The Weak in Eats

Hello folks. Continuing our countdown to our 300th post, the World of Bollocks presents: The Weak In Eats, our Culinary Special. Less molecular gastronomy and more bucket chemistry.

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I'd like to talk to you today about something very close to my heart. In that it's something that is probably making the artery walls of my heart closer together than they used to be. It's called bacon, and along with beer, big fuck-off motorbikes and bi-curious amateur girls with big boobies, is among my very favourite things in the entire universe. Pity you can't combine any more than three of them at once without the potential for disaster, or at least a mess that's not coming out of the living room carpet without a heavy duty can of Shake-N-Vac.

I have a theory, ladies and gentlemen, about bacon which I'd like to share with you. My hypothesis is this; that bacon is, in fact, man chocolate. I'll rephrase that before you puerile idiots start sniggering. Bacon is to man as chocolate is to The Ladies. That whole deal of obsessing over chocolate, gormlessly and fatuously declaring oneself to be a 'chocoholic', compulsively gorging on the stuff at Certain Times Of The Month (i.e any day with 'day' in the day) - yeah, well I have that for bacon, the prince of foods, the snack food of champions. Bacon can complement breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and can even provide sterling service as a condiment. There is indeed no meal to which bacon cannot 'add value', and anyone who disagrees is either vegirrelevant, or possesses ovaries. Either way: your input is Not Mission Critical.


Actually, that position, while defendable, is not entirely enlightened, and I have become aware of bacon-curious ladies who are beginning to see my way of thinking. A fellow researcher was stopped at the lights (yes we have them one the Riviera of the Antarctic) on her way to work one recent morning. And through her window, suddenly and randomly, was lobbed... a bacon buttie! Hallelujah! Manna from heaven! Or more accurately, manna from a promo girl from the Rock FM station, whose marketing department is either very, very clever or very, very stoned. I presume she was aiming for the preset on our correspondent's car stereo. In any case, this is the Greatest Radio Station Promotion EVAAAARRRRR, and has resulted in me driving aimlessly around and between any and all traffic-lighted intersections in the local area at morning peak fifteen-minutes, hoping against hope that I'll come across a girl in a tight-fitting The Rock T-shirt and jeans who'll sidle over to my car in the fleeting opportune moments afforded by the red, with a promising smile, and offer me a taste of her bacon sandwich.

I'm not sure that came out right.

Anyhoo, as a cultural attache of note and an internationalist of repute, I can tell you that from my extensive research on the topic, bacon is different over here. It's wetter. Strayan bacon is more stringently cured than Kiwi bacon, ending up saltier, drier and crisper. And, obviously, better. But one must make do as best one can when one is overusing one as a term of reference for oneself. And bacon is bacon, and bacon is good. Whether in an authentic Italian carbonara (no cream, you backward-arsed heathens), paired in the holy burger trinity of chicken and avocado, bewilderingly smothered in maple syrup and condimented onto pancakes by Canadians, casually slapped into a Bacon & Egg McArse by a spotty prepubescent (and why the fuck do they need 15 minutes to do so these days? Bring back the fucking warning trays Ronald, you smug-faced twunt) or just chopped up real fine, doused in soy and grilled with oysters kilpatrick, either as an aphrodisiac or a purgative depending on the allergy status of your intended, bacon is all the pork you'll ever need on your fork.

'Vegetarian bacon', though, that's fuckin' crook. That shit needs outlawing.

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The publicity ploy of renaming unpleasant shit to make it sound more appealing, saleable or palatable has been around for years, but has accelerated exponentially in the last image-obsessed, marketing-infested decade or so. ‘Friendly fire’ was coined by some Army PR type for being blowed the fuck up by the Seppos. ‘Market correction’ is the euphemism for your parents losing three quarters of their super because some speculationary stockbroking twunt and his day-trading arsewit mates couldn’t keep it trousered. And then there’s ‘family-friendly’, as in the political mindset of redneck, racist, homo-hating uber-Christian fucktards.

