Sundays are for:

Sunda’ys crumpets are heavier with butter & honey,
Sundays are shooing a feisty cow away from the driveway & into its paddock,
Sundays are for hastily preserving cucumbers that have caught us off-guard.
Sundays are for learning to keep ones fingers free from fouling the mainsail ropes when tacking.
Sundays are for reading out loud, all the classics.
Sundays are for poring over the papers with a forensic intensity.
Sundays are for burying the hatchet & finding common ground.
Sundays are for setting things up for Mondays
Sundays are for the kids to have a day off, never getting out of their PJ's.
Sundays are for a bowl of warming, dip your bread into, food.
Sundays are for sleepy dreams & yawning plots before bedtime.
Sundays make you remember buckets of shells & sand , the yap of seagulls in your ear, before you drift off to sleep.
Sundays make you steal a glance at Mum & Dad holding hands on the couch.
Sundays are for hitting the ball toward the boundary, goaling through the hoops or drilling between the posts.
But this weekend, this Sunday morning was reserved for making fat fluffy golden pikelettes, smothered in Golden Pearl honey, our jam or cinnamon & sugar. Consumed by children still in their PJ’s & dressing gowns, still clinging to a lazy Sunday wake up.

Something fishy

An interesting question was discussed on Rita’s blog in the last day or two when she enquired as to what was the best seafood restaurant in Hobart. Many people commented & gave their thoughts & there were a few surprises in there.
What interested me though were the difficulties & hurdles one has to overcome in getting a steady supply of fresh & interesting seafood to put on the menu.
When I came to Tassie from the mainland a few years ago I was convinced after absorbing a salivatingly steady flow of printed articles on the abundance & quality of Tasmanian Seafood, that I would be able to literally amble down to the end of a pier, chat amiably with the fisherman & walk away with a bucket teaming with fresh fish, molluscs & crustaceans. Six years on & I am no closer to realizing this dream.
What I have come to learn sadly is that there are a few major obstacles in this ever becoming a reality.

1. Most of what’s caught here ends up on the mainland or overseas. It seems the domestic market comes a very poor second. Try to get local seafood from just about anywhere these days, its getting harder & harder.

2. Fish has become expensive & people here are just not prepared to pay for it. This is why at last look, there were at least two fish retailers on the market in Hobart at present, not including the now closed Seafood Demayne in Snug or the Margate fish stall at the Margate train.

3. The locals won’t pay for it because they know they can catch it themselves as there is a vibrant culture of fishing & why wouldn’t they really? It seems nuts to pay upwards of $20 to $25 for common flathead doesn’t it when the waters around these shores are teeming with them? Mind you in Adelaide last year Rock flathead was retailing for $49 a kg AND it was selling.

Yes there are a few who service the domestic market here but its becoming increasing more difficult & expensive to procure the fish & get it onto a menu.
Looks like if I want more fish on the menu I might have to buy that tinnie after all.

