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We were driving back from the Lort Smith animal hospital this morning, along Mt Alexander Road, when we saw a sign that made us pull over:

WOW Bacon only $9.00 for 2.6kg

We went in. It was an almost expired food sort of place, with loads of cool stuff. I picked up some honey mustard cranberry condiment for 80 cents, some lime flavoured soft drink called Frenzy (which I think is funny, because it’s the name of Alfred Hitchcock’s only experiment in gore, which snobby film critics like to forget ever happened) and, best of all, a couple of large camemberts for two bucks each. Oh, and some bacon, of course, which was good quality stuff from Castlemaine, in separate sealed packs inside a cardboard box, which’ll go straight in the freezer. I make bacon myself, but that’s for eating. This bacon will be for cooking, for making baked beans and such.

Then, as we were leaving, I saw the bin. It was a freegan’s wet dream:

Yes, it was entirely filled with bacon.

Over the past couple of years I’ve found myself having heated discussions with people online about food and the politics of food, and invariably the biggest douchebags quote Michael Pollan, usually as their sole point of reference.

I’ve been writing about the politics of food since before Michael Pollan started, so I’ve paid attention to his increasingly quackish claims, and even read one of his stupid fucking books (In Defense of Food; I couldn’t stomach another). I’m not a fan, to be frank. But criticism of Michael Pollan leads to invariably aggressive attacks from his fans/followers, with an intensity that is nothing short of religious fervour.

Which makes me wonder: what is it that makes Michael Pollan’s most ardent fans such total douchebags?

I’ve thought about it, and I have a couple of ideas. The first reason, I suspect, is that most Michael Pollan fans have almost no pre-existing knowledge of the subjects that he makes pronouncements about. I suspect that few of them have any scientific training, or first-hand familiarity with food production methods. Many of them have probably never seen a feed animal up close, let alone slaughtered one. Mostly, their knowledge of nutrition will have come from two main sources: advertising and, since his audience is predominantly middle-class, the lifestyle sections of newspapers, neither of which provide a terribly useful or reliable framework for understanding a very complex subject.

Without any sort of structured understanding of the issues, one relies on feelings or hunches about things; prejudice, in other words. And that’s where Michael Pollan is a viking. There is nothing in his work that challenges any of the prejudices or values that you could expect your average white, middle-class urban dweller to already be convinced are self-evident truths.

Very few of his claims stand up to any sort of rigorous inspection, claims that we are all getting sicker, that the great unwashed masses make poor food choices, and so on. But to a person who instinctively believes these things to be true, to whom these claims ‘feel’ right, having them reinforced by reading them in print bolsters what is, essentially, bigotry.

My partner writes about issues of faith from a sympathetic but outside perspective. While now a firm atheist, she was brought up in missionary communities, wrote a book about English missionaries in the Gobi, and has a pretty firm understanding of the mentality of evangelicals.

Many evangelicals feel confused that non-believers are not convinced by quotations from the Bible. They find it very hard to put themselves in the shoes of someone who doesn’t accept that the Bible is the final arbiter of all things, the written word of God. Pollanites are hardly different. There’s the same failure to accept that, perhaps, there’s a whole world of different, often conflicting, research and conclusions and opinions. But, since the word of Pollan is the only authority they are at all familiar with, most discussions end up as little more than a series of increasingly louder repetitions of the same paraphrased arguments. In other words, it’s like trying to make sense to an angry parrot.

But perhaps the worst bit of intellectual charlatanry is the way that Pollan denies authority. Now, as someone with a background in the hard sciences, I understand that you should never accept an argument from authority. But dismissing authority is a different matter altogether. He writes:

So on whose authority do I purport to speak? I speak mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense. Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.

The authority of tradition and common sense or, in other words, mindless conformity and prejudice. He both dismisses all others as false prophets and sets up the readers themselves as ‘authorities’ with no need for further qualifications: they already know everything there is to know, and all else is lies and trickery. This, I think, is the real reason why Pollanites are douchebags.

