From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Thursday, November twenty one. Treasure Jim Chalmers is unlocking Australia's biggest financial asset, the giant two hundred and twenty five billion dollar Future Fund, to drive investment in housing
and green energy projects and improved infrastructure. One of the Biden administration's most powerful diplomats, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, is warning incoming President Donald Trump not to turn his back on Australia in the face of a relentless China. Those two big stories and what they mean for all of us are explained in detail right now at The Australian dot com.
What are the.
Kids in your life having for lunch today? I bet it's not a devon and tomato sauce sandwich on white bread. How times have changed and today we've got to treat our treasured senior writer Matt Condon on the ghosts of lunch boxes past. Let's make some lunch for my kids.
It's so cute.
Out there on social media. Women are joyfully making their children's school lunches. I'm tapping it off with their crew egg and fleaky salts. This food is nourishing, organic, inventive. A tortilla, add some hommice, lettuce and some turky. Matt Condon is a senior writer with The Australian and today he started a new column. His first is a treatise on how generations of parents raised on white bread and plastic cheese have found themselves preparing bento boxes for their children.
My mother would just sort of chain saw a bit of devon and chuck it between two bits of bread, and then it did go into the lunch box and then five hours later, in thirty five degree Brisbane heat, it had come out again as a completely different product. This is before microwaves. I mean it was just Brisbane humidity was enough to completely transform the horror that it initially was into some new, absolute new culinary monster. And yet now kids are getting sushi like what was sushi
in the seventies. Sushi was I don't know. It was like a martial art type of martial arts was it? Who nobody knew what sushi was. The biggest event in Brisbane in the early seventies was a pizza hut opening. I mean, it's incredible how in a single generation. The culinary arts have evolved extraordinarily.
Have your children ever tasted devon?
It's dog food now, I mean, but having said that, even the dogs eat better quality, more quality Devon than we had as kids. So no, to answer your question, no, they've never eaten devon. I mean that the concept now of a roll, a kilogram of processed sausage that comes in a dog food style roll pinched at either red is literally beyond their comprehension.
I've got very powerful Devon memories, Matt. You see kids being pushed around in the supermarket now, sitting in the trolley with an iPad. But when I was a kid in canber in the eighties, I was sitting in the trolley with a packet of devon. My mum would the first storf in the supermarket would be the deli counter. She would get six slices of Devon and they'd wrap it up in paper, and then she'd give it to me in the trolley and I would eat it while
we went around the rest of the supermarket. It was sort of quite cheap entertainment.
Oh why do I understand that so well? You know, with lunches today there are sort of this myriad of one hundred thousand types of snacks. So there's all sorts of musally sugar free musli bars and different sort of types of seaweed. That's sheets of seaweed that's graded in different thicknesses and got different condiments and flavors of different types of seaweed sheets.
Here's some of Matt's essay, which you can read in full at the Australian dot com dot au.
Right now, Oh, dinner time in the nineteen seventies, I tell my children over dinner, closing my eyes with the pleasure and simultaneous pain of remembrance. What was it like? Dad? Tell us, tell us, what did you eat well? I said, we didn't have organic stuff way back then. Anything organic just meant it had either been grown in the earth or was rotting back into the earth. What did I eat well? Tripe for starters, stripes tripe the stomach lining of a cow or a sheep or a pig, cleaned, trimmed,
cooked and served with white sauce and onions. My daughter placed her hand across her mouth. It was awful. Nobody laughed. Stomach lining, I stressed. Then there was lambs fry and bacon. The lamb's liver, that was the fry bit wrapped in bacon to make it even remotely edible. My youngest almost dry wretched. But I was on a roll, a roll of horror rissoles, endless rissoles, and curried sausages or normal sausages with some sort of tinned curried powder sprinkled on top.
My eldest, a vegetarian, quietly belched. A lot of things seemed to come out of tins. My youngest son said, quizzically, yes, they did, I said, because we never knew when there was going to be a nuclear war, so at least when the bombs hit, we'd have plenty of tins of pineapple and apricots and we'd survive. The children were silent, I know. My youngest wanted to ask how the tins
managed to survive a nuclear holocaust, but he refrained. I wanted to add, Look, I'm not blaming my parents or a generation of adults that were entrusted with our luncheons. They worked with what they had. My father, for example, born in the late thirties, so his childhood was a sort of directly influenced by the depression. So of course, off all et cetera was just part of the course. And of course in the seventies came the great movement of quote buying in bulk, so if you bought in
bulk then you could save money. Everything came in these sort of giant, almost forty four gallon style drum tins of full of processed fruit, and Dad would and it's a funny, old fashioned word that you'd only use with wine nowadays, Mum would say you, your dad's decanting the veggiemite, because you'd buy it in a drum and then you'd decant it to a smaller jar so that it was more manageable, and you might get twenty jars out of the drum that was sealed up for the next decantation.
So it's just a completely different planet.
After the break.
How post war frugality and industrialized food production shaped childhood diets.
Australia was lucky to avoid the strict rationing of post war Britain and we didn't have the unfettered corporatization of food that has cursed the United States and led to a situation where Donald Trump's nominee for Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Junior mixes conspiracy theories about vaccines and fluoride with ideas on food that for Americans might sound radical, but for Australians seem quite reasonable, like that kids breakfast cereals
shouldn't contain artificial colors, and that most of our food should be unprocessed. In Matt's seventies Brisbane childhood, there were some early adopters who believed food should be fresh and wholesome.
Indeed, I had a great friend of mine at the school whose mum I look back on her now and think how progressive she was. That they literally had their own They actually had a goat in the backyard of their suburban house in Brisbane, so they would drink goat fresh goat milk. She would grow her own veggies. Having said that, he did go to hospital briefly with malnutrition, but apart from.
That, that's a small price to it.
It is, but there were pockets, but that was considered sort of highly unusual, if not something to be suspect about.
Yeah, So, like so many things about modern parenting, we try to smack our kids a bit less than our parents smacked us. We may try to lay our own emotional baggage on them a bit more lightly than our parents laid their.
Emotionalage on us.
How do you interpret the way we are feeding our children as a kind of indication of the kind of parenting people in twenty twenty four in Australia are trying to live by.
Well, If I shout at the dog, my children are slutely all over me, about to report me to the RSPCA. But you cannot be aggressive, cruel, et cetera to this animal. But sensitivities, it does go to a point where sensitivities are completely different than you know. Maybe my kids will be reflecting as I'm reflecting today on the norms of when they were children and how things have changed dramatically for their own children. Maybe we all just try and put our shoulders to the wheel and do the best
we can in the moment that we live. I do reach some points with my kids where I just think, for a flash of a moment, oh, for God's sake, let them have it and let them be kids for ten minutes. Are we limiting them and strangulating their childhood too much? I will literally sneakily buy the kids ice creams and say, just go for it, but don't tell mom.
All right, Well, I'm off to buy a roll of Devon and some of the fool sugar tomato sauce.
That's another big treat.
These days, you're supposed to give the kids the stuff that doesn't have any sugar and isn't as nice.
Good luck in finding the Devon, I mean, I would go to the pet section because some of it does look to my ancient mind, does look quite appetizing compared to what we had as kids.
Matt Condon is a senior writer with The Australian.
You can read Matt's full essay right now at the Australian dot com dot au slash health, along with a suite.
Of other inspiring and informative.
Yarns about the science, ethics, and taste of good health today.
Ah thank you that it's very funny.