Those were the days my friend

Around the dinner table tonight we were discussing & underpinning the division of daily chores for each person & our collective expectation of what the other is responsible for. In my case, just so you know, it’s the ‘daily maintenance & upkeep of the kitchen’ & the regular sanitization of the cottage bathroom in which two of the children reside-code for: it’s a pigsty! Now the kitchen I can deal with in my stride but the kid’s bathroom, now that another matter entirely. However, if one is to lead by example, I have to suck it up & get on with it. During our family negotiations, at times the mood became heavy & in order to lighten it up a bit I decided like all old people to enthrall my younger audience with tales of hardship & toil from yesteryear. My tale unfolded with the predictable outcome of their eyes glazing over & them, slumped onto their elbows staring at the wall whilst I gesticulated wildly with hubristic panache, desperately trying to engage them with my own ‘Tale of the Ancient Mariner’.
However a funny thing happened. Towards the end of my saga, which I had actually sped up, to ensure I could take in the seven o’clock news my eldest latched upon an aspect of the tale & thoughtfully expanded, leaving me a little lost for words.
‘But that’s illegal’. She said.
Illegal, I thought. Yes perhaps it was. Why had I not thought of that? ‘How can they do that?” she enquired. By this time the others had been resuscitated satisfactorily enough get some traction on the thread of what had until now, been a monotonous monologue precluding them from excusing themselves from the table to suckle at the TV.
‘Yea dad, how can they do that?’ chirped the youngest one.
I was caught in a moment where I had no answer & was swamped with thoughts of a major opportunity lost to correct a long time injustice.
As a second year apprentice, the restaurant I worked for went into receivership. It was taken over by & operated by a company that intended to eventually buy what was left of the business. As I was indentured apprentice to the restaurant, I had to stay & watch my chef & the rest of the kitchen staff be sacked with the loss of all their entitlements, holiday pays etc. This was an awful predicament to be in.
The new kitchen crew was a rag tag bunch of guns for hire that appeared to hold no allegiance to the new regime yet alone what they had come in to replace & I was the one remaining person who was part of the old team. What unfolded from that day on was a sorry tale of victimization & bastardization in that awful kitchen of which I put up with for a full six weeks in the vain hope that my papers would be signed & could leave to be taken on as an apprentice in another restaurant after I had successfully applied for another position. That is a story for another day.
This is the story that elicited that response of shock & awe from my eldest at tonight’s dinner table.
It was my last night after that very arduous & taxing six weeks of misery. It was the crescendo of service & I was already being informed that the rest of the kitchen crew were leaving early tonight & as well as doing all the desserts on my own, the entire kitchen clean down would be left solely for me to do.
At that point I was grilling a beef Bitok under the gas salamander & the rendered caul fat wrapping around the Bitok had run into the already smoking hot oil in the pan. Distressed at hearing this bad news I unintentionally shook the pan a little too hard causing some of the hot fat to cordon into the gas flames where it combusted spectacularly in a burst of orange & yellow flame. My arm fully outstretched & bearing the weight that only a cast iron pan can exert, could only hold onto the pan which threatened to bubble over & run down my arm, & which it did.
I tried hard not top spill the contents of the flaming pan as I knew that it could & would spread angrily over the benches & possibly over my belly & legs. I managed to get it over the bench & let it down before the pain of the oil bore down agonizingly. In disbelief I watched as my forearm & elbow ballooned with a large blister which popped as soon as I straightened my arm to lay the pan down. Rushing to get my arm under cold water & I guess in a bit of shock, the words of the chef seemed not unreasonable as he enquired as to the whereabouts of the entrée for table 12. It wasn’t until later that painful night as my mum bandaged my arm that his words sounded so callous & so cold.
They left me as planned, to clean the whole place up.
My kids open mouthed disbelief at this story jolts me back to the now & the easy conviviality of our table after a belly full of meatballs & sketty.
‘It happened a long time ago’, I say, ‘things were different then’.