Final Fantasy XIII, Disc 1:

Final Fantasy XIII, Disc 2:

From an early age, it was clear that Luffy enjoyed music. He seemed to prefer simple, dynamic sounds, particularly Krautrock bands like Cluster and Harmonia. He would sit in front of the speaker and tilt his head, a little like the dog from the HMV logo. In the car he seemed to react most positively to upbeat, syncopated dance music like the Jackson Five or the Pointer Sisters. My understanding is that dogs cannot differentiate between different pitches as well as we can, only differentiating between high, middle and low pitches within a single octave. He has never seemed to enjoy rock and roll at all, which I presume sounds like a wash of noise.

Our new dog, Toki, seems to have no interest in music at all, and doesn’t react to it. But he does seem to have a taste for literature. He is roughly four and a half months of age at the time of writing this, and his puppy teeth are still coming through. Like most teething puppies, he chews on things to alleviate the discomfort. And we found that he had started picking books off the shelves of the various bookcases in the house, to chew on.

I didn’t think much of it until I noticed that he had pulled down a copy of Aristotle’s writings on literature that I had forgotten I owned, which got me thinking. I collected up all the books with chew marks on them and piled them on top of one of the bookshelves in the hallway. When a new book takes his fancy I add that to the pile.

I was talking to Gerald Murnane on the telephone. Gerald is residing in the country for awhile. I told him about the new puppy, and how he had a taste for literature. Gerald asked me if Toki had tried any of his own books, and I told him no, that for now Gerald’s books were a little beyond him.

But funnily enough, a few days later Toki found a photo of Gerald’s country house that he had given us, and chewed the corner. I haven’t talked to Gerald since he picked up his award at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, but I want to know if he visited the Murray Bridge bunyip on the way either there or back, as I suggested.

I suspect that Gerald will be pleased to know that Toki has given his country place his blessing.

Toki’s Recommended Reading List

1. Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl
2. Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron
3. Michel Tournier, Gilles & Jeanne
4. Len Deighton, Horse Under Water
5. Mark Leyner, Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog
6. Aristotle/Horace/Longinus, Classical Literary Criticism
7. Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner

Toki just made his debut on Matrixsynth right here.

I’ve been very lazy this Christmas. Today I’m going to brine the turkey, and tomorrow I will cook it. But I haven’t made anything else. Compare this to last year, when I cured and smoked ten kilograms of pigs’ leg as well as smoked a turkey.

I fully intended to make another (smaller) ham this year, but before I realised it was December 18, and it takes at least seven days to properly cure a ham in brine. So that’s just poor time management (awareness?). Sadly, I lacked the willpower to forgo a ham entirely, and bought a tiny little on-the-bone number for about $25, just to tide us over until after Christmas, when I’ll go shopping for post-Christmas ham bargains. Woohoo!

I had other big plans. I was going to make panettone this year. But again, it’s way too late.

I only started eating panettone a couple of years ago. We’ve always bought them fairly randomly, usually whatever looked good at Piedemonte’s, generally with fruit or chocolate fillings, or even, one year, a solid chocolate coating. One year Dora the cat went crazy for panettone we’d brought home, but ever since she’s refused to touch them. So I don’t know what was in that panettone that the rest lack.

This year I went with a plain Perugina Pandoro (like a panettone without the fruit, so kind of like a brioche), which my friend Placido at the Preston Market recommended. I think that without the other flavourings you get to appreciate the texture and taste of the cake better. I guess the acid test for me is that Luffy still likes it, and he’s usually unreceptive to plain baked goods. But then he tends to like anything Italian, from parmesan reggiano to cannoli.

After Christmas is when you get the deals, of course, and even stale panettone makes a good bread-and-butter pudding. Or toasted with coffee for breakfast, maybe with berries and marscapone cheese. There’s just something magical about eating cake for breakfast, and while I’d be happy to eat panettone year-round, I guess it makes Christmas a little more fun.

