AT SOME POINT IN 1997, at about 1.30am, in a loading dock opposite Railway Square in Sydney, I swore a sacred unbreakable oath. “As God is my witness,” I said to myself, “I’ll never work in the food industry again”. It’s one of the few promises to myself amongst the many I’ve made I can honestly say I’ve kept. Should any freebooting restaurant manager come sauntering up the steps of Rancho Estanmore, out to press-gang me into kitchenhand or service work, I’d not hesitate to defend my honour.

Probably an outlet of a major multinational hamburger company is not the best introductory experience to food production and retail. Certainly, a franchisee who styles himself “entrepreneur”, getting by by shorting his employees’ entitlements and demanding unpaid overtime in the form of “oh, just clock off before you unload the truck” is not a great introduction to industrial relations. Nor is an assistant manager who, in the halcyon days of Pauline Hanson and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, makes sure you aren’t Croatian, or worse, Muslim, before he hires you. (Even less of a great introduction to food industry work is when that assistant manager is also the shop steward, SDA delegate, and first point of contact for new union members). Perhaps a work culture where screamed explicit threats of physical violence are the normal mode of discourse—at a level to make Gordon Ramsay seem like Rhett Butler—is not a representative sample of the food industry.

Perhaps. I’m not going back to find out.

Thankfully, in the whole back section of the outlet there was not a single knife or indeed, sharp object. I recall being amazed at the extent of the de-skilling of the whole outfit: tomatoes were chopped with a special safe tomato-slicing machine like a mitrebox of the Spanish Inquisition; burgers grilled with a two-sided press requiring no proverbial flipping; every condiment came pre-prepared and was applied with silicone-style squeeze guns. It was a space of egg rings, strict timers, and religious devotion to the Bundy clock on the back wall. I wondered at the time whether it was to prevent industrial accidents (and the legal liability) or to prevent acts of workplace ultra-violence. I’m still unsure which motive was predominant.

I know from two years of work I came away with two pieces of knowledge, a) how to wash very large, heavy pieces of very hot greasy machinery very quickly without gagging at the smell, and b) how to keep my temper faced with extreme acts of bastardry, economic exploitation, casual gutter racism and passive aggressive rubbish. It baffles me, therefore, that there can exist in 2011 institutions like Masterchef, where people compete to imitate what they imagine to be the culture of a professional kitchen. In any Masterchef episode has there been a challenge where competitors have to work out how to escape the -10° cold room their coworkers have locked them in “as a joke”? I suspect not. When the show is over and the camera crew go home, are the competitors still there, clocked off and angry, pallet-jacking frozen stock from a truck to a loading dock?

Alas. I’ve had to learn everything I know about cooking easy hand-sized food from the internet.

Empanadas

Short crust pastry is a lot of fun, I realise, having made it for the first time. You rub in butter and salt into flour, then put a bit of water in and make dough out of it. Fantastic.

Now you sear finely chopped sirloin in olive oil, add onions, green capsicum, garlic, cumin, paprika and chilli, then whole pipped olives. The olives are important—each empanada has to have one.

Once it’s done, roll out the pastry and make circles, put some filling in each, add a bit of hardboiled egg, close it up, and oven them on a greased baking tray at 180° for fifteen minutes. Brush it with beaten egg if you want to be faaaency.

You’ll get something probably half as delicious as the empanadas from the Argentinian bakery on Glebe Point Road. If it’s the evening, eat it hot, with red wine and steamed vegetables. If it’s lunchtime the next day, have it cold with a bottle of stout.

Thank your God you aren’t a teenage boy in the employ of a fast food franchise.

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