Life is Sweets

I've just read this article about Pixifoods

Basically it's any food you loved as a kid, but cannot stand eating as an adult.

It’s a fascinating concept because as a kid, I only ate food which fell under two nutritional categories: "Total" and "Utter" rubbish.

I ate badly as a child in spite of the stern countenances of my mother and father, who had gone through a militant health food putsch when we were little kids. At family meal times, I didn't eat the tofu-dressed-as-sadness based dishes that my father had diabolically steamed. I'd pretend to chew the offensive curd until he got up from the table to fetch more brown rice grit from the stove top... then and only then, would the games begin.

With reflexes that would make David Blaine trip over his socks, I would tactically stuff seven mouthfuls of dramatically chewed tofu into the twin pockets of my track suit pants below the table-line. The hazardous material would then flushed when my father was sufficiently distracted by the 7.30 Report. Kerry O'Brien would become my patron saint of "things I did not wish to eat". After the disposal process, at around the 7.45pm point, I would then sneak and hide in the muffled darkness of kitchen pantry and silently down a Milky Way chocolate bar in situ, making sure to hide the blue and white wrappers in a crack where the air conditioner didn't quite meet flush with the wall. It really was true, Milky Way bars didn't ruin your appetite... mainly because I had hundreds of steamed tofu dinners which were perfectly good at ruining it long before a snack was ever in the picture.

At school lunch times, it was the same slick swindle, except you had accomplices.

Smiling, milk-toothed assassins who gladly dealt in second, third and even fourth party snacks strewn across teaming cells of stubby legged peer groups. Sewn together by parallel networks of child-height, aluminium recess benches. It was a black market bazaar run by a throng of screaming, midgets clad in plaid. All of whom had something to give away if you had something to offer.

The red head who'd swap you rollups for the little boxes of oily sultanas. The Korean kid who inexplicably hated Cadbury chocolate sticks but loved Le Snacks. That awkward blonde girl? A snack market goldmine. She'd eat those soggy pear slices, she'd scoff that handful of odd looking walnuts hell, she'd even take that inexplicable Ziploc bag of prunes (parents may as well have packed ziplock bag of child abuse) off your hands for a packet of freaking Burger Rings.

What needs to be understood about Burger Rings is that they were and still much very are the gold standard of Playlunch currency. You would need at least two, possibly two and a half KitKat bars to even think about trading someone for a packet of Burger Rings.

Why? First and foremost you could wear them as rings. Any snack which transcended the great food and apparel divide was literally venerated to legendary status on the playground. The things fluoresced in the sunlight. The ingredient list was basically salt and the colour orange. The nutritional content was intangible, almost inconceivable - any trace or shred of vitamin or fibre that had somehow managed to escape the deep fried annihilation of the Burger Ring extrusion process would instantly be rendered into a shimmering orange djinn the moment that tang dusted ring passed your lips. Whenever you ate a whole packet, your entire digestive system would just collectively shrug . It was a food that had absolutely no basis within reality. And it was awesome.

Between the schoolyard and the tuckshop, I ate anything that sat outside of the demilitarised diet zone of home. This had happened whenever and wherever the opportunity arose – which upon proper recollection, was a scant few. It would go a long way in explaining why I was thin as a rake throughout my pre, primary and secondary schooling years and why ended up gaining fifteen or so kilos after I moved out of home.

For me, I didn't reach actual adulthood and independence (well young adulthood and "occasional trips back home to borrow washing powder" independence) until I sat at the table of my first share house in Leichhardt and had a breakfast which consisted of nothing but a box of cornflakes and a two litre bottle of MOOVE chocolate milk.

You know the one… yes that one. The one you eyed off as a kid as you stood beside the glass of dairy cabinet, refrigerated air buffeting against your silly fringe as you gazed in wonder at TWO WHOLE METRIC LITRES of chocolate milk… sure you could do the same thing with two whole litres of normal milk, some Milo and a lot of patience but that wasn’t the point. Not even.

However it was always at this point that it became my mother’s sworn duty to take on an antagonistic role of food fascist whenever I was at the supermarket. She would furrow her brow and pointedly ask me to return the offensive item back to confectionery dressed in staples-skin hell from whence it came. It'd be like be asking the Mussolini if you could borrow his stupid looking hat for a couple of minutes so as you could practice running over it with your scooter. Tiny daggers might as well have shot from her eyeballs. That’s the look she gave me. Every time…

But now… Now I was gulping down on cornflakes and chocolate milk… this was living. It had turned the very nature of a complete and nutritious breakfast upside down and on its head. I drank chocolate milk until I was ill, I even bought the strawberry one and made unholy combinations of the two every Saturday morning for several months.

Anyway. Long story short. That’s when I became a man.*

This is exactly what happens when you’re not Jewish or have any real proper cultural identity to call your own. You’re left to your own maudlin devices to set up semiotic signifiers for your own personal and chronological milestones…

Like a cultural Macguyver with ADHD I'm making up my own traditions as I go… with bits of string, chewing gun, old Christmas decorations, a broken clothesline, some leftover birthday candles and an inexplicabley red plastic stool purchased from a thrift shop on a drunken "Everything is $2 dollars? That's amazing!" binge. I'll name this holiday Hillshoisterstolamas! We shall feast only on Tim Tams with their corners bitten off and suck cups of Lady Grey Tea through them as a symbol of better times, we'll dance the Nutbush in memory of bad school formals and sing songs like "Total Eclipse of the Heart" because I really dig that song. Plus everyone will have whistles and bells and semi automatic hand guns for merry-making and hoop-la.

That’s my traditional holiday. So stick that in your thousands of years of fancy pants tradition and just try to smoke it…





* And lactose intolerant.

Misadventures in Mylar

I like candy.

Due to my interest in work having reached absolute zero, I decided to put coin to slot for a Twix candybar - all in a fit of eye-twitching inanity after my third cup of “work as a beverage”.

Upon inspection and subsequently misguided exploratory chews:

Firstly the chocolate was grey with white spots, this is something that doesn't usually happen to chocolate unless you've been saving it in your pocket since the seventeen hundreds, secondly - the centre biscuit could not hold - totally staled out from some sort of mysterious jungle humidity that can permeate solid objects. Lastly - the caramel had crystalised into a molasses so hard that only the Jaws of Life could masticate it, perhaps once or twice before shorting out into sparks and blue flame.

It was akin to the joyless candy bars they gave to Russian World War Two conscripts as a concession for not giving them actual rifles or ammunition - right before charging them off screaming over the front lines to battle German Panzer tanks with sharpened tea towels…

It didn’t necessarily sustain, satisfy or even pique your palate’s whimsy so much as it filled you with a quiet sort of shell-shocked dread.

And while carefully noting that the wrapper was still well within an edible date range, half expecting to find “disappointment” on the ingredients list - there it was... A hasty IOU from the gods of slighted confection.

Mr Twix, of the Mars Confectionary Industrial Complex maniacally exclaiming in big block letters on the inside of the wrapper "FREE BAR WINNER!".

Oh… Glee!