Speaker 1: From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey.
Speaker 1: It's Thursday, November twenty one. Treasure Jim Chalmers is unlocking
Speaker 1: Australia's biggest financial asset, the giant two hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five billion dollar Future Fund, to drive investment in housing
Speaker 1: and green energy projects and improved infrastructure. One of the
Speaker 1: Biden administration's most powerful diplomats, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell,
Speaker 1: is warning incoming President Donald Trump not to turn his
Speaker 1: back on Australia in the face of a relentless China.
Speaker 1: Those two big stories and what they mean for all
Speaker 1: of us are explained in detail right now at The
Speaker 1: Australian dot com.
Speaker 2: What are the.
Speaker 1: Kids in your life having for lunch today? I bet
Speaker 1: it's not a devon and tomato sauce sandwich on white bread.
Speaker 1: How times have changed and today we've got to treat
Speaker 1: our treasured senior writer Matt Condon on the ghosts of
Speaker 1: lunch boxes past. Let's make some lunch for my kids.
Speaker 3: It's so cute.
Speaker 1: Out there on social media. Women are joyfully making their
Speaker 1: children's school lunches. I'm tapping it off with their crew
Speaker 1: egg and fleaky salts. This food is nourishing, organic, inventive.
Speaker 1: A tortilla, add some hommice, lettuce and some turky. Matt
Speaker 1: Condon is a senior writer with The Australian and today
Speaker 1: he started a new column. His first is a treatise
Speaker 1: on how generations of parents raised on white bread and
Speaker 1: plastic cheese have found themselves preparing bento boxes for their children.
Speaker 2: My mother would just sort of chain saw a bit
Speaker 2: of devon and chuck it between two bits of bread,
Speaker 2: and then it did go into the lunch box and
Speaker 2: then five hours later, in thirty five degree Brisbane heat,
Speaker 2: it had come out again as a completely different product.
Speaker 2: This is before microwaves. I mean it was just Brisbane
Speaker 2: humidity was enough to completely transform the horror that it
Speaker 2: initially was into some new, absolute new culinary monster. And
Speaker 2: yet now kids are getting sushi like what was sushi
Speaker 2: in the seventies. Sushi was I don't know. It was
Speaker 2: like a martial art type of martial arts was it?
Speaker 2: Who nobody knew what sushi was. The biggest event in
Speaker 2: Brisbane in the early seventies was a pizza hut opening.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's incredible how in a single generation. The
Speaker 2: culinary arts have evolved extraordinarily.
Speaker 3: Have your children ever tasted devon?
Speaker 2: It's dog food now, I mean, but having said that,
Speaker 2: even the dogs eat better quality, more quality Devon than
Speaker 2: we had as kids. So no, to answer your question, no,
Speaker 2: they've never eaten devon. I mean that the concept now
Speaker 2: of a roll, a kilogram of processed sausage that comes
Speaker 2: in a dog food style roll pinched at either red
Speaker 2: is literally beyond their comprehension.
Speaker 1: I've got very powerful Devon memories, Matt. You see kids
Speaker 1: being pushed around in the supermarket now, sitting in the
Speaker 1: trolley with an iPad. But when I was a kid
Speaker 1: in canber in the eighties, I was sitting in the
Speaker 1: trolley with a packet of devon. My mum would the
Speaker 1: first storf in the supermarket would be the deli counter.
Speaker 1: She would get six slices of Devon and they'd wrap
Speaker 1: it up in paper, and then she'd give it to
Speaker 1: me in the trolley and I would eat it while
Speaker 1: we went around the rest of the supermarket. It was
Speaker 1: sort of quite cheap entertainment.
Speaker 2: Oh why do I understand that so well? You know,
Speaker 2: with lunches today there are sort of this myriad of
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand types of snacks. So there's all sorts
Speaker 2: of musally sugar free musli bars and different sort of
Speaker 2: types of seaweed. That's sheets of seaweed that's graded in
Speaker 2: different thicknesses and got different condiments and flavors of different
Speaker 2: types of seaweed sheets.
Speaker 1: Here's some of Matt's essay, which you can read in
Speaker 1: full at the Australian dot com dot au.
Speaker 2: Right now, Oh, dinner time in the nineteen seventies, I
Speaker 2: tell my children over dinner, closing my eyes with the
Speaker 2: pleasure and simultaneous pain of remembrance. What was it like? Dad?
Speaker 2: Tell us, tell us, what did you eat well? I said,
Speaker 2: we didn't have organic stuff way back then. Anything organic
Speaker 2: just meant it had either been grown in the earth
Speaker 2: or was rotting back into the earth. What did I
Speaker 2: eat well? Tripe for starters, stripes tripe the stomach lining
Speaker 2: of a cow or a sheep or a pig, cleaned, trimmed,
Speaker 2: cooked and served with white sauce and onions. My daughter
Speaker 2: placed her hand across her mouth. It was awful. Nobody laughed.
Speaker 2: Stomach lining, I stressed. Then there was lambs fry and bacon.
Speaker 2: The lamb's liver, that was the fry bit wrapped in
Speaker 2: bacon to make it even remotely edible. My youngest almost
Speaker 2: dry wretched. But I was on a roll, a roll
Speaker 2: of horror rissoles, endless rissoles, and curried sausages or normal
Speaker 2: sausages with some sort of tinned curried powder sprinkled on top.
