When There's A Wills They're Away
The Age
Friday April 24, 1992
I WAS heartened by the Federal Government's response to the Wills byelection result. Moving with the speed of a cross-eyed rattle snake, they announced moves to reform pub food.
Thirty thousand dollars will be spent reforming hotel menus providing moral as well as dietary fibre, putting more spring into our spring rolls and throwing more light on our dim sims. Steak and eggs with chips will be banished and salad bars installed. I digested this information slowly, at roughly the pace of a warm pie and sauce.
The minister for gapped teeth had actually released a press statement about it with all the fervor his tired eyes could express. Then the Prime Minister in a bold stroke stole the limelight. He made our position on Timor crystal clear. He would remove the Union Jack from our flag!
He also foresaw independence overtaking us like a rising tide in a mangrove swamp, gradually and inevitably. This must have impressed the Merdeka fighters deeply, but then I remembered the cartoonists' stock joke: you can't invent anything as funny as real life.
Between these bread and circus acts I tried to remember there was a recession going on and put it down to poverty overcoming the thought processes.
There used to be a time when drinkers had to be persuaded to eat anything at all, ``blotting paper" was the favorite reference. Doctors, amazed by the survival of those who put the bar into barbecue, consoled themselves with the thought that steak, two eggs, chips and snag was not only a stomach lining it was almost wood panelling.
OH, I know all about cholesterol and saturated fats, but that sort of eating didn't start at the legal drinking age. Please consider, as they say in the car ads, what you ate in your school days.
Piggy school boys who would kill for an extra rissole, cream bun, pizza, potato cake or battered-sav rinsed down with fizzy caffeine drinks were only diverted into gourmets affecting to live on sushi and sashima, grilled squab and wild rice, sipping wine of any fashionable color from season to season while watching their cellulite wax and wane for that maniac period beginning in their late thirties until their early fifties.
After that comes a tendency to let it all flab out. To allow those taut, anxious dieter's stretch lines to relax and become character lines or wrinkles as we used to call them, the power walk to slow and roll slightly.
It's then that the idea of a couple or several pots accompanied by a crisp lettuce leaf and a mung of bean shoots on lightly toasted tofu, not only looks repugnant but positively bizarre.
NO, it's back to the fish and chips, the steak sandwich, the mixed grill, the lamb's fry, the tripe and onions and the meat and three veg. The counter lunch that counters lunch.
Then you can relax and get into the small talk about free trade and tariffs, regional security and job creation and fun topics like elections.
© 1992 The Age