Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Author Liam Hogan

  • French Onion Soup

    AS A WHITEY-AUSTRALIAN, I FEEL deep down the imperative, despite criticism and all sense of self-reflection, to carry on my ethnic burden to cook utterly climate-inappropriate meals. It’s a reflex that should be familiar to anyone who’s listened to Paul Kelly’s narrator, languishing in clink, fantasising about Christmas gravy. By the age of twenty, like it or not, every Anglo kid has at some point in her or his life, accepted the terrible demands of tradition despite the urgings of the weather and common-sense and the knowledge of inevitable gastric punishment and eaten pudding and custard in December. We accept this, as a small price of eternal national foreignness. It’s normal, and funny. We make jokes about the dissonance.

    The latest details from the Bureau of Meteorology list the temperature as 24.8°, with a 65% humidity, and I’m cooking French onion soup.

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  • Light Rail

    “HE WOULDN’T KNOW A TRAM was up him unless the driver rang the bell” was one of the old-fashioned stock phrases for stupidity a co-worker of mine once liked to use. He wasn’t from Melbourne: he was merely old enough to remember a Sydney where tram tracks ran down the centres of major roads. Whenever I wind up talking or thinking about trams and light rail in the context of urbanism I think of that phrase—-because trams, more than being vehicles in a streetspace, are much more important as tokens of human urban imagination.

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  • Quesadillas Inauténticas

    INAUTHENTIC IS HOW I roll. It’s a slogan and a helpful cliché but every now and then it’s a literal description of the dinners I make.

    Quesadillas

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  • Indian Home Diner Butter Chicken

    What used to be the Indian Home Diner on Glebe Point Road, Glebe

    RESPONDING TO PERSISTENT HECKLING, THE Right’s Michelle Rowland, speaking for the amendment, said the most popular last name in her electorate was “Singh” and that for many, the uranium issue was a reason for Indians not to vote Labor. The inner city contingent that favoured the ban was out of touch, she said.
    “Just because you order the butter chicken from Indian Home Diner in Glebe Point Road doesn’t make you an expert.”

    If you didn’t have the privilege of attending the most recent National Conference of the Australian Labor Party as I did, you can take away (ahem) from this quip everything you can possibly need to know about the event.

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  • Compost

    THE INTERNET IS A LIMITLESS source of contradictory information on how one should compost. I understand the basics; you put organic matter together with a decent proportion of carbon and nitrogen sources, then you leave it alone. But should I bother to shove a fork in it twice a week? Do I need a second to establish a cycle? What should my position on eggshells and scraps of meat be? Is it hot or cold enough? How do you promote organic breakdown and stop maggots or pests getting in? Should I have added chicken shit? Does one layer a compost heap like a good lasagna1 or rotate the pile, or leave it be entirely? If I keep googling “nitrogen ratio” am I going to get a knock on the door from the Australian security organisation?

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  • Death To The National Media

    THERE IS AN ASSUMPTION THAT TV and radio… provide a means of expression and self-expression for a tiny group addressing a vast multitude. That assumption is no longer technically valid, and it is doubtful whether it ever really was. …
    All the political problems arose with the realisation that the contours of society did not, or did no longer, follow the contours around which the broadcasting institutions had been built.1

    That’s a description of the destruction of the older institution of broadcasting in the 1970s, from which we got the current landscape of broadcasting and print. The simple problem was that older organisations—like Lord Reith’s BBC in the UK, and the older commercial networks—had been built to service a society the founders imagined as a relatively homogeneous, happy mass, in need of education and communal entertainment everybody could share and enjoy, in a community of shared recognition of mutual meaning. The social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s destroyed that happy illusion and print and broadcasting industries profoundly altered themselves to match the new world: in Australia, we got SBS, campaigning city-based tabloids, vicious and ruthless talkback, the short-lived Nation Review and the greatest still-existing fossil of the era, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian.

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  • Stick Figure White Silhouettes

    NOWADAYS I SEE THE WHITE chalk silhouettes of 1980s Palm Sundays on the back windows of the middle-class people movers whose drivers want to boast about their happy families. I’ve been meaning to photograph someone’s back windscreen to illustrate the point, but I can never quite get there fast enough with my phone camera. Perhaps it’s just as well I see them so relatively rarely, considering the associations. If you’re over the age of about 25, once you’ve seen it, you can’t un-see it.

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  • Mutt and Gmail

    A RECIPE IS A LIST of instructions, just that. It’s not necessarily about food or edible goods; it can be oh so much more. As this is a blog not just about the consumption of meals and drinking, but also time and energy, it seems fair that I also document the other ways in which I choose to profligately squander the short time I will walk the earth.

    I quite like the free email service Google provides. I also have a soft spot in my heart for using computers to do things in ways that aren’t entirely in keeping with the browser-heavy experience of those one generation younger than me. How can I reconcile these two?

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  • Peas

    FRESH PEAS, YOU ARE SO delicious to eat, but so very tedious to shell. No wonder I usually buy you frozen instead.

    Fresh shelled peas

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  • Spanakopita

    WHENCE, THEN, ARISES THE ENIGMATICAL character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? …The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.1

    Children of the first decade of this century have found their relationship to food revolutionised by the entry to television of a special genre of cooking show: competitive cookery. Food shows are as old as the medium, and the cook-off is hardly a new form of competition. The genuinely new format is the cooking spectacular with glorious winners and a hyper-marketed process of competition, the entry of reality TV into the field of food.

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