I’ve just uploaded a (leaked) copy of Australia Post’s draft proposal to reduce their workforce by discriminating against fat posties. You can read it here.

I think there are some very clear parallels between Australia Post’s efforts to slim their workforce and Lincoln College’s threat to fail fat students. Except that we’re talking about people losing jobs and ending careers, not for their job performance, but because of their physical size and weight.

I don’t actually see any reportage in the local papers about why the posties are trying to strike. But I did discover that Reese Witherspoon is single again. I wish her all the best.

Here’s something I wrote for magazine publication a few months ago which, for various reasons, didn’t happen. But with the posties striking over the next couple of days, I guess this might help explain why they’re doing it:

My dog, Luffy, barks at posties. He hears the motor of the little Honda motorbike approaching, or the sporadic squeal of the Honda’s disc brakes, and runs out to the front fence and barks crazily, in little triplets. Luffy is a chihuahua poodle cross, so he couldn’t scare anyone. But the postie stops and then rides on, and Luffy seems convinced that he scared the postie away.

If I see a postie in neutral territory, I’ll approach them and say hello, and maybe hold Luffy up to be patted. I hope I’ll convince the dog that posties don’t represent a threat. I’m telling you all this, just so that you know I have no special interest in postie welfare, but that I tend to notice them about. I’ve never been a postie but I can recognise that the job involves a fair amount of repetitive physical labour. Posties always seem to have tanned and muscled calves, at least on the leg that I see when they ride past. The gear they wear looks heavy and uncomfortable, and the bikes never get to go fast enough to generate much of a cooling breeze, so in summer they must feel like they’re doing step aerobics in a sauna. They start at six in the morning and often work until past four. And dogs bark at them. A lazy person is not going to become a postie. A lazy person is going to aim for a desk job.

There is a noted phenomena by which a person will see a fault in others as being the result of laziness or incompetence, whereas when they display the same fault themselves it is seen as the result of external forces or unfortunate circumstances. News that Australia Post was planning to make posties who weigh more than a hundred kilograms lose weight or be reassigned really brought out the bigots, with headlines like ‘Post Aporkalypse‘ and the Herald Sun claiming that their excess weight was slowing mail delivery. Rather than get bigger bikes (which would seem the sensible solution), Australia Post plans to force bigger posties to diet to fit the bike’s weight limit.

The basic facts and figures: Australia is the only country that uses motorised postie bikes. It’s a large continent with a relatively sparse population. Even our major cities are huge sprawls, so the bikes were introduced to make the mail delivery more efficient and to make the job more pleasant. The 110cc Honda bikes that posties currently ride were originally rated to carry 130 kilograms. That broke down to 40 kilograms of mail and, at best, a 90 kilogram rider. But they found it too hard to attract and retain posties who also fit the weight requirements, so in early 2008 they asked Honda to reassess the bike’s upper weight limit. Honda obliged, and raised the legal carrying limit to 145 kilograms, meaning they could hire 105 kilogram posties.

But with the economic downturn and one thing and another, the demand for postal services is down right now, and Australia Post is looking to shed some staff, ideally without having to offer redundancy packages. Weight is not a protected characteristic, like age or sex or race, according to the discrimination lawyer quoted in the press in relation to the issue.

So arrivederci, fat posties. And I thought discrimination lawyers tried to stop discrimination rather than, you know, kind of encourage it. I must be so naive.

The question, then, is why is it legal to discriminate against fat people? How is weight different to race or sex or age or, for that matter, sexual orientation? This is where things become contentious. There’s a popular notion that being fat is a lifestyle choice. People who are fat choose to be fat, some argue (always people who aren’t fat). Fat people are lazy and eat too much junk food, watch too much television and put an inordinate drain on the healthcare system. They need to be harassed and constantly shamed into fixing themselves, or be heavily taxed and have their fat offspring taken away, and are generally to blame for all the world’s ills, up to and including global warming. If there were no fat people there would probably be no heart disease, cancer or diabetes, and we’d all live forever, happily.

I’m hardly exaggerating. Susie O’Brien argued in the Herald Sun that clothing stores shouldn’t offer clothes in large sizes because it encourages fat women to feel comfortable in public. She wrote: ‘Alarmingly, a new Australian study of more than 30,000 people shows obese and morbidly obese men are less depressed and less suicidal than those of a normal weight.’ Well, I won’t be sending Susie a Christmas card this year. Michael Smith, in an opinion piece for the Age, wrote: ‘Obesity and related diseases are costing the ALP millions of votes because of premature deaths.’ I’m really not sure how many people he thinks lives in Australia, for obesity to have killed millions of potential ALP voters, but he seems firmly convinced of the need to abandon the most fundamental principles of democracy in order to solve the ‘obesity crisis’. Democracy has met its match. Brought down, not by terrorism, nor by drugs, not even socialism, but by fat people.

There are other people, myself included, who question many of the basic assumptions behind the ‘obesity epidemic’. We’re talking about a flat increase of roughly three to five kilograms in the weight of the average adult born in the last couple of generations, an increase that plateaued back in the eighties, and was probably the result of improvements in food availability and nutritional knowledge, and is at least partially explained by a corresponding increase in average height. People are living longer now than they have ever lived before. Australians have the second-longest life expectancy (behind Japan) of anyone in history. How you turn that into a health crisis is a mystery. Now, while life expectancy is not the same thing as quality of life, it’s the best indicator that we have. Sick and unhealthy people generally die younger.

Your weight is largely determined by genetic factors, so the only truly effective way to maintain a slim figure is to pick slim parents. While there may be correlations between obesity and certain diseases, and while weight gain (or weight loss) can be a symptom of health problems, obesity is not an illness. While the BMI, or Body Mass indicator, has been used by insurance companies for many years to assess health risk, there is no evidence of a correlation between obesity and poor health. The life expectancies of overweight through to morbidly obese people are actually higher than for people with ‘normal’ BMIs, particularly beyond the age of twenty-five or so, when most people put on a bit of weight. Being underweight has the lowest life expectancy of all, even compared to that of the morbidly obese. Weight loss has never been about health, but about conventions of beauty and issues of social class and social status, control and obsessive-compulsive ritual behaviour.

Dieting neither seems to work terribly well, nor be terribly good for you. Two-thirds of dieters who have lost a large amount of weight (think Magda Szubanski) put it back on within twelve months. While you can starve your body of calories for a period of time, unless you plan to spend the rest of your life feeling hungry, the weight is almost certainly going to return. How anybody gets anything done in a constant state of hunger is beyond me, but hell, people have different priorities, right? Ninety-eight percent of people who lose more than fifteen kilograms put the weight back on within three years. Weight loss is a forty-six billion dollar-a-year business in the US, and it doesn’t bloody work.

And while I’m at it, heart disease, cancer and diabetes are all largely genetic. The seeming increase in all three is almost entirely due to an ageing population and the result of improved medical care (and in the case of diabetes, much better detection). You’ve still got to die of something. Since most of the old killers have been eradicated with antibiotics and surgical procedures, and we’ve come up with all sorts of other neat things to protect you from external threats, you’re probably going to end up dying because of something genetic, some built-in design flaw. That doesn’t mean that these diseases are getting more common, just that a lot of the other horses are out of the race.

But with an ageing population, and the very profitable nature of ‘preventive’ medicine practices, politicians are swayed by anyone promising to shift the cost of healthcare on to the individual. Somehow, people living long and possibly full lives became a problem, rather than something to be happy about or thankful for. But the average human body doesn’t need constant medical care and attention. Doctors are for sick people, and while constant medical regulation and governmental intervention might make some medical practitioners’ jobs easier, it really is missing the point. Your body’s not like a rented tuxedo; you don’t get your deposit back if you return it in pristine condition. Your body is not owned by the government, or your employer, or even Australia Post. There is a real threat here, but it’s not from fat posties.

