Not a sausage

(First of all, like all my good ideas, this is someone else's. Namely John Birmingham's. Credit where due.)

For as long as humans have walked the Earth, there have been other humans absolutely gagging with evangelical fervour to tell them exactly how to live their lives, and to punish them relentlessly if they fail to comply. Fundamentalist religion has lead the charge for compulsory self-improvement by force, from the Crusades, the missionaries and the Spanish Inquisition of years gone, to Hillsong, World Youth Day and World Vision - sanctimonious twunts getting their jollies from directing others how to live their lives, largely because they get no enjoyment from the way they live their own. Through the years fundamentalism has worn many faces, each of them uglier than Kyle Sandilands and equally as morally reprehensible. However the new fundamentalism is not Islam, nor corporatization and globalization, but the twin pillars of health-and-safety nazidom and environ-mentalist-ness. OH&S is the new church, the National Health and Medical Research Council the new deity, and you will worship. All over the crystal bucket, be it the news or an endless barrage of reality TV effluent, self-appointed guardians of humanity are telling us what not to eat, what not to spend our money on, what suburbs not to buy in, and even what not to wear - and the latter from a haggard pair of skeletal mavens you wouldn't root for practice. And you can already hear the deafening chorus of self-righteous green-gilled arsewits craving the coming apocalyptic clusterfuck of high fuel prices, high food prices, credit crunchy goodness and global warming just so they can wheedle out a half-mongrel over the experience of lecturing the rest of us that THIS IS ALL OUR FAULT for driving cars, flying on planes, using electricity and breathing air, and not joining them over in the corner munching on soylent tofu bran-snacks, plaiting their armpit hair and wondering why they haven't scored a shag in four and a half years. The most miserable part about it is that unlike the fundamentalist Godbotherers, there is the sliver of truth to what this lot have to say; the world is in a bit of a state, and it's proving difficult to pin the fuck-up on anyone but ourselves (or at least our parents'.) But they still don't have to be so fucking smug about saying it, because making someone else's life miserable merely for enjoying themselves more than you do is what we like to call in the trade a Cunt's Act.

Anyway. Health gimboids in white coats ahoy - and these jokers are particularly embarrassing for anyone in the world of research, because one utterly clueless press release declaring 'meat is murder' - which must therefore follow, as Tony Martin once pointed out, that yoghurt must be burglary - and everyone stops thinking 'Scientists, hey. They're clever, in touch and relevant, they deserve much more money' and starts remembering 'Scientists. They were the snotty little nerdlingers at school who we used to beat eight grades of shite out of, and justifiably so apparently.' The cringe factor remains persistent, from one of ours (unfortunately) at Otago's Wellington campus who declared that the only way to decrease NZ's above-average rate of salmonella and campylobacter food poisoning was to ban the sale of fresh chicken - which would have really impressed the multi-million dollar poultry industry, not to mention the number of the Ingham brothers' race horses who would go short of a feed - to the self-promoting media-tart head of the NHMRC who decided amongst himself to redefine four standard drinks in a session as binge drinking. A session being any timespan of unlimited duration, including presumably one person's entire life (that one person possibly being K-Rudd's.)

The latest evangelical plot-evader to grace the media spotlight is Dr Bruce Neal of the George Institute for International Health in Sydney, who presumably share premises with the Ponds Institute and the Ministry of Fucking Cretinous Decision Making (who I understand are a NSW state government body.) He's declared the humble Aussie snag sanger to be a VIRTUAL TIME BOMB JUST WAITING TO GO OFF. AS VIRTUAL TIME BOMBS DO. OR AS ACTUAL TIME BOMBS DO, WHEREAS VIRTUAL ONES PROBABLY ONLY DO IN A VIRTUAL SENSE. I THINK HE CAN STOP SHOUTING NOW. It's not just the fat, salt, sawdust and processed animal-extract badness of the snag itself, but the salt and sugar in the tom sauce, the lack of fibre in the invariably white bread, and the carcinogenicity of the barbequing process as well. Anyone who eats a sausage sandwich will DIE SOONER than anyone who doesn't. FACT. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the instant prohibition of any butcher, supermarket or delicatessen selling any form of high-fat, high-salt cylinder of offal, in a synthetic lining or otherwise. Won't someone think of the children, etc.

Thanks. For. That. Your point being?