Confessions of a kitchen pedant

I hate clutter & mess in the kitchen, especially on a prep bench. My preoccupation with it borders on the obsessive compulsive side of the ledger. My vigilant eyes roam the nooks & crannies of the workspace, ever alert to the threat of a build up of detritus. You see, as will most profession kitchen people, it is piles of discarded scraps, peeled skins, vegetable ends, trimmed bones & flaps of unwanted fatty skin left to grow in pile on the work station, can easily derail & distract one from the thread of a busy service.
To be clear, most kitchen staff worth their salt are very aware of good hygiene practices & employs diligent & routine cleaning schedules.
I am talking more precisely about one of my all time kitchen pet hates, which is the infuriating habit that some cooks have of placing the refuse of their preparation directly onto the bench, the sink or a table instead of a vessel that can contain its spreading menace. During prep time is bad enough, but during service is one step closer to red lining my blood pressure.
You see I find it very difficult to concentrate on service if there are any distractions & the sight of an untidy work station is too much info for my one track brain to process. It is with this condition that you will appreciate why over the years I have policed all the kitchens I have presided over with this same vigilance.
I have also learned that I am not alone.
Watching many chefs lose their way during a busy service, getting deeper & deeper in the shit at the same time observing the chaos & clutter of spilled ingredients, messy spoon buckets, thousands of recklessly discarded tongs & hastily ripped plastic wrap I came to the conclusion that the two are related & by maintaining a pristine work station, one can negotiate the stresses of service freely.
These days I find myself repeating my mantra to the mildly bemused staff that look back at me with a mixture of ‘what’s the big deal?’ & ‘here he goes again’.
I routinely pick the scratchings of waste from clogging up the sink, discreetly placing a bowl under the dropping shaved peelings as a cook chats about what they did last night & regularly empty the sullied water from the spoon buckets whilst everyone remains oblivious. Like the invisible downstairs people in the Manor House I skulk around greasing the machine’s parts that others do not see or choose not to see.
Perhaps my condition became fully diagnosed when labouring as a second chef I watched as my mentor kept pushing the carved & unwanted remains of roasted meats to the edge of the chopping board until it became a sweating pile of oozing congealed grease which began to hinder his focus during the dinner rush. I didn’t have the nerve at the time to confront my boss about how this might be putting him off but clearly it was. In a moment of inspiration between tables I swooped in & cleaned the station with the precision & dexterity that would impress a Formula One pit crew. He carried on as if nothing had changed, however I detected a re-sharpening of his aim & service reached its climax without mishap. Hmm, a clean work station equals no problemo, I resolved.
This doctrine has filtered down into my domestic kitchen & my adaptable children have been drilled into carrying around ‘refuse bowls’ with them in the event that they should engage in any cooking activity. Curiously they have also absorbed some of the patois that you’ll frequently hear in commercial kitchens. ‘Coming through!” they’ll shout as they rush to put their Weetbix bowl in the sink. ‘Behind’ one will boom as he darts in to retrieve a glass & ‘HOT HOT HOT!’ one yells in order to get a biscuit in a hurry from the tin. Ahh, its moment like these when I know I’ve made a difference.
What are you pet kitchen hates?

Goodbye alehouse, hello aisle 13 super specials

I’ve always loved British pubs & had never really encountered quite the same special atmosphere in our pubs here that I enjoyed so much whilst in Great Britain.
There are exceptions of course, some fantastic memories from a few cherished inner Melbourne places & a number of special country pubs that I am very fond of.
However as a rule, the English pubs, well, rule. It was alarming to read recently that in the UK forty pubs are closing per week, that’s right, forty. Some who say that pubs were at the heart of British culture are distraught as they see a special part of Britain sliding into oblivion. It seems that that a combination of anti smoking laws, the high tax on alcohol, land rates & of course, the global recession are all biting hard on the once cornerstone of the British discretionary pound & punters are staying away in droves.
The fact is though, that pubs & their patrons have changed. There is a very popular sentimental view that once upon a time the local was the extended living room for a family, a place for merry get togethers, darts & conviviality. I’m sure that this did happen & perhaps still does in some pockets & it’s also probably where those tacky faux Irish & Belgian themed pubs have sprouted. How ironic that the market that English pubs once dominated has been replaced by these ersatz not-pubs, sort of sneaky Trojan horse colonisation. The supermarkets, they say are the culprit for why this trend away from consuming bev in pubs has occurred. Two for one deals, discount liquor available 24/7 & unrelenting advertising combined with higher rents for brewery owned public houses & the big brewers again squeezing small operators out of the field of diminishing competition. Could it be that people are self medicating at home instead?
Pretty soon they might cease to exist as some of us knew them & only remind us of what they looked like in re-runs of the old British sit-coms on pay TV.
Why the sentimentality? I guess because my time in Old Blighty resonates with the memories of some great & not so great experiences in pubs, of a time long ago when I was much younger, carefree & unburdened by responsibilities that age can bring.
The flip side to this boozy, beery-breathed nostalgia is the reality that the pervasive culture of alcohol that we share with Great Britain, is so entrenched in our society that even the moderates & small L liberals in governance don’t have the bottle to tackle it head on, lest they alienate themselves from the gargantuan teat of taxable revenue, that successive governments have grown comfortably accustomed.
It is very difficult in our society to untangle occasions where the pleasant addition of alcohol is used to lubricate festivities to where it stumbles into a self medicated binge.
Think of all those times when someone you know or perhaps even yourself have gotten hammered, embarrassing yourself & perhaps everyone else, merely to be brushed off with a knowing comment, sweeping what could be considered unacceptable behaviour, under the table where is easier not to confront. Or the time when an uncle who regularly gets progressively pissed at lunch before falling asleep at the table whilst conversation goes on around him. What about our rights of passage, initiations, sporting victories, wins at the races, footy team celebrations etc, they are rarely teetotal events. I’m no wowser for sure but it is striking me as a subject that we are as a whole uneasy in dealing with its excesses.
It will take a while but one day we might actually face up to the fact that we have a very damaging & conflicted relationship with alcohol in this country. As to England’s disappearing pubs, maybe it’s just a sign of change.

