The Mouth: As Dan Andrews bans gas, I’m staying in a state cooking with gas

The Mouth does not care one bit about how wonderful induction cooktops may be, they will pry our six-burner gas monster from our cold, dead hands.

Nothing cooks better than gas, says The Mouth.

At some point in the not too distant future, expert advice will replace choice and the risk of harm will be properly understood to rule out all fun.

But until then The Mouth is happy to live in NSW.

Because choice – and the terrible things people choose when they are left to their own devices – is very much in the news again.

Down in Victoria, you see, people have been making bad choices.

They’ve been installing gas heaters and gas cooktops and making the planet very angry indeed.

And thus Dan Andrews, with all the swagger of an Egyptian pharaoh or South American generalissimo, issued his decree: No more gas!

Blue flames from gas stove burner.

In normal circumstances, of course, one would imagine there would be a popular uproar.

But for whatever reason Victorians feel a sort of bizarre loyalty to Andrews, in the same way members of the Jim Jones cult looked at their dear leader.

Yet Victorians and Melburnians pride themselves on being big food and wine people, not just Kool-Aid drinkers and at some point we are likely to see a wave of “look what they have taken from us”-style regret.

Because, friends, The Mouth does not care one bit about how wonderful induction cooktops may be, they will pry our six-burner gas monster from our cold, dead hands.

Cooking with gas … yes, that’s Dan Andrews. Picture: Supplied

And while Dan Andrews and his ilk can bang on as much as they like about climate or whatever, it is not hard to squint and see that the ultimate motivation is a press against fun. Which, cooking with gas certainly is.

You can bang pots around like a proper chef and tip your pan to catch the flame and burn off the booze from a sauce.

If you’re flinging some Kung Pao chicken around in the wok, you can get a bit of wok hei – the breath of the wok – that makes Chinese food taste like Chinese food.

Induction may be precise, but it is cold, clinical, technical, the opposite of what you want when you want to mess around in the kitchen with a martini.

Just like the electric vehicles which we are supposed to trade in our growling and geared petrol cars for, they are predicated on a narrow sense of “better” that sees the world through Excel spreadsheets.

NSW Premier Chris Minns, meanwhile, has shot down any such ban, making him a rare voice when both sides of politics are all too ready to rush to a microphone to curtail free choice. Which is why the Mouth is happy to stay put.

– The Mouth is an anonymous critic and bon vivant who pays his own way around Sydney and beyond.