Alex Rizkalla told me he had seen an old organ in the Sydney Road Savers, a Roland, an R-something, and that it had just been marked down. A Roland R-something could be almost anything – a string machine, an organ, or a synthesizer – so I had to go see.

We took a detour on the way to Gilpin park, where Luffy has regular social obligations. The Savers was real busy. This was a Monday afternoon, around four. There was a sale on. Kate waited outside with Luffy, tag-team style, while I went in to look for the Roland organ.

It had probably been sold. All I found was a sad little Italian GEM spinet with a $1199 price-tag, which is about 1199 times more than anyone would pay for it. But that was at the back of the shop, so I had to work my way past a lot of people there and back.

Most of the customers were dressed like normal people. But there were a lot of young hipsters as well, that end of Sydney Road being increasingly fashionable. And as I walked past them, the hipsters would give me this strange look. They’d smile at me, but like they were embarrassed.

Afterwards I realised what it was. The smile was their way of telling me they were shopping ironically. They weren’t there because they were forced by circumstance to buy secondhand clothing. They were there to find cool op shop kitsch. But they were, of course, concerned that strangers might confuse them for one of the more impoverished customers buying necessities. So they gave me that uncomfortable grin to re-affirm their social status, the Savers smile.

I’ve just been down the park with Luffy, chucking him the ball with the ball chucker thingie. I’ve got an old iPod and some bulky professional headphones I’ve started wearing to listen to music in the backyard while I lie on the cat’s banana lounge. But there was no shade in the backyard this afternoon, so I decided to go down the park instead. The headphones wouldn’t fit under the only hat I have big enough to fit my overly large head, so I didn’t wear it. The long shot is I got sunburn again anyway.

I was listening to the old The Fall album Grotesque (After the Gramme). I was listening to the song ‘NWRA’. The bass line is mostly one distorted note. I was thinking: ‘That’s a great tone. It sounds like they ran it through a mike pre-amp’. The energy of it, the anger of it, got me feeling excited. Then I started to feel like a phony.

I’ve been feeling old for years. I’m middle-age now, forty next March. That should be considered old. I don’t want to be young forever. People who remember being young with fondness are mostly full of shit. Life gets better in almost every significant way the longer you live. But I never felt like a phony before.

I just wrote a fairly long piece about my recent experiences working for the ABC, more for the therapeutic value than anything else. I’ve been putting out feelers to a few people I know with the idea of publishing it somewhere, adding a little assurance that I can always get rid of the swears. From the replies I’ve been getting the general consensus that Quadrant will be my best bet, enemy of my enemy and all, but that even they might be worried about the more defamatory bits.

So I was thinking about how I could edit the piece to get it past lawyers and I was listening to Mark E. Smith singing: ‘Too many people cower to criminals.’

That’s when I started feeling like a phony. Because once upon a time I wouldn’t have given these things a second thought. I wouldn’t have even considered whether or not it was defamatory, just whether or not what I wrote was true, an accurate representation of the events as I saw them. Nothing else mattered.

When you get older I guess you start worrying more about what people think of you. You learn to recognise all your flaws, and then you start to think: I don’t want people to think I’m a gossip, or that I’m self-righteous, or that I’m intolerant, or that my fucking shit smells. I’m going to cover it all up and pretend. I’m going to have them all thinking I’m a meek motherfucker, just like them.

And then you realise you’ve started cowering at criminals. Because you’re thinking: ‘You get more flies with honey’, and how the extra money comes in handy.

Fuck that. Flies get squished. So I’ll wait a couple of days and see what happens. If nobody wants to publish the thing I’ll put it online here. With all the swears left in.

Cunt flaps.