No kisses before this mob get Royally Fu_ _ed!

Is this possibly the worst mauling a restaurant has had at the hands of a reviewer? I once read that Adrian Gill is the most hated food critic in Britain but I find his his writing style so compulsive, like a bowl of hot chips I'm supposed to avoid, but having said this I never hope to on the receiving end of this wilting prose. I chanced upon this article last night-boy what a shellacking!

Apple crumble L plate

At the greengrocer, when it comes to apples we are at the mercy of the wholesaler & it’s generally limited to a choice of the Granny Smith, the Jonathon or the Golden Delicious. As it is with seafood, perhaps only peculiar to Tasmania, the unholy trinity of fresh fish available seems limited to farmed salmon, Trevalla & Trevalley. Though numerous species are regularly caught & coveted not only within this state but of course on the big Island but very little actually gets to the domestic market. It seems that in order to get a feed of fish, Tasmanians are more inclined to catch it themselves rather that pay for it. Fair enough really & its an endearing quality to life here that the very act of fishing for ones dinner has yet to be swept up, puffed & perfumed by journo’s before being embellished into some Uber foodie wet-dream. It’s just what people seem to do here & why their might be a culture that resists paying for seafood because everyone it seems knows how to catch it or procure it?
It is also the reason why at last look there were at least three major seafood businesses for sale. But I’m talking apples, so back to my observation.
In my business, I regularly liaise with all sorts of providore’s, wholesalers, farmers & middle-people. Generally I think it’s not unreasonable to expect that they might know more about the product that they are selling & what might available to them than I.
I am shocked to tell you that this is most often not the case.
In fact I wish I had a buck for every wholesaler I had enlightened to a particular grower of this or that or someone who is fishing specifically for something, a grower harvesting a particular baby vegetable or herb & a farmer rearing a certain breed of animal by my reckoning I'd be a whole lot more, thanks Kim-moi, 'Effluent' than I am now, at times I feel I am doing the work for them.
In this instance pertaining to apples, if you talk regularly to fruit & vege wholesalers you might be forgiven in coming to the conclusion that they are generally in the business of selling only two varieties of apples, red or green.
This reality is completely at odds with the ballooning interest from consumers of not only where there food comes from these days but also what variety & in which manner it is grown, harvested & the distinct point of difference that each has from the other & recently I was happy to learn of yet another convert who was seeking apples out of the ordinary.
I have written many times before about my love affair with the apple & the people who have stoked my fire, like international Malus Domestica, Eminence Gris, Bob Magnus.

It still amazes me though, that not enough pride & understanding is reflected in the apple industry & consumer understanding here & for those who are growing heirloom & heritage range that are on the periphery of the simple ‘red or green’ varieties.
People these days want to know what varieties are best suited for a particular application but it seems that this info is sadly not readily available to most of us from the point of sale. At first glace, this could be explained away as one of those generational maladies where a particular skill simply runs out of puff, perhaps because of our expectation as consumers of a combination of 24-7 supply of food stuffs insulates us to their particular seasons & the fact that we often ignore that wisdom of past generations who knew what type to use for a specific dish, that is of course until it becomes fashionable to do so or the prevalent economic times make people become more frugal & resourceful.
My oldest daughter, a keen pudding eater & instinctive cook, made the classic mistake of not cooking the apples before she made her crumble, resulting in a raw apple but over- cooked topping & bitter dissapointment. Simple mistake, easily remedied.
For those who are not able to meander, basket in hand, through their own leafy bejewelled orchard or breezily delve into the rich heritage & bewildering assortment of apple varieties that abound my simple rule is this: Most apple varieties will need cooking before you put them in a crumble.
Simple really but probably best not heard, like driving instructions, from your dad.

