Stuffed to the gills

An obesity epidemic? We always blame it on McDonald’s. But what about our addiction to gastroporn?

Seems only yesterday Melbourne had simultaneous booms catering for masturbation and mastication. Suddenly both insatiable appetites were being served by an influx of posh restaurants and an influx of massage parlours.

Many parlours had names suggesting oral pleasures more appropriate to food. And the two poshest restaurants? Fanny’s and Glo Glo’s. Famed hosts Blyth and Gloria Staley confessed to me this caused some confusion when people phoned for bookings.

Enter the term gastroporn, to describe the increasingly sensual, voluptuous, eroticised approach to food. Playboy centrefolds yielded to panoramas of pork and pastry. Cheesecake became the new cheesecake. Cookbooks with nosh as nookie topped the bestseller lists. Margaret Fulton, Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer took over from Hefner’s bunnies and Penthouse pets.

And it’s getting worse. The alimentary canal now has its own alimentary channel. Thanks to SBS it has become a televisual digestive tract. The Special Broadcasting Service now stands for Saliva Bowel Sphincter. Not content with a fulltime non-stop cooking network, the channel still crams its schedule, like stuffing seasoning into a chook, with cooks cooks cooks. And too many of them spoil more than the broth.

An obesity epidemic? We always blame it on McDonald’s. But what about a culinary overkill force-feeding us like Strasbourg geese? My Kitchen Rules. MasterChef. The Hotplate. The Cook and the Chef. Come Dine with Me. Ben’s Menu. Lust has lost to a gourmayhem of gluttony. The Brits bear much of the blame with their Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith, Rick Stein, Gordon effing Ramsay and, worst of all, that temptress Nigella Lawson, who makes her kitchen steamier and sultrier than the Kama Sutra.

Poor old sex doesn’t have a chance against something you are required to do three times a day, plus snacks and nibbles. And the ABC must share the blame. Instead of stopping with the Bush Tucker Man they’ve done dozens of programs — climaxing with Annabel Crabb’s political cook-ups, which humanise the most appalling MPs and PMs, and Silvia’s Italian Table, which dehumanises dozens of leftover celebs.

I remember the late Malcolm Muggeridge making the point that the West spends more on dieting than the rest of the world does on food. And it seems Australians still throw out as much food as they eat. As organic food producers our farm is proudly self-sufficient (beef, lamb, olive oil, honey, garlic, vegies) and we like people to take their food seriously. But it’s going far too far.

You can see where it’s heading … to the exploding gourmand, as in The Meaning of Life, or to an Annabel/Sylvia dinner where guests devour each other as presaged in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. If that isn’t gross enough, how about coprophilia? If you are what you eat, I can envisage a reality show starring Donald Trump.

OK. This is personal. I have a lifelong aversion to televised cooking. I was just 16 when I got my first job in TV, working on The Jean Bowring Show. Paid about five quid a week, I’d augment my meagre diet by gorging on Jean’s props — the dishes pre-cooked for the live program. Come the final credits I’d join the crew in the rush to her leftovers — and will never forget the day I was first to the cream sponge.

What I didn’t know was that Jean had replaced real cream with Brylcreem so that it wouldn’t melt in the studio lights. It left a bad taste in the mouth.