Neal's barrow-of-choice becomes pushing well obvious when you read the final quote: "The government now needs to make salt a national health priority and lead negotiations on maximum salt targets for different products," said Dr Neal, who chairs the Australian Division of World Action on Salt and Health. Translation: I am The Salt Guy. I want to be as famous as fuck. I want food producers to cower in fear at the mention of my name. I want governments to give me money to do research into things I've already decided the results of so I can continue to barrage people about how sick and dead they will be if they don't LISTEN TO ME GODDAMMIT. I am The Salt Guy, and I will keep pushing my barrow until the fucking wheels fall off. Or until it rusts. (See what I did there?)

There can't be a human alive who seriously doubts sausages aren't the best for your health. In their lowest-common-denominator form, the generic supermarket snag, they are seriously toxic, more flour than offal. But there equally can't be a human alive who, having figured this out, is prepared to take this information in hand when choosing to consume sausages. And such individuals don't need nosy medico-fucktards-by-appointment to help them distinguish their arse from their elbow, given they themselves would struggle without the illustrated edition of Gray's Anatomy. (I HAVE spelt that right, you soapie watching twunts; the medical text is by Gray, the soapie writers had to change the name because they couldn't get the rights. At which point they should have quietly dropped the idea.) To paraphrase (i.e. utterly misquote) Denis Leary, excess salt and fat will shorten your life by years, but they're the crappy, incontinent, senile, doddering, colostomy-bag years at the end, so who gives a flying fuck? Given that thanks to little Johnny we all have to pay for our own health care, it's not as if the do-gooders can argue they're being sanctimonious for the good of the nation. Too much salt? Too much fat? Evolution wouldn't have made us find them both so damn tasty if they weren't essential for life. Argue against sausages and you argue against evolution, you argue against science, and you argue in favour of Intelligent Design, Southern Baptists, black slavery, breeding with your relatives and playing the banjo with your toes. And that IS a FACT.

The most cretinous argument of all, though, is that we should ban the sausage because highly agriculturalized meat production causes global warming, and that makes the Earth sad. Boo hoo. According to some stat that a vegan plonker pulled out of their arse on JB's blog, 18% of our carbon dioxide emissions are from meat production. On top of the cars YOU drive, the planes YOU catch, the power YOU use et al, the meat YOU eat (and WE of course don't) is causing global warming.

Jesus suffering fuck.

This just in: LIFE causes global warming. It also causes cancer, acid rain, Parkinsons, the global credit crunch, the breakdown of the nuclear family, the cost of iPhone 3G call plans, gout, tennis elbow, Coro Drive traffic, Phillip Ruddock, the inability of the All Blacks to kick drop goals under pressure, tinea, Starbucks and the clap. If you want to feel personally responsible for any or all of that, feel free. If you want to try and make ME, any of US, or any of our fellow sausage lovers (hmmm, I don't think that came out right) feel personally responsible, you've picked the wrong target demographic for unloading your guilt trip. In short, anyone standing between Dr Yobbo and a tasty snag in bread can take their 18 percent CO2 and find an appropriate place to sequester it.

And more to the point, despite these unfounded communist gutter-press allegations of Australia being the most obese nation in the history of lard, how often do you see Aussie kiddies winning the big fat events at the Olympics? Weightlifting's never been the same since Dean Lukin tested positive. For that matter, when was the last time the Wallaby scrum had a set of gigantic front-row lardos to strike genuine fear and loathing into the heart of the Bok, the (All) Black or the Pommy Bastard? As a nation, Australia is still yet to produce a decent hammer-thrower, NFL linebacker, caber-tosser, or even one of those fat bastard roid-merchants from the 'World's Strongest Man' on ESPN. Even our Gladiators look underfed and a bit mangy compared to the steroidal-cattle-fed Seppo variety.

Bollocks to the medi-nazis. We're not nearly fat ENOUGH.

Think of the children indeed! What kind of role models are we leaving for our kids to emulate? Our nation's sporting heroes of the past weekend are (a) Tour de France leader Cadel Evans, an anorexic whippet in lycra; and (b) German MotoGP winner Casey Stoner, a small boy with prepubescent bumfluff who appears to have fucked off off on his old man's motorbike for a burn around the farm. Where's the AIS when you need them to churn out Australia's next generation of genuinely obese sporting superstars? To be frank, it's time the Institute - only marginally more credible than the the George and the Ponds - hurled their precious Sustain into the skip and replaced it with the breakfast of champions - some form of animal extract fried in lard. With chips.

So say it loud and say it proud: SAUSAGE ON my friends. For the good of the medal count in London 2012, if nothing else...

The Doctor is OUT.

PS Get in while you can to Walters Butchery in Maclean to get into the finest sausages in the land, because it can't be long before old Sid hangs up the butchers' stripes and/or drops off the twig. And into the mincer, presumably.