'Workin' Nine to Five'-with apologies to Dolly Parton

It seems that the federal government intent on bedding down its IR laws are keen to re-instate penalty rates on weekends for hospitality workers. Recently in the Australian, former Epicure journalist, John Lethlean wrote about the impending change & its possible effects on the restaurant industry.
There has been much conjecture in blogs & printed media about the high cost of running a food related business & that many operators are loathe to pass these costs onto the customer as they feel that business will just dry up as a result. This has occurred at the same time that issues relating to poor service from staff being the direct result of restaurants & cafes paying poor wages, the old ‘pay peanuts get monkeys’ argument.
Simply put, paying hospitality workers these penalty rates for working weekends would indeed raise their standard of living & arguably bring their wages into line with the rest of the workforce, hospitality workers apparently being amongst the most poorly paid. This in turn would mean that restaurants & cafes in turn would possibly start issuing a weekend surcharge of up to 20% to compensate for this rise. Now the service & the product would be the same, just more expensive.
My feeling is that people will equate any price increase with an incremental lifting of standards, value for money, product or service not just that it all of a sudden costs more.
The problem as I understand it, is that the new penalty rates are based on all hospitality venues which include pubs, clubs & hotels of which many derive considerable income through gaming & or pokie machines. This revenue stream gives a biased view of the state of play as it does not take into account the many restaurants & cafes that do not have it. I know this might sound like an obvious oversight, easily rectified, but if I am to believe the reportage, it’s a done deal.
What it also fails to reconcile is that hospitality work by its very nature occurs mostly on weekend & nights, you know…..When everyone else is off?!
To impose a nine-to-five regimen on an industry that doesn’t operate within this limited confine, seems ridiculous & very out of touch to me.
Perhaps, should this legislation go ahead as planned, we should prepare ourselves for the possible realty that all restaurants & cafes would close on the weekends & at night also.

Get Cook'in

The growing popularity in the United States for high end cooking classes reveals that many attendees are eschewing going out to restaurants & enrolling in these classes instead.
It seems that a the heart of this movement could be a way of up-skilling oneself in the basics of cookery as a result of the economic downturn whilst at the same time still enjoying the bonhomie once enjoyed in restaurants.
Underpinning this trend it seems is the perception of value. Many cooking classes are charging what a three course meal would cost in an upmarket restaurant but the difference is you get some wine, your food, company, come away with some instruction & often get to play in a state-of-the-art kitchen, & it does seem attractive.
I also think another part of the attraction is that some people are eager to connect with celebrity these days & could find the notion of working along side some of our best & brightest names in the industry very desirable & here in Oz we might'nt be any different
Take Rodney Dunn, once Australian Gourmet Travellers’ food editor, for instance. His & partner Severine’s Agrarian Kitchen in Lachlan, Tasmania seems to be going gangbusters. Meanwhile another stalwart & cooking school pioneer, George Biron of Sunnybrae in Birregurra Victoria has re-opened his place for classes, which I suspect was the result of this growing interest.
Who knows, perhaps Stephanie Alexanders Kitchen Garden scheme primarily focused on activities & awareness for children has sparked an interest for many of us eager to re-engage with the basic tools we need to sustain ourselves.
To be able to cook for one self I think is a basic skill that every person should be able to acquire. To be clear though, I don’t mean high table cooking skills, just basic stuff that will keep you from starving when confronted with a lean larder or an empty fridge.
To be able to ‘knock something up’ from the most meagre of ingredients is certainly a skill & one that usually comes from a person with years of experience under their belt, either from continued practice, from always having faced starvation or both.
Incredibly to me in this day & age we are still surrounded by people who for whatever reason simply cannot cook. I am mildly irritated by those who loudly profess to any sympathetic audience that not only don’t they cook, but they can’t be bothered learning either. Yes its true, for some, particularly those unfortunates for who cooking has become a drudgery of endless meals for extended & often unappreciative families, the joy of it has simply dried up, leaving only its exhaustive task & so to those people I empathise. However for those not burdened with these particular responsibilities, what’s your excuse!

