The Australian Greens may well be a sanctimonious blight on the national political landscape but I don’t see why they should be teased for eating lentils or tofu.
There is nothing wrong with lentils at all. They’re terrific. Dhal rocks, as does lentil salad with mint, peas, red onion and feta, and stewed lentils make the perfect base for a grilled sausage.
Anyone who doesn’t like tofu should try the kick-arse Chinese dish mapo tofu, which is fresh tofu served with spring onions, minced pork and heaps of chilli. If that still doesn’t work they should get along to a little place called Barbecue City in Adelaide’s Chinatown and order the tofu with broad beans and pickled cabbage. While there is nothing smart or clever about vegetarianism there is also nothing wrong with eating vegetables, and this vegetable dish is one of the best going around.
In a spirit of fairness, if we are prepared to leave the Greens alone on the basis of their culinary choices, they should also be prepared to let the remaining normal 90 per cent of us eat whatever we like.
This of course is not the way of the Greens. At the two-day waste of time and money also known as the Tax Summit in Canberra this week, it was the Greens who were advocating not one but two punitive new taxes which reflect their heartfelt conviction that everybody else in the country should live as they do.
Greens Leader Bob Brown used the tax summit to reassert his long-held conviction that Australian cities need taxes on car ownership or congestion to survive. This is all well and good if you are one of those people who doesn’t have kids and lives in the inner city and gets around on an old bike with a cute wicker basket on the handle bars filled with lentils and tofu.
It’s not that good an option if you have two kids and you have to drop one of them at childcare and the other one at school and then pick them up later and take one of them to footy practice and then go to Coles and get home and make tea and do it all again the next day.
The second tax which Senator Brown fired up about is the so-called fat tax. It’s received a bit of a boost this week with researchers from Yale University saying it’s the only effective way to combat obesity, especially in the corpulent United States. The Danes also introduced a fat tax this week. The tax is applied at the rate of 16 Danish kroner per kilogram of saturated fat in a food, the equivalent of about $2.50 a kilo in Australian terms.
In terms of its effect in the shopping aisles it means the price of a 250g cake of butter has gone up by 50 cents, and a 300ml tub of cream has risen by about the same. The tax takes effect when the saturated fat content of any product is above 2.3 per cent.
Clean-living purists would argue that the Danish tax is a tax on eating badly. I would argue that it is instead a tax on eating well. The problem with our increasingly fat society is not just a question of junk food consumption, which is one of the main targets of the Danish law. The problem is that so many people simply don’t know how to cook any more, or have convinced themselves that they don’t have time to cook.
One of the most telling harbingers of a society that has lost its way is the ready availability of pre-peeled carrots in the vegetable aisles of our major supermarkets, peeling a carrot apparently being such an onerous or time-consuming task that thousands of people simply cannot do it any more.
The arbitrary targeting of fats such as cream and butter reflects a total lack of appreciation of basic food preparation. I cook all the time and I reckon a cake of butter lasts about six weeks in the fridge, and I cook with butter a lot. You don’t actually need to use very much of it at all to make food taste good, to lift a sauce, to add more flavour when you are searing meat for a casserole.
Humans need fat to survive, especially growing kids, and its subtle use in the kitchen is to be encouraged rather than deplored. As with so many things which are apparently wholly bad for you the health purists don’t take into account the links between the consumption of an ostensibly sinful foodstuff and our basic need for happiness.
Dishes such as a béchamel-rich lasagne are called comfort food for a reason. A well-made take-away hamburger and a couple of potato fritters on a Sunday night can often taste like the best thing you have ever eaten. Nigella Lawson might be a couple of kilos overweight on that ludicrous body-mass index, designed as it was not with people but the praying mantis in mind, but she looks pretty healthy to me.
The law introduced in Denmark and the types of taxes envisaged by people such as the Greens are well-meaning, but they are also paternalistic nonsense. The key to making people healthier is to educate them on how to cook well from the earliest possible age, and how to eat sensibly over the course of any given week – which in my view should totally include the right to jam a Chiko roll in from time to time, rather than as a daily event.
It’s an impertinence for anyone in the health lobby or in any political party to project their own lifestyle choices onto others. It shows a desperate lack of imagination that the only way they can envisage changing poor culinary behaviour is through the blunt instrument of taxation.
We should at least give them marks for consistency in that regard.
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