of is my Trangia-style stove and cook set. Why? Mainly because of this cat food tin.

That’s right folks, I want my outdoor meals to make me smile like this man:

But you can’t buy Fancy Feast in the UK! I hear you cry.

Well, worry not, friends, because Andrew Skurka’s article gives away the tin’s dimensions: it’s 2.5″ in diameter, and by holding up a ruler to my screen I was able to estimate its height too. Converted to metric, it’s approximately 3.3cm tall and 6.4cm in diameter.

To my surprise, no-one batted an eyelid when I whipped out a tape measure in the canned goods section of the nearby Asda supermarket. (I know, I know: Asda = Walmart = bleurgh. I normally avoid the place. But it has the largest canned goods aisle of any of the supermarkets I’m aware of on my side of town, and I happened to be passing.) I found three products sold in cans of very nearly those dimensions:

• Princes Tuna Chunks in sunflower oil. Comes as a pack of 3×80g tins.
• Princes Tuna Chunks in brine. Comes as a pack of 3×80g tins.
• Essentials from HiLife Tuna Royale cat food. Sold in single 85g tins.

I recommend the latter. It’s about half the price of either of the others, per can, and because it’s sold in single tins you don’t need to buy any excess. Also, although both products claim to be dolphin friendly, Princes has a poor corporate responsibility record (and besides, the cat food is probably mostly made of waste meat). Furthermore, the Princes cans have reinforced rims top and bottom, whereas the cat food cans just have a reinforced top rim. The catfood cans are therefore closer in spec (and may well be identical) to the cans Andrew uses.

Now I just need a cat and a hole punch.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 6:54 pm and is filed under hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.