It’s ridiculously wrong though. Ketchup has tons of varieties, even if you only talk about tomato ketchup (which is not the only kind, although the vast majorit

It’s ridiculously wrong though. Ketchup has tons of varieties, even if you only talk about tomato ketchup (which is not the only kind, although the vast majority). I can easily name more common varieties of tomato ketchup than of mustard. This seems kind of symptomatic of Gladwell’s writing, to be honest: fancy, convincing, but divorced from facts and true only in a limited, cherry-picked niche. In the context of evolutionary anthropology this is known as “just-so” stories. Fitting then, that Gladwell’s ketchup essay also contains a just-so stories. He just couldn’t resist.