Taste of the Huon

Look I couldn’t get there, yet alone judge , as invited to do so, but its not to say that I wasn’t there in spirit, my spinnaker bellowing with foodie goodwill for an event that I hold dear.
As luck would have it, the first long weekend that I have off also coincides with that of my family also all being off & after a long day tying up all those loose ends that owning some land can have, we decide to stay at home to tie them up.
Whilst this home-work is rewarding, I am keen to see that The Taste of the Huon is a success, so in my own way create an informal dinner in line with the ‘Esprit de Corps’ that I imagine the Taste of the Huon to have emblazoned in embossed lettering as part of its Charter.

We ate hamburgers & chips.

Of course the ground beef pattie is from a celebrated animal from our own farm, binded with our own eggs, my sourdough breadcrumbs & some Worcestershire sauce made from a friend in Glen Huon
The tommies are from our garden as is the lettuce, the onion, the beetroot & the pickled cucumbers of which half of this family is partial.
The spuds, pink eyes, respond awesomely to the challenge of being in the ‘Best supporting role’, the side dish of chips can be oh so unfulfilling for a lesser spud.
However in this case they make their claim for a stab at the ‘Best in Show’ role, such are their salted magnificence. Topped off with the homemade sourdough roll & you have a real contender for an authentic “Taste of the Huon”.
However that’s not for me to judge, just mine & my families tastebuds!

Big wheels keep on turnin'

If you are in the business of hospitality you might be regularly swamped with glossy advertising brochures hurled at you by the large food distributors eager to get you on board or should you use them already, expand your portfolio of products.
Now, as a bloke from the old school of ‘try to make it yourself first’ I find what is on offer mostly just stuff I wouldn’t use, nor care to really.
However one cannot afford to be completely snooty about the service or products they provide as they do have a place definitely. Some very large food outlets tend toward a heavier reliance on these purveyors in the name of cutting down labour costs. As a result, they buy many things in pre-cooked, frozen, canned, battered, mixed, blanched & boiled, all so the labour is kept down to the barest minimum & the skill level required to execute such dishes containing these foodstuff is apparently not as necessary or ultimately as expensive as hiring a qualified person trained to do this job.
Money saving.
What seems to be of a lesser concern is the actual quality of the food, like what’s in it for instance? Where is it manufactured? How processed is it? This is before we might even think of whether it is made from endangered plants or animals, are people & or land being exploited in its manufacture? Is it morally or ethically sound to use? The latter concerns I guess would be a very distant second to those of maximising profits of which I am not adverse, let me tell you. However I believe there are those in this game who are willing to put their ethics & morals on hold if they are heavy users of these kinds of foodstuffs in their businesses.
Also, what does it do long term to our fledgling cottage & specialty food industries that are always featured in the glossy food mags, you know the ones, the feel good stories of a free range chook grower & their supposedly bucolic country life? Well they are staring down the barrel of becoming more & more surplus to requirements as their products, though unquestionable in their quality, are just more expensive & thus less attractive for these businesses to buy. Don’t believe me? Think that there some foodie renaissance going on in every rural pocket? Let me ask you this.
If you go to the local big beer barn pub with the costly fit-out makeover, do you really expect to see a Barossa Chook, or some Holy Goat cheese even a bespoke sausage on the menu? My guess is that you don’t. So if these places as big as they & with the huge numbers of diners they attract aren’t buying all this flash artisan produce then who the hell is?
Here’s another curly one. Take your local chippie. Everyone loves a good feed of fish & chips these days. It might not be too unreasonable to expect that in the very least some of the fish will be fresh, perhaps bought in the last day or two. Wrong.
Most chippies buy in ALL there produce from the big food purveyors. That’s right. Everything from the flake, the flounder, the squid rings, the burger patties to the tartare sauce & always, always the chips. Whatever rosy coloured ideal you might have had for your local chippie should be having a bit of a reality check by now.
Why do they buy this stuff from these places & not off the boat, the wholesaler or the fish shop? Because, it’s cheaper to do so.
They know that we, the public will not pay a higher price regularly for the privilege of having a better, fresher & less processed product available for sale.
Now back to these large, often multinational food conglomerates. In there hunger to win your business many offer ‘incentive’ schemes, nothing new here I know but what I find the most baffling is their use of prizes that include cookbooks from feted chefs, chefs that would not probably EVER use their produce in their restaurants! How ironic that you are offered a book whose author is renowned for supporting a network of specialty & niche producers & above all is committed to their craft, by a company that represents the very polar opposite in their product catalogue.
I’m not suggesting that these food companies are somehow malevolent in their stocking items of mass convenience, they are businesses first & foremost & they have recognized long ago that most people don’t ask too may difficult questions as long as their food is cheap. I suspect that if many more of us ask many more questions of them, the products they offer might begin to reflect this change.