Speaker 2: My eldest, a vegetarian, quietly belched. A lot of things
Speaker 2: seemed to come out of tins. My youngest son said, quizzically, yes,
Speaker 2: they did, I said, because we never knew when there
Speaker 2: was going to be a nuclear war, so at least
Speaker 2: when the bombs hit, we'd have plenty of tins of
Speaker 2: pineapple and apricots and we'd survive. The children were silent,
Speaker 2: I know. My youngest wanted to ask how the tins
Speaker 2: managed to survive a nuclear holocaust, but he refrained. I
Speaker 2: wanted to add, Look, I'm not blaming my parents or
Speaker 2: a generation of adults that were entrusted with our luncheons.
Speaker 2: They worked with what they had. My father, for example,
Speaker 2: born in the late thirties, so his childhood was a
Speaker 2: sort of directly influenced by the depression. So of course,
Speaker 2: off all et cetera was just part of the course.
Speaker 2: And of course in the seventies came the great movement
Speaker 2: of quote buying in bulk, so if you bought in
Speaker 2: bulk then you could save money. Everything came in these
Speaker 2: sort of giant, almost forty four gallon style drum tins
Speaker 2: of full of processed fruit, and Dad would and it's
Speaker 2: a funny, old fashioned word that you'd only use with
Speaker 2: wine nowadays, Mum would say you, your dad's decanting the veggiemite,
Speaker 2: because you'd buy it in a drum and then you'd
Speaker 2: decant it to a smaller jar so that it was
Speaker 2: more manageable, and you might get twenty jars out of
Speaker 2: the drum that was sealed up for the next decantation.
Speaker 2: So it's just a completely different planet.
Speaker 3: After the break.
Speaker 1: How post war frugality and industrialized food production shaped childhood diets.
Speaker 1: Australia was lucky to avoid the strict rationing of post
Speaker 1: war Britain and we didn't have the unfettered corporatization of
Speaker 1: food that has cursed the United States and led to
Speaker 1: a situation where Donald Trump's nominee for Health Secretary, Robert F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy Junior mixes conspiracy theories about vaccines and fluoride with
Speaker 1: ideas on food that for Americans might sound radical, but
Speaker 1: for Australians seem quite reasonable, like that kids breakfast cereals
Speaker 1: shouldn't contain artificial colors, and that most of our food
Speaker 1: should be unprocessed. In Matt's seventies Brisbane childhood, there were
Speaker 1: some early adopters who believed food should be fresh and wholesome.
Speaker 2: Indeed, I had a great friend of mine at the
Speaker 2: school whose mum I look back on her now and
Speaker 2: think how progressive she was. That they literally had their
Speaker 2: own They actually had a goat in the backyard of
Speaker 2: their suburban house in Brisbane, so they would drink goat
Speaker 2: fresh goat milk. She would grow her own veggies. Having
Speaker 2: said that, he did go to hospital briefly with malnutrition,
Speaker 2: but apart from.
Speaker 3: That, that's a small price to it.
Speaker 2: It is, but there were pockets, but that was considered
Speaker 2: sort of highly unusual, if not something to be suspect about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, like so many things about modern parenting, we
Speaker 1: try to smack our kids a bit less than our
Speaker 1: parents smacked us. We may try to lay our own
Speaker 1: emotional baggage on them a bit more lightly than our
Speaker 1: parents laid their.
Speaker 3: Emotionalage on us.
Speaker 1: How do you interpret the way we are feeding our
Speaker 1: children as a kind of indication of the kind of
Speaker 1: parenting people in twenty twenty four in Australia are trying
Speaker 1: to live by.
Speaker 2: Well, If I shout at the dog, my children are
Speaker 2: slutely all over me, about to report me to the RSPCA.
Speaker 2: But you cannot be aggressive, cruel, et cetera to this animal.
Speaker 2: But sensitivities, it does go to a point where sensitivities
Speaker 2: are completely different than you know. Maybe my kids will
Speaker 2: be reflecting as I'm reflecting today on the norms of
Speaker 2: when they were children and how things have changed dramatically
Speaker 2: for their own children. Maybe we all just try and
Speaker 2: put our shoulders to the wheel and do the best
Speaker 2: we can in the moment that we live. I do
Speaker 2: reach some points with my kids where I just think,
Speaker 2: for a flash of a moment, oh, for God's sake,
Speaker 2: let them have it and let them be kids for
Speaker 2: ten minutes. Are we limiting them and strangulating their childhood
Speaker 2: too much? I will literally sneakily buy the kids ice
Speaker 2: creams and say, just go for it, but don't tell mom.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, I'm off to buy a roll of
Speaker 1: Devon and some of the fool sugar tomato sauce.
Speaker 3: That's another big treat.
Speaker 1: These days, you're supposed to give the kids the stuff
Speaker 1: that doesn't have any sugar and isn't as nice.
Speaker 2: Good luck in finding the Devon, I mean, I would
Speaker 2: go to the pet section because some of it does
Speaker 2: look to my ancient mind, does look quite appetizing compared
Speaker 2: to what we had as kids.
Speaker 3: Matt Condon is a senior writer with The Australian.
Speaker 1: You can read Matt's full essay right now at the
Speaker 1: Australian dot com dot au slash health, along with a suite.
Speaker 3: Of other inspiring and informative.
Speaker 1: Yarns about the science, ethics, and taste of good health today.
Speaker 3: Ah thank you that it's very funny.