But now, the gold standard for changing the semantics to fit the purpose. However astonishingly, amazingly, car-crash-stupefyingly misguided.

I give you... the PETA ‘Save the Sea Kittens’ campaign.


I think only taking a look for yourself will truly do this site justice, and explainify the thesis behind this particular bit of intellectual genius. However, perhaps their ‘About the campaign’ screed might give you a clue:

People don't seem to like fish. They're slithery and slimy, and they have eyes on either side of their pointy little heads — which is weird, to say the least. Plus, the small ones nibble at your feet when you're swimming, and the big ones — well, the big ones will bite your face off if Jaws is anything to go by.

Of course, if you look at it another way, what all this really means is that fish need to fire their PR guy — stat. Whoever was in charge of creating a positive image for fish needs to go right back to working on the Britney Spears account and leave our scaly little friends alone. You've done enough damage, buddy. We've got it from here. And we're going to start by retiring the old name for good. When your name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through your head, it's time for a serious image makeover. And who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?

Ask the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to stop promoting sea kitten hunting here.

No, they’re not taking the piss. No, it’s not a hoax site set up by the Chaser or the Yes Men. They’re serious. They’re not fish, they’re ‘sea kittens’. And we need to stop hunting and killing them with big scary hooks because it hurts their feelings. And presumably their mouths too.

If your jaw didn’t drop and a wordless ‘Oh for fuck’s sake’ whisper from your slackened lips, best you shut this complicated looking ‘puter down and go do something more in line with your powers of ideological reasoning and your level of intellectual competence. Turning the letters on ‘Wheel of Fortune’ might be about it.

And as for PETA... Jesus fucking Christ. All I can recommend for this august body is that perhaps it should just stick to its core business. Encouraging easily misled ‘politically aware’ twiglet actresses into nuding up in public.


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From our 'Oh for fuck's sake' file...

The Britpop civil war of the '90s has finally reached armistice. Peace has been declared. Where once pitched battles raged across the stages and the pages of the British music industry, there is now rapproachment between the two warring tribes of Britpop, between those who follow the Mancunian Brothers Gallagher and those who set their star by that floppy haired tweek who went on to sing for Gorillaz. Oasis versus Blur, people. Get with the program.

Anyway, as some old dead fucker from Liverpool once wrote, war is over. And the peacemaker? Not a fairly shit action flick with George Clooney and a dubiously un-ginga Nicole Kidman (why did the last 10 minutes on the big nuke timer go for twenty on-screen?) but... cheese.

Our story begins with former Blur bass player Alex James who has packed in the London celebrity gig and fucked off to the sticks. He lives in a house (a very big house) in the country, doesn't drink smoke laugh takes herbal baths in the country... Sorry. Anyway he's got a farm in the Cotswolds and makes cheese. Not dick cheese either, the proper stuff.

And it seems, if Sources Close To The Band (i.e. some cunt from the NME who made this shit up) are accurate, cheese was the glue that held Blur together for so long. "Cheese was the glue that held Blur together so long," A Friend was quoted as saying. "Damon (Albarn, aforementioned tweek) and Alex (James) have always been enthusiastic about cheese. But it wasn't until recently that Alex discovered Liam (Gallagher) and Noel (Where's me fruit platteh) shared their obsession." Who this Friend Of The Band is, other than a tedious name-dropping arsetard, remains a mystery, but pretty safe to say it's not Graham (Coxon), former guitarist for Blur, who is still of the opinion that Damon (Albarn) and Alex (James) are a pair of (fuck)wits. Oasis, for their part, are no strangers to producing their own cheese (insert Be Here Now joke here, pause for editing.)


Anyway Farmer James has invited Albarn and the Gallaghers up to his cheese factory to jointly develop a special edition cheese for the upcoming BRIT awards. James, whose life has transitioned completely from hard drugs to soft cheese, has remarked, "It's amazing, the friends you can make, just through cheese. People get very emotional about it!"

Maybe not a complete transition away from the 'hard drugs' side of the ledger then methinks? Someone tell him to stop mainlining the Gruyere.

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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 apparently justifiably so.' 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.