One negative point on living in the country

It went like this:

Oh hi, I'm just ringing to enquire as to the whereabouts of my order today.
What order?
The order I placed with you actually two days ago so it would arrive today.
I'll just check on it.
Fine, I'll hold.
a minute passes
Are you there?
Yep.
You haven't received your order yet?
No...This is why I'm calling?
So you haven't got the order?
A pause from me, then,
As I said, this is why I'm ringing.
Mumbling in the background then the same voice this time more jovial.
We've worked it out, its OK, Davo forgot to put it on the truck! he's always doing that the dickhead, he says laughing
Silence from me, veins bulging, blood pressure redlining
Hello are you there mate?
Yes.
Do you still want the order?

Feeling Blue Food

We all know instinctively on a base level that blue food won’t be good for us.
But food colouring is not the subject of this post, instead it’s about feeling blue & the urge we might have sometimes to stave it off by eating food that gives us comfort. I don’t mean ‘comfort food’ in the sense that it is evocative of our collective childhoods’ per se with recipes such as; Shepherds pie or sticky date pudding, as such.
I, like many I expect, know friends or loved ones whom, in moments of melancholy, turn to food for security. Often this leads to other related issues to do with ill health from diabetes to obesity, making the person even more miserable with every self fulfilling turn, often unable to break the repeating sequence.
It’s a common feeling for those in this cycle to have a miserable relationship with the food they consume & to deconstruct it simply into ‘bad foods are the ones I crave’ & ‘good foods are the ones I loathe’. Of course, adding to the conundrum are the very mixed advertising messages we are constantly bombarded with that sexualize & tantalize us with ‘forbidden pleasure’, ‘wickedness’ & ‘giving in to our base desires’. Its little wonder many of us are in a perpetual state of confusion & guilt about what we eat.
Yesterday, having time to kill, I wandered around a busy shopping precinct & was distracted for a moment by an image that I couldn’t diffuse in my head & read into, arguably perhaps more that I should have, but in the end, caused me to write this post, such was the emotional power of the scene. You know when you chance upon a situation or witness something that has a profound effect on you, even if you might later learn that the situation wasn’t as you first observed, that initial burst of understanding still lingers persistently & might even just change the way you think about something for evermore. This was one of those moments.
A lone, very overweight teenage boy sat in the window of a popular burger franchise with what looked from the distance, a very large pile of wrapped food. Before commencing to eat, I saw him steal a glance over his shoulder, as if to check that no one was watching, before momentarily wincing, as if to cry, his face contorted into a tearless mask. In that moment, I believe that poor boy let his guard slip, to reveal such sadness & perhaps, deep self loathing, that his situation was unbearable to gaze at any longer than I already had, feeling too much like a voyeur.
I felt a bit ashamed at having been witness to his instance of grief, his dignity, yes, unwittingly, breached by a casual observer but breached nonetheless & was with a heavy heart I carried this image cheerlessly until I could exorcise & drive it out into the confines of this post.
Like the anti smoking campaign where black lungs, dead toes & rotting teeth are highlighted with technicoloured alarm on packets of smokes, maybe his image should be paraded in prime time as an alternative to the usual syrupy, bewitching, immoral & sinister commercials cluttering everyday life these days?