Food porn: don't adjust your set
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday July 25, 2009
SUNDAY-NIGHT dinner usually comes out of a tin. Last Sunday it came out of the box. About 4 million Australians tuned in to the biggest TV dinner in our history, a real potboiler starring the girls next door: the grand finale of MasterChef.We like to watch. And food pornography has left real estate porn for ratings dust. We get our rocksalt off by watching other people cook things. Better still if they are not professional pan-rattlers but dabblers like us.When it came to the crunch, everybody's mum next door, Julie Goodwin, out-cooked the girl whom many viewers wished lived next door, Poh Ling Yeow. "Cyclone" Goodwin's roasted crown of chicken was art, elegant dollops of food on a big white canvas, the plate. So was her reproduction of Aria restaurant's chocolate tart, which was a heart-stopping, seven-piece wonder that involved not only the tart but a chocolate macaroon, chocolate sorbet, chocolate pipe, chocolate pastry, chocolate sauce and a chocolate glacage spread clockwise around half of the plate, as per the recipe. Who knows the consequences of an anti-clockwise flourish of glacage? The whole dish down the plughole?But, no, the seductive modelling of this wicked treat solicited an act of indecency. It was not to be eaten but ravished. At home, our taste buds awakened to this glorious possibility, we lifted our spoons to our mouths. It tasted a lot like tomato soup.OVER THE MOONWhat would the man on the moon make of all this? Surely the glow of all those televisions was visible from space.Oddly enough, the men on the moon didn't catch MasterChef. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were busy this week celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing mankind's first. The old astronauts are meat-and-potatoes guys, in any case. How could they ever reproduce at home the culinary triumphs that accompanied them in their little tin can: thermo-stabilised wet packs of beef stew and cream of chicken soup?They minced no words this week when asked about the prospects of another lunar mission. Hang the moon, they said. Been there, done that. Let's make a truly giant leap and send the next crew to Mars.Yes, well, thanks for that gentlemen, said Barack Obama. Let's put our hands together for some true American heroes.What if man walked on the moon today? How might the media cover it? Slate put a hilarious but frightening suggestion on YouTube: a few seconds of that grainy, boring bit you know, Armstrong putting his foot down followed immediately by panel discussions, vox pops of ecstatic Americans, clueless news-anchor commentary and mindless crosses to Twitter and what the twits think. And there's a pie chart to tell us who has polled as our favourite astronaut (52 per cent for Neil Armstrong, 43 per cent for Buzz Aldrin and 3 per cent Michael Collins, no matter that it doesn't add up).What would Walter Cronkite think? In the week we've laid him to rest, at 92, it's worth a look back at Cronkite's priceless coverage of the moon landing. He had as much time to prepare for it as the Apollo 11 astronauts. But, when the moment came, he was speechless. "Oh boy," he said. He admitted to being overcome with emotion. And it was great television. The pause, the little gap in the action that betrayed his hopeless excitement, that was what made it great.Bless him.MONSTERS INC.So we can put a man on the moon, maybe on Mars, but we are seemingly light years from understanding the Earthbound monsters among us. In this week that we celebrated the best of humanity, we were forced to grapple with the worst.We learnt the heroes of a jaundiced jihad sent a boy to the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta to be their martyr bomber. DNA tests showed he was 16 or 17. There was no test to explain what mutation of the genome could possess anyone to commit this atrocity; and there is none to explain the madness or badness of his masters. Let's just call them cowards.At least with terrorists we have some insight into their motivations, their warped logic. We have no inkling at all in the case of the mass murder of the Lin family at North Epping. It is hard not to despair but the Lins' neighbours, customers and schoolmates were doing their best this week. If anything restores your faith in human nature, it's people such as these.Genetic scientists, meanwhile, have not given up on trying to understand the species. This week came evidence that today's Australian Aborigines share genetic traits with groups from India. It suggests that, after leaving Africa about 50,000 years ago, the Aborigines had a long stopover on the subcontinent. In this week of flashbacks to the moon landing and JFK, the man who dared to dream it but didn't live to witness it, we might recall Kennedy's words in 1963: Ich bin ein Berliner. "I am Berliner," he said. "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin."Jakarta's bombers probably never got that. Maybe they'll get this: we're all out of Africa.IRON BARISTA?Italy is always good for light relief. In the same week that an Italian nun was booked for doing over 180km/h, secret tapes exposed the nation's Prime Minister doing over a blonde escort.First, the flying nun. Italian traffic cops pulled over the 56-year-old in her Ford Fiesta. Also in the car were two fellow Salesian nuns, aged 65 and 78. They were travelling at 50km/h over the limit but told police they had a perfectly reasonable excuse. They were on a mercy dash to Pope Benedict, who had fallen in the bathroom and broken his wrist. The cops didn't buy it. They threw the book at her. She plans to appeal to a higher authority.That wouldn't be the Italian Prime Minister. Tape recordings of Silvio Berlusconi, in the privacy of his own Roman residence, the Palazzo Grazioli, reveal his saucy conversations with a call girl, Patrizia D'Addario, and their apparent romp in a bed named after Vladimir Putin. The details won't be repeated in this family column. Suffice it to say that D'Addario reported back to Berlusconi's go-between: "He says he has a woman friend and wants to see me lick her." If only Berlusconi hadn't forgotten to pay her.Unlike the nun, the 72-year-old PM did not seek papal dispensation. Nor did he insult the intelligence of Italians with a pious denial. He appealed instead to their baser instincts. "I'm no saint," Berlusconi said. "You all know that." As Berlusconi told reporters a month ago, when he was accused of playing up with other women: "Italians like me the way I am."Wilson Tuckey could try a line like that. It just might work ... on Italians.When Iron Bar Tuckey shoots from the lip, all his bovine collagen oozes out and it's not pretty. This week he emailed every Liberal colleague to tell them their leader, Malcolm Turnbull, was arrogant and inexperienced for daring to suggest the party might strike a compromise with Labor on an emissions trading scheme.Joe Hockey had this to say about Tuckey: "Every family has an uncle who goes a little wild at the family wedding." Yeah, but does he have to shoot the groom and debauch the bride?When Tuckey's political epitaph is written and there's no guarantee that will be any time soon much will be made of the assault conviction that earned him his nickname. He beat an Aboriginal man, not with an iron bar, Tuckey insists, but with a piece of 100-amp cable. Tuckey was a publican and reckons he was evicting the man from his hotel in Carnarvon. And, hell, it was way back in 1967, when he was inexperienced and arrogant. The point here is that mud sticks, especially when you're the type who throws it.When Ian Macdonald's political epitaph is written and that might be sooner than Tuckey's the whole tombstone might be scrawled with mud: "Sir Lunchalot: Presided over 58 quangos but he did not shoot that elephant."There must be more, from a life of public service, than this. Probably, but it's hard to fit much in when you're writing in mud. And one story that will stick is the bloke sitting on one Macdonald quango, Robert Borsak from the Shooters Party, and his boast of shooting a bull elephant in the head at six paces."It was awesome," he said. That was Borsak, not Borat.SPACE SHTICKOn the subject of jumbos, it is interesting to note that Neil Armstrong put his foot on the moon in the same year the 747 took its first flight. Armstrong, though, has never been one to gloat. "How long must it take before I can cease to be known as a spaceman?" he once pleaded. And in 2005: "We'd all like to be recognised not for one piece of fireworks, but for the ledger of our daily works." Nice try, spaceman. Mud sticks